Rachel Lawson's The Magicians Podcast · Rachel Lawson

🎄 The Magicians: Christmas Is Hell, A Novella v2🎄

April 3, 2026·34 min·3 clips

A grim reaper king must solve a murder while his skeleton workforce is forced to celebrate Christmas against his will.

Christmas Is Hell is a four-chapter gothic comedy novella podcast set in and around Charing Cross, London. The protagonist is Blake Alexander, a local coroner who operates a dual existence: in the mortal world he is a grumpy, Christmas-averse doctor, and in the afterlife he is Mortimer, King of the Grim Reapers. His boss is Argent, an immortal personification of Fate who takes the form of a thin, human Santa and is fanatically committed to the Christmas spirit. Blake's son, Lance, known publicly as the superhero the Enchanter and secretly as the Necromancer, is a supernatural assassin who kills only by order of Fate. Chapter One opens with Blake being handed the murder investigation of Tim Wong, who had reported that a foreign government attempted to recruit him as a Manchurian candidate. Blake and Lance split the paperwork, and Blake independently identifies the payer of the hit and goes to confront them, only to be shot and imprisoned in a hidden panic room. Lance, following his own investigation thread, tracks the hitman, extracts the shooter's location from them telepathically, finds his near-dead father in the panic room, and transports him to hospital. Blake recovers, the hitman is arrested, but the shooter escapes abroad. Chapter Two introduces the darkly comic Christmas scene in the afterlife, where Argent has ordered Blake's grim reapers to carolle in hospitals and collect judgments under a naughty-and-nice list format. Tim Wong's ghost is rejected as an interview subject by Argent because his death was not in the spirit of love. Argent forces Mortimer to drink brandy despite being a skeleton, soaking his Santa suit, leading to a police call about a drunk Santa and Mortimer's arrest at T-Mart. Chapter Three shifts to a photo-with-Santa booth where Blake is undercover investigating the murder of a Santa from the agency. Lance arrives drunk after fortifying himself at a pub for an errand Fate assigned him. Blake, disguised as Santa, extracts his inebriated son from the hospital children's ward after Lance fails to recognise his own father. A confrontation with Fate in the afterlife clarifies that Lance got drunk independently. Chapter Four returns to the shopping centre Santa stint where a sharp child pulls off Blake's fake beard and punches him, ending the Santa operation. Later at the police station, Lance enchants a Santa hat onto Blake's head so it cannot be removed until after Christmas. A closing poem reprises the Grinch theme, cycling back to the darkly comic opening verses about humbug and Christmas being hell.

As heard by us

A darkly gothic Christmas tale where grim reapers, Santa hats, and holiday chaos keep piling up.

Christmas Is Hell keeps its gag simple and lets it get stranger. Blake Alexander moves through a darkly gothic Christmas where the hospital, the police station, and even the afterlife all seem to have lost the plot.

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Why you'd press play

If you want reapers singing Christmas carols, this one goes all the way.

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