"My name is David Ward. I am in Eskew."
I Am in Eskew is a single-season horror podcast that ran from January 2018 to November 2019.
David Ward was an ordinary person, until he ended up in Eskew, a city where fear and pain is adored, so long as it happens to someone else. In an effort to keep his sanity, he begins to record his stories and send them to the outside world, and while most are lost entirely, a few make it through.
Part of the Rusty Quill Network as of 2021.
This podcast contains examples of:
- Abstract Apotheosis: This is what happens to David in the final episode, his body disintegrating in the darkness until he becomes... something that is pure sensation. He is very content with this.
- Body Horror: Mr. How and Mrs. Why. It's one thing to be together forever. It's another to be together forever.
- Body of Bodies: The Graft, a thing of unwellness that feeds on the unwell to heal itself beyond health.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: David's Eskew-generated daughter Lucia dies terrified and betrayed because David doesn't believe her, and he walks away, with her still trapped and screaming on the swing, as the monster Happy Jack Adams comes to finally kill her.
- Eldritch Abomination: Whatever it is that's in the Commemoration Gallery. It's the same thing that's in the ballet.
- Eldritch Location:
- Eskew itself. A few off-hand comments from David in the first episode alone are enough to establish it as such a place.
- The Commemoration Gallery. An art gallery that, whether by accident or intention, overlaps with an ever-growing number of alternate versions of itself. Step through a doorway, and rather than reaching the room you were looking at you enter an alternate version of it from an entirely different version of it. Step through the wrong one, and you'll find yourself trapped in a room with no exits because all its doors open to solid walls in alternate versions.
- Nana's Bungalow
- Forced Transformation: The victims of the digging sickness gradually warp and transform as they attempt to dig. Their nose slopes down into their upper lip, their eyes sink into fleshy brows, and eventually they become nothing more or less than giant worms.
- Gray Rain of Depression: It's always raining in Eskew, which well represents the feeling of being in a city of nightmares with no idea how you got there and no way out.
- Mad Doctor: The black-coated doctors of the Hospital of the Blessed Saint Bartholomew. Whether they're actively malevolent is unclear, but there's certainly something ominously off about them.
- Magic A Is Magic A: Played with. There's no set of universal rules that can be applied to everything in Eskew, but everything has its own rules. While you might not survive long enough to learn them, knowing the rules for a particular hazard can make the difference between an inescapable maze and a slightly inconvenient place to live.
- The doorways of the Commemoration Gallery shift between alternate versions of itself, but you can navigate it relatively safely so long as you never enter a room that doesn't have at least one other visible entrance. You can cycle around it as many times as needed, but eventually you'll find a clear way through. Additionally, the entrance room and the room at the t of it always remain consistent.
- The digging sickness only affects people who are of working age and are capable of manual labor.
- The Graft only preys on the unwell.
- The audience of the Diamond Theater is just that: an audience. If their chosen show is finished, they leave.
- Magic Realism: Eskew just is the way it is, and the populace is used to it. Sure, there's a place in town called the Endless Square and there are noises at night you'd do best to ignore, but that doesn't stop the newspaper from being printed or bars from closing at midnight.
