So let’s talk about Mabel.
I stumbled over this one because the hosts of The Bridge mentioned it in their lists of podcasts to check out. When I looked it up—a podcast simply named Mabel, what is that about?—I liked the woodcut-looking rabbit… Yeah, I’m shallow. It was enough to make me sample Mabel.
Written by Becca De La Rosa and Mabel Martin, Mabel’s premise is a podcast about ghosts, family secrets, strange houses, and missed connections.
I’m putting on my hypocrite hat here. I got annoyed because Archive 81 had a vague premise: Archive 81 is a found footage horror podcast about ritual, stories, and sound. I said the vagueness was irritating (and it was!). Yet, Mabel’s equally vague premise feels evocative to me. If you, like me, are a fan of gothics, you probably perked up when you heard “family secrets and strange houses.”
There’s a gimmick to Mabel that will either drive you away or strike you as increasingly emotionally resonant. The gimmick is this: Anna Limon, health caretaker for a very elderly Sally Martin, finds some things about the house worrying, and calls Sally’s only living relative, her granddaughter, Mabel Martin. Anna leaves endless messages for Mabel and Mabel doesn’t call back. The calls are often truncated, either by Anna hanging up, the message machine cutting off, or maybe even Mabel fast-forwarding. Mabel herself is a silent presence for a very long time.
Photo by Nils Nedel on Unsplash
The setting is opaque, which, if you’ve been following along, you know I don’t like! Mabel takes place in a country house in a city near the mountains and ocean. There are hills. There’s a hospital. There’s a cemetery. Many of the random characters that show up on occasion seem to be Irish. That’s it.
So… why do I love Mabel with every fiber of my being?? So many reasons.
SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS BELOW
Reason # 1) Becca De La Rosa is one of the script writers as well as the voice of Anna Limon, and she is a hell of a double-threat: performer and storyteller. Her acting is stagy, but deliciously so. She lingers on certain words; she employs vocal fry to add emphasis, and in other moments, her voice is musical. She writes about the liminal spaces, not only between reality and fantasy, but in the day-to-day.
Anna’s phone calls to Mabel are full of little truths: what it’s like to live in someone’s house where your time is not your own, what it’s like to have a job watching people die, then moving on, what it’s like to be left alone in that house after your job is done—the mixture of trepidation and freedom.
She makes every emotion seem honest and plausible.
Anna Limon, as a character, is a drama geek’s monologue dream: she gets to rant and rave, she gets to be introspective, investigating herself as well as the mysteries around her; she gets to peel herself like an onion for display. That’s one of those things that is either riveting or cringe-worthy. De La Rosa makes it riveting. It’s a diary by phone. You’re invested in her non-conversations with Mabel; you feel the same satisfaction she does when she realizes that Mabel is listening to these calls.
When there’s a turnabout episode of Mabel attempting to call Anna, it’s like a physical shock—Mabel is real, and she’s reaching back, only she’s very very far from home.
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Reason #2) The gist of this story is fairies. Tricksy, dangerous fairies, and a family line that seems to be bound up with them. It’s a Tam Lin story of sorts, or more appropriately an Orpheus story. Anna wanders through Greek myth as well as Irish as well as family history—both Mabel’s and her own. It’s both adventurous and oddly, pleasantly voyeuristic to listen to. It weaves between myths, always familiar, always new. It leaves me desperate to know how things will play out.
Reason #3) The vague premise promises us family secrets—and it delivers. It promises strange houses—and oh boy, Sally’s house is strange. And missed connections—well, that’s the whole set up, isn’t it?
The dreamlike setting works because this is such a dreamlike story. It’s about a young woman alone (maybe) in an isolated house (houses?) and really, what more do we need to know? There’s a hill and sometimes there’s an artery into the hill and most of the time there’s not.
Photo by Marcus Cramer on Unsplash
And sure, we don’t know where or when this story is happening, but by god, we know the house. We know what the rooms look like, we know what the singing in the halls sounds like, what flowers grow in the garden, and so forth. We have all these tiny, delicate details to keep us grounded.
Reason #4) It’s full of microscopic cliffhangers to keep you invested.
A strange man knocks at the door, and we get a history of why Anna doesn’t like palindromes before we get back to what happened when she opened the door to him.
Sally has a terrible fall and we hear Anna’s frantic call, then… we get Anna calling Mabel back to describe a room of the house that she likes best, before we find out what happened to Sally. It should be maddening, but it’s not because the underlying promise is there: Anna will tell us what we want to know. Eventually.
Reason #5) For all the dreamlike, leisurely qualities to the storytelling, the plot keeps moving. Right now, I’m up to episode 18, and we are in a dramatically different place than we were in episode 1. Anna’s whole world has changed and she has a quest: to bring Mabel back home.
Honestly, I’m enjoying this podcast so much, I’m burning the episodes to discs so I can listen to them more easily. Whether that level of enjoyment will hold true for the entire run I can’t say. So far, Mabel is up to 36 episodes, and I’m just halfway through. I might get bored. Anna and the plot might start running in circles instead of moving forward. Mabel might be too insane to stomach for long. It might go a direction I dislike. But right now, it’s wonderful and I highly recommend it to anyone who likes first-person narrative and fairy tales.
Photo by Jacalyn Beales on Unsplash
Reason #6) The website gets top marks! Mabel has TRANSCRIPTS!!!!! And as if that’s not enough, the writers have a game with the transcripts, where a certain word is highlighted somewhere in each transcript which spells out a hint of some kind.
So far, in season two, I uncovered “Two Girls Share A Single…” I cheated a little bit. I read ahead, because I wanted to know what they shared—a heart? A soul?
It could have been “heart.” It could have been “soul.” Either would make sense, plot-wise. The word could have been “house” or “shadow” or ….
The word was throne. And now I’m even more intrigued by the upending of my expectations.
In the end, I think that’s the key to my love for Mabel. It’s well-executed, but more than that, it’s a constant, delightful surprise.
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