I Am In Eskew

This show is crazy pants—and I mean that in the best possible way! It's bizarre, surreal, and trippy. Once you get sucked in, it's hard to get out!

I listen to a TON of horror fiction podcasts and this is by far one of the most unique, creepy, mind-bending premises I've ever come across. It's the kind of skin-crawling, melancholy, surreal world of nightmares that twists the mundane just enough to set your teeth on edge and make you question everything about the reality in which you've been placed. ABSOLUTELY worth a listen if you love the genre, but beware this is a slow and subtle horror of psychology and tension building, not jump scares and gruesome action. If you can hang with that then you're going to love it!

This is easily a top 3 fictional podcast for me. The pace is slow, but if you stick with it, you will be filled with dread in the most interesting (good) way. There’s a certain quality to the narration that is soothing, yet horrifying, when juxtaposed against the eerie things David (the main character) experiences. You can interpret this podcast in multiple ways, and I am certain nearly everyone will find at least one episode that resonates with their own feelings or experiences in life. What I truly love about this podcast is that if you listen close enough (this one requires full attention as to not miss anything), David will often offer a single line that will turn your view on the story he is telling you sideways and cause you to grin at its cleverness. This podcast is a work of art, storytelling/writing at its finest. I wish it was adapted into a book. Once I finished the podcast, I immediately started it over and am picking up on more pieces and clues I missed the first time around. This is a fun one for folks who have an analytical mind. This is also a fun one for people who are just in it for the ride, wanting body horror themes and creepy, eerie feelings, without any jump scares. One last note. Episode 30 contains some overlapping dialog bits that can be difficult to hear and auto-transcriptions in the podcast app don’t always pick it up. There is an official transcript of the episode on iamineskew(dot)com that lays out any audio you struggle to hear.

There’s a lot of genres you could categorize Eskew under, and a lot of comparisons you could make to other podcasts that focus on weird places where weird things happen, but none of them manage to build the atmosphere and mood as well as David’s narration of his experiences in Eskew. From the first episode, the relentless rain becomes a familiar backdrop that manages to tie together the strange and melancholic world he inhabits. The horrors he finds within it are ones that always seem to begin as banal, slightly “off” experiences, ones that may be familiar to listeners, but escalate in a way that always brings me chills. Have you ever lived in a big city, and been walking back to your apartment at a very late or very early hour, when the streets are completely empty? Your brain, fighting off the fog of sleep, might suddenly be overcome by a feeling of unease. Not that you aren’t alone, but rather that you *are* alone, and that the only thing that has and ever existed is you and the twisting streets that seemed so familiar in the day time...and that scares you. This is the feeling that I find Eskew evokes in me when I listen to it. And I love it. Great job to the folks behind it. Updating this review in the year 2024: I am always coming back to this, even years later, to relisten. Thank you so much.