You’ve found the world’s premier horror fiction podcast. Pseudopod brings you the best short horror in audio form, to take with you anywhere.

WARNING: This is a podcast of horror fiction. The stories presented here are intended to disturb you. They are likely to contain death, graphic violence, explicit sex (including sexual violence), hate crimes, blasphemy, or other themes and images that hook deep into your psyche. We do not provide ratings or content warnings for specific stories. We assume by your listening that you wish to be disturbed for your entertainment. If there are any themes that you cannot deal with in fiction, that are too strongly personal to you, please do not listen.

Pseudopod is for mature audiences only. Hardly any story on Pseudopod is suitable for children. We mean this very seriously.

Pseudopod is on hiatus until October 2010. In the meantime, dig through the archives or try these other fine, free, wonderfully bent audio fiction publishers:

Drabblecast

Transmissions From Beyond

The Classic Tales

Frequency of Fear

October Country Radio

Scott Sigler

and Cast Macabre, who made a nice timely promo and everything:

 

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By Tim Pratt

Read by Tina Connolly

A high fence of weathered wood ran along the right side, partitioning the beach for the people in the hotel. The fence ran for a distance even into the water before giving up hope of division. Harriet heard happy shouts and laughter from the other side. It was a gleaming white hotel with balconies on the back; she could see the top floors rising over the fence, much better than the ramshackle crammed-in house with rusty showerheads and sand in the mattresses. Same water, she thought, squelching her envy, they get the same beach we do.

But this was a sad little beach. Grady surged like a live wire, pulling away and eager to be in the grey-green water, but she held on and stepped with distaste around broken beer-bottles and chunks of styrofoam. The horizon was infinite and curved but the air stank of fish.

 

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By Paul Haines

Read by Graeme Dunlop

I wanted her to say she’d had a few long-term boyfriends, a couple of one-night-stands. The fewer lovers the better. I wanted her to make me feel superior in my sexual conquest of the world.

She recorded our lovemaking sessions to watch later. I knew what that meant in terms of experience. I wanted to be cool about it. I wanted to be able to handle it. Whatever went before didn’t matter.

 

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Ladies’ night at the meat market. A threesome of delectable flash fiction morsels.

My Body Your Banquet

By C.S.E. Cooney
Read by Jacquie Duckworth

The man next door was interested in eating human flesh. He said as much, last time I took the trash out to the alley.

Sight Unseen

By R. Scott Shanks, Jr.
Read by Rachel Swirsky

“Wherever you touch yourself, you will feel my hands touching you.” Sylvie reached for her aching head and felt a man’s rough hand twined in her hair, gently but firmly pushing her face into her graying sheets.

The Lot

By C.M. Harris
Read by Eve

It’s The Call of The Hydrae. It’s started.

 

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Episode 203, scheduled for July 16, will be tardy by perhaps a week or so I can tell you now. All this schedule craziness is what you get when you’re working at the last minute and have no time, a syndrome which I intend to terminate with the assistance of a two-month hiatus over August and September 2010. We will return with a vengeance in October. It’s the first such hiatus Pseudopod has ever taken. Oh, I’m not taking a vacation of any kind, and we’re not closing to submissions either — our associate editors continue to slave away all month, every month, giving as much personal feedback to authors as they have time to give. I’ve just fallen so far behind with submissions, production, and administrative duties, that if Pseudopod doesn’t air for those two months it will just let me, and incidentally the budget, keep from sinking. Assuming donations don’t drop off as a result… but we have to do this. Delegating only gets me so far, and I would rather take a break and come back with quality shows than resort to stopgap measures.

The winners of our flash fiction contest will still be produced, either in October or sooner. Voting in our final poll closes July 22, so you can go there for some free online fiction! Vote for your favorites. (Free registration is required to see the candidates and vote. No, we’re not going to spam you — it’s a legal kludge so they remain technically unpublished.)

Enjoy the rest of July — we’ll post them as soon as we can.

• Ben Phillips, chief editor

By K. A. Dean

Read by Alasdair Stuart

Sit down with the usual gut warp strength black coffee - only thing that’s going to keep my eyes open all night really- and settle down to watch. I can’t help smiling at it all, all those individual juddering images spread out in front of me, like an artificial compact eye watching the city. A hundred small screens surrounding the single, higher resolution monitor, all for me. So much information fed right back to me in my warm, dark skull of a control room.

I can’t help but enjoy it. Too much to pour over. So many minute human dramas played out over the night shift as though just for me, all of them oblivious. All so used now to the all seeing eye, that ever present observer above that hums and tracks them, benevolent and protective. Never look up, never acknowledge, but I don’t mind. It’s more interesting when they forget they’re being watched.

 

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By Simon Wood, whose latest thriller, Terminated is hot off the presses this month.

Read by Ben Phillips

Turning into the long driveway, I noticed three tall figures standing shoulder to shoulder on the porch. That, I wasn’t expecting. This was meant to be a one-on-one affair with no spectators. Alarm bells rang in my head, but there was no way I could turn tail for the hills. I had to see things through, no matter how bad they got — especially after the phone call.

I’d recognized the voice immediately and knew I had no choice. There’d been too much killing over the years and if I could prevent any further bloodshed, then I would do my best. It was the least I could do, considering the amount of blood on my hands.

 

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In which we present, for your pleasurable unease, two classic tales of suspense and woe by two of the masters.

Oil of Dog

By Ambrose Bierce

Read by Ben Phillips

One evening while passing my father’s oil factory with the body of a foundling from my mother’s studio I saw a constable who seemed to be closely watching my movements. Young as I was, I had learned that a constable’s acts, of whatever apparent character, are prompted by the most reprehensible motives, and I avoided him by dodging into the oilery by a side door which happened to stand ajar. I locked it at once and was alone with my dead.

The Horror of the Heights

By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The thirty-thousand-foot level has been reached time after time with no discomfort beyond cold and asthma. What does this prove? A visitor might descend upon this planet a thousand times and never see a tiger. Yet tigers exist, and if he chanced to come down into a jungle he might be devoured. There are jungles of the upper air, and there are worse things than tigers which inhabit them.

 

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By Daniel I. Russell

Read by Graeme Dunlop

John walked into the small kitchen. About to pitch the hot tea across the room, he took a slow breath, tipped the drink down the sink and delicately placed the mug at the side. Hands covering his eyes, he leaned back against the table.

He’d be the one left to make it.

 

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