Mysterion, December 2023

“Twelfth Night” by Jonathan Edward McDonald

Reviewed by David Wesley Hill

It’s been more than forty years since I graduated from college, but I still remember the long, boozy, and pretentious philosophical discussions my friends and I had back in graduate school. Jonathan Edward McDonald does a good job of capturing this time of my life with his epistolary short story, “Twelfth Night,” the December offering of Mysterion. The tale, told in a letter from Kevin to Blanche, focuses on the annual Twelfth Night party the narrator and his roommate host for several years, where he first meets Blanche—and also Stephen Gregors, a history student from Indiana, who is existentially troubled by the dictum—Hier ist kein warum. As we learn, Kevin’s and Blanche’s romance eventually runs its course, but Stephen keeps attending the party even after leaving school and moving out of town—very far out of town… An intriguing ghost story that, unfortunately, would have benefited if the narrator had used a keyboard instead of supposedly writing out his letter “by hand because I am afraid that if I type it then I will be tempted to go back and make endless edits…”