The Attic Monologues

The Attic Monologues is a serialized queer urban fantasy from Planar Prod, and it takes the word 'story' literally. At its center is Nyx Ryland, a nonbinary student at university, in a world where people live inside narratives and know it. Characters ask each other when they were written; the answers include the early 1800s and 2009. They can feel a narrative gathering in a room, and they wave off a 'narrative hitch' as nothing important. In one scene, a character is pressed for the whole truth about Ambrose's narrative, down to how the author was found the first time. Episodes begin with a monologue. A narrating voice speaks directly to a 'you', talking about threads tightening, a storm on the way, and happy endings that exist only because the curtain closes. It can be menacing, as in 'In Shallows & In Miseries', where it doubts that everyone will be left standing. It can also stumble. In 'Both Alike in Dignity' it observes that this is usually where a narrator would offer comfort, and in 'The One Left Behind' it stops mid-sentence to accept a hot chocolate. The show is at its best when the portentous and the everyday run into each other like this. The scenes that follow belong to an ensemble, and they are often funny. Agatha loses her eyebrows to a recipe involving flaming alcohol. Someone has dismantled the toaster, so breakfast is fried bread. Raven, one character explains, deals with his feelings by blowing things up, quite possibly a building. Another gets teased for coming from 'the archaic age of 2007', and one credits their views on the written word to too many arguments about whether audiobooks count as reading, a sly joke for an audio drama to make. The wider world arrives in asides rather than exposition: record keepers in a place called Trinovantum who work with the Crow, a princess of a magical world, a magic door in an ordinary living room. Running alongside it is the romance between Nyx and Bella, news that catches at least one friend off guard. The horror is not decorative. A haunted character who sees spirits describes moss growing in their ribcage. The monologues turn to family betrayal, to a boy whose grieving parents forget he exists, and to survivors who find that life after a narrative never goes back to normal. Old friends meet again after fourteen years with more anger than warmth. Because the threads carry across numbered episodes, the start of the series is the natural place to begin.