Guest Post: Borrasca

It’s another guest post, please experience and enjoy it in that order.

For a few years now I’ve been aware of the burgeoning genre of narrative horror podcasts. Probably the best-known example is Welcome to Nightvale, the long-running podcast/media empire that centers around a town stuffed to the gills with supernatural phenomena. I’m going to admit something scandalous here and reveal that I could never quite get into Nightvale. The writing and presentation was solid in the few episodes I sampled, but the tongue-in-cheek tone and the setting never really did much for me. 

Lately I’ve also seen a lot of people recommend The Magnus Archives, a long-form narrative podcast which has apparently developed a very rich and well-constructed mythos over its four year (and counting) run. Unfortunately it also has over 170 episodes. I don’t have quite that much time on my hands, even taking the lockdown into account, so I decided to look for something a bit more manageable in terms of length.

Borrasca seemed to fit the bill. It’s a nine episode series adapted from a well-received story originally posted on /r/nosleep, Reddit’s premier destination for campfire-style ghost stories and multi-part novels about edgelord serial killers. I didn’t actually realise that the nosleep story existed until after I finished Borrasca the podcast, which is probably for the best; the original story is exactly the kind of nosleep content I tend to dislike: overly long and written essentially as a regular first person novella, verbatim dialogue and all. I’ve always preferred the more traditional nosleep approach of ‘let me tell you about this spooky thing that happened to me’, but I guess that’s increasingly fallen by the wayside.

As a narrative podcast, however, Borrasca works pretty well. The story is told in radio drama style, with each episode bookended by a framing device set in the present day where Sam, our protagonist, recounts events that happened when he was a child and teenager to his parole officer. 

When he was twelve, Sam’s family moved to the town of Drisking so that his father could take a job as sheriff. Sam is almost immediately informed of the many unusual events that occur in Drisking, including a mysterious ‘scream’ that periodically echoes across the nearby mountain and some vague talk among the local children about ‘skinned men’ who are responsible for the town’s unusually high number of disappearances. Before long his sister goes missing, triggering a series of events which ultimately lead to an adult Sam using heroin to medicate away a severe case of PTSD.

I’ll admit that I didn’t initially gel with the scenario that Borrasca was trying to set up. Partially that was due to the sheer number of creepypasta-friendly entities and concepts that are included in its backstory. You have the scream, the disappearances, the skinned men, someone or something called ‘the Shiny Gentleman’ and the titular Borrasca itself, which is said to be a place out in the woods where ‘bad things happen’. 

The problem is that this is all supposed to have taken on the status of town folklore, the kind of story that newcomers are told at their first barbecue with the neighbours. ‘Oh, there’s a legend that a ghost haunts the local woods.’ That sort of thing. Except in the case of Drisking it’s more like ‘There’s this scream that you can occasionally hear across the entire town and it means someone is about to go missing, and that person’s name shows up on this tree near Ambercot, which is where the local teenagers have ‘Borrasca parties’ every time the scream occurs, and also there are ‘Skinned Men’ who kidnap you and some kind of Shiny Gentleman who’s involved in some way and oh, right, every time there’s a Borrasca party these Women in White show up at 1am exactly and lead three teenage girls out into the woods and also-”

The Women in White are what almost made me delete the podcast from my phone entirely. They apparently appear like clockwork at every single Borrasca party (which the local teenagers hold without fail the night after a scream) and lead teenage girls into the woods. The people they lead into the woods always return but never talk about what happened. The women could credibly be linked to the astonishing number of people who have disappeared throughout the town’s recent history, a phenomenon so commonplace that the teenage main characters and their friend groups casually ask each other who went missing after each scream, yet nobody ever raises the possibility of trying to get the police to talk to them or work out where they’re coming from. 

But I’m glad I stuck with Borrasca until an explanation for this part of the story at least was forthcoming, because it was at once more mundane and also more intriguing than anything I was expecting. It was also around this point I started to realise that for a story seemingly designed to generate maximum creepypasta cachet, Borrasca had featured remarkably little in the way of actual supernatural entity sightings. The Skinned Men had resolutely failed to make an appearance, and indeed hadn’t even been described in any real detail. No gentlemen, shiny or otherwise, had made themselves known to the main characters. If the purpose of this whole thing was to create the next Slender Man, it was doing a remarkably poor job of it.

As it turns out, that is absolutely not what Borrasca is trying to do, and the eventual explanation for everything that’s going on in the town was completely different to anything I expected. I’m still fifty-fifty on whether it was actually good, and certain aspects of it (like the names on the tree or the ‘mile markers’, which is a whole other thing) still didn’t entirely make sense by the end, but it was at least an interesting change of pace for a genre that too often gets tangled up in its own elaborate supernatural worldbuilding. 

Story aside, Borrasca opened my eyes to the fact that I might actually enjoy narrative-style podcasts. It starts out a bit more slowly than it really needed to and relies a bit too heavily on having the characters yell some variation of ‘Dude, what the FUCK’ at each other towards the end, but the performances are universally at least decent and often quite good. 

I can’t quite promise that I’m going to tackle The Magnus Archives next, but my experience with Borrasca was positive enough that I’ll at least download the first few episodes and keep them in reserve for when I have nothing else to listen to. Expect a full guest post review when I finish it in, let’s say...four years. That sounds about right.