i think the cruelest thing about ‘a guest for mr spider’ is that its a story so rooted in childhood
like on a meta level this is Jon’s ‘backstory’ episode where we learn all sorts of fun things like ‘Jon’s been an orphan from about the age of four’ and ‘his new primary caregiver always made him feel like a burden’ and ‘Jon was physically and emotionally bullied by a boy more than twice his age’ - we see the person who jon started out as and it makes so much about him make sense from there, like his ‘posh grandma’ manners and his struggle for human connection from an early age.
But the actual text and themes of mag 81 come across so much like a ‘coming of age’ horror story, almost like a broad outline of a goosebumps novel - ‘little boy finds something spooky, sees something awful but lives to tell the tale’
Everything from a precocious child who likes to wander, to the awful neil gaiman style childrens picture book to that last minute almost moral altercation with a teenage bully - it all feels like a genre horror flick from ‘scary stories’ or ‘tales from the crypt’, or even one of the more tame Stephen Kings- just the glimpse, a brush with something awful but thank god our protagonist escaped in the nick of time.
But of course we know now he didn’t. Jon never escaped, never got out of that web they caught him in. Instead it left him on a long leash (but never as long as he’d like) and let him wander once again, ‘safe’ in the knowledge that the book is gone, the door is closed, maybe mr spider had enough (he never has enough)
And what a way for the web to get what it wants. To instill a lonely little boy whose already lost so much with a hunger, a need to understand what happened all those years ago. Maybe Jon always felt ‘Mr Spider’ might come back, with his awful hatred of all things eight legged, his scrambling need to understand, but everything about his encounter screamed at him that it could only happen there, then, in a short but suffered chapter in his youth.
Instead, what jon needs to know, and ultimately finds out, is that there is more out there - more evil books and hungry mouths and open doors - and finds a thousand things in his perfectly crafted ‘fascination’ with the supernatural.
But ultimately there was only one thing out to get him through the works of a thousand whispering voices and grabbing hands.
