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[The following contains spoilers.]

Dot Harper (Marsha Harman) is unwell. A mysterious accident has befallen her on the outskirts of Mt. Absalom, the small Ohio town where she keeps a boarding house, and she has broken her ankle. In addition, there is a second mountain looming in her life. Despite being only sixty-two, Dot has already climbed some way up the misty slope of Alzheimer’s. Her adult daughter Lillian (Shariba Rivers), who has not seen her for fourteen years, penetrates the Ohio hinterland to care for her. Lily comes for the ankle and stays for the Alzheimer’s, reluctantly growing ever more at home again in her old home town.

Dot has two visiting academics as her boarders. Abbie (Kathleen Hoil) is down in the gutter researching “rural small-town decay” whilst Dr Rufus (Joshua K. Harris) is staring up at the “forgotten astronomy.” The boarding house is also maintained by a sixteen-year-old named Wes (Michael Turrentine), who might be suffering from a medical condition that is even less conducive to wellness than Alzheimer’s.

These days one small town rules them all within the American middlebrow. I am always exploring American horror podcasts and YouTube series and I am always reencountering Mark Frost and David Lynch’s surreal, small-town television show Twin Peaks (1990 –). Its influence is lately like that infamous sign that torments the backpackers who are lost in a forest, the one that reads, “You Are Here.”

As with Twin Peaks, HartLife NFP’s Unwell is based in a close-knit rural community that is named after the nearest mountain(s). As with Twin Peaks, the protagonist is an outsider who intends to pay a short visit but who ends up semi-settling. As with Twin Peaks, many of the story’s characters are clearly too trendy to ever realistically live in the back of beyond. As with Twin Peaks, the smug quaintness of the community would soon alienate us if it was not offset with some suitable darkness and despair. And as with Twin Peaks, the town is held in the jaws of expansive surrounding forests, with the baddest character of them all being a man of the woods.

I have an idle theory of my own about why narratives that are similar to Twin Peaks today recur so frequently. This show has since become aligned with what is happening in American politics. Twin Peaks had been a luxuriously chic and cinematic story that was set in a dirt-poor, post-industrial town. It had often come down to Californians with perfect skin playing rednecks. In Unwell, this inconsistency only grows acuter. It sometimes seems like the real “occupied land” in the story is the world of Donald Trump’s voters and that the colonisers who are breathing down their necks are the social class that had lost with Hillary Clinton.

So Mt. Absalom is home to lesbians and a cross-dresser and a vegan and a “they/them.” None of these people are ever exposed to a particle of the intolerance that one might expect them to naturally meet in a rural American town. For example, can you imagine this conversation occurring straight-faced in any small-town diner from the 1970s, even one that has spectrally landed like a spaceship in the present day?

PROPRIETOR: Hello, I am the proprietor here. You wish to become a waitress?

ABBIE: The gender-neutral equivalent, yes. “Server.”

PROPRIETOR: Of course. Can you work nights?

Conservatism has been here eradicated from Mt. Absalom more spectacularly than the Peoria people who the podcast comically apologises to at the end of every episode.

Actually, there is a peculiarly legalistic quality to that announcement. It is as if the podcast has taken it upon itself to address the Peoria on behalf of the whole of white civilisation and it is being mindful not to issue any admission of liability. The podcast “wishes to acknowledge” that the land that its recording studio has been built upon is “occupied land.” Personally, I think that Unwell is being extremely offensive in imposing Westocentric concepts of property rights on to these hapless savages. The Peoria had probably believed that the land belongs to the spirits of their ancestors or to the animals of the forest, or some such nonsense.

For several reviewers on PodParadise, it is a convenient step from their listening experiences of Unwell to the familiar class conflict of Trump’s America. They flag up the “woketopian virtue signalling” and “boring, politicized episodes where the educated city folk ‘teach’ the poor uneducated country folk.” I am nonetheless wary of sounding like a European who is trying to navigate this podcast solely with the aid of clichés about American culture. Perhaps what is instead of value in Unwell is how it avoids reiterating tired representations of America’s haves and have-nots.

Far from being set in its ways politically, Ohio is amongst the swingiest of the swing states. It has been culturally pluralistic throughout its history whilst its economic portfolio is equally diverse, with major employers ranging from aerospace to agriculture. Within such a miscellany, one wonders what necessarily bars Mt. Absalom from living out its desired life as a poor, rural “woke” town. Why shouldn’t progressives imagine their worldview as coexisting with small-town America? Isn’t there something rather admirable about forcing “wokeness” (yes, gentle reader, I despise this buzzword just as bitterly as yourself) out of its box?

Where the “wokeness” of Unwell begins to stretch and strain the story’s fabric is in what it might mean for the relationship between Dot and Lily. When she was a girl, Lily had abandoned her white mother and ever since she has been greatly more in cahoots with her black father (LaQuin Grove). Her own explanation for this favouritism is that Dot was just too selfish or infuriating for her to bond with. I am not sure that we ever really buy this though.

Normally, it is a boon if a chemistry exists between two performers. Unwell is indeed enhanced by the vibe between Harman and Rivers, but we might consequently judge the antagonism that has split their characters to sound distinctly artificial. If these two ever really quarrelled, they are so sensible and empathetic that they would surely make it up within minutes rather than hours. So why the fourteen years?

As listeners, we might go off on a tangent here. We might decide that Unwell is too “woke” to ever acknowledge that its broken family might not exist in anything other than absolute multiracial harmony. In other words, the dispute between Dot and Lily might be simply as spurious as Lily claims. In a work of genuine realism, Lily could conceivably fall prey to the bugbears that Frantz Fanon had fished out of the black psyche. If Unwell is instead a story in which everybody is chirpily empowered, then why is it dangling the prospect of such an interesting vulnerability in front of us? Audiodramas such as Unwell always become a therapeutic exercise, in which the characters have to go through the tremendous ritual of unravelling themselves psychologically, so we will undoubtedly get to the bottom of what had once occurred between Dot and Lily. But the ongoing peril for the story is that this deepest secret does not, in the end, ring true.

Away from the politics, Unwell has some enjoyable vocal performances to showcase. As Dot, Harman is gutsy and wisecracking and yet she diligently remains on the tasteful side of cartoonishness. There is also a lot to admire in Mark Soloff’s bogeyman. He comes with a courtesy that is so disarming that it is possible to weather a number of his visits before his villainy finally catches up with you. His is a masterfully-handled devil – a devil who is so deceptively neutral that there are never any horns to grab him by. I am at sea with the folk significance of his persimmon brandy, but his character is a little like that of the hermit Richard Rowe, now a notable ghost at Ohio’s Hocking Hills State Park and one who is also accompanied by two hellhounds. Unwell‘s diablo functions in some respects like a traditional vampire too.   

Unwell describes itself as a “Midwestern Gothic” but this does not mean that it is in any hurry to break out into horror. Suspense is in fact its richest note. It takes a group of characters and then gradually makes the case that one of them could be a ghost. With this, a radical and indeed absorbing instability opens up within the story. If one ghost has passed unnoticed amongst the townspeople, then maybe all of them are ghosts. Could it be that Dot, Lily, Abbie and all of their friends are merely a row of skeletons lying undiscovered on a roadside, down some lost country lane? This is unlikely to be where Unwell is leading us, but it is exhilarating that we are not yet able to discount it as a theory.

It transpires that Unwell largely approves of ghosts. In common with participants in America’s therapeutic culture, ghosts are left behind and they have lives that are unresolved and it is only some neat little act (albeit one conducted by a spiritual healer instead of a therapist) that can release them. Yet where does this leave Mt. Absalom? The nostalgic comforts of the town where Lily had grown up soon become synonymous with the haunting ground of an uneasy spirit:

OLD MAN: That seems like enough. I hope, when the brandy is ready, that we will toast to new beginnings. That’s why you came to Mount Absalom, is it not?

LILY: I came to help my mom.

OLD MAN: You came quickly. Must have been an easy life to leave.

LILY: I guess so.

OLD MAN: To new beginnings.

LILY: Yeah.

Dot, we will have noticed, has stayed in the same community for years, living an unchanging life. The forgetting that is now liberating her is at once an apocalyptic neurological disease. Is it so foolish of her to cling on?