MAGICK SHADOWS: THE REEL

Book I of the Magick Shadows Novella Series — Los Angeles, 1947

A noir occult novella. First person. Past tense. Forty-three thousand words.

Edward Calhoun came home from the war with a mission nobody assigned him. In a sealed sub-basement in Berchtesgaden, he had watched forty-seven seconds of film — enough to know what he was dealing with. Not enough to understand it. He has been working toward that understanding ever since.

Now a German reel has surfaced in a Hollywood evidence vault, and another has turned up in a Compton projection booth. The people who screened them are hospitalized, missing, or lying. A well-funded European collector is moving through the city's grey-market distribution network, acquiring everything he can reach before Ed can burn it. And something is growing behind Ed's left eye that has been growing since Graz, 1945 — something that is watching him work with an interest he is only beginning to classify as separate from his own.

The movies should be what we dream about, not what we fear.

The Reel is a noir investigation told in the controlled, archival voice of a man who has trained himself to document what he cannot afford to feel. The horror is in the footage. The damage is in the methodology.

It is not a fast book. It is a precise one. Ed catalogs everything — the films, the contacts, the anomalies, the cost. The card catalog in his Silver Lake garage has sixty drawers. Most of them are still empty. The ones he has used have gone the color of an old penny.

If you like James Ellroy's Los Angeles, John Connolly's supernatural investigations, or the kind of horror that arrives in the gap between what a character knows and what the reader has begun to understand — this is the book.

THE WORLD — ALSO A SOLO RPG SERIES

Before The Reel was a novel, the Magick Shadows world was a six-game solo journaling RPG series — MS1 through MS6, spanning 1939 to 1983. The novels and the games share a world, a mission, and a protagonist lineage.

In the RPG series, you are The Watcher. You hunt cursed films. You document what you find. You choose their fate. Every viewing marks you.

The complete six-game series — MS1 Hollywood (free), MS2 through MS6 ($1 each), or the full bundle for $5 — is available here on itch.io:

jgesq.itch.io/magick-shadows-complete-series-bundle

The RPG and the novella are designed to be experienced independently or together. Reading the novel first gives the world. Playing the games lets you run the operation yourself.