PseudoPod 108: The Teacher
The Teacher
by Paul G. Tremblay
Days and weeks pass without another special lesson. We’ve had plenty of time to waste. Our first term grades are good and we lose ourselves in the responsibilities of senior year; of college recommendations and applications and social requirements.
On the first day of winter term the TV returns. Mr. Sorent doesn’t have to tell us what to do. We pull our chairs in tight and put away our books. Mr. Sorent says, “Lesson two, gang.”
There is a collage of clips and images, nothing in focus for more than a second or two, of car accidents. The kind of stuff some of us saw in driver’s ed. The images of crushed and limbless and decapitated bodies are intercut with scenes from funerals, and there are red-eyed family members, the ones who never saw any of it coming, wailing and crying and breaking apart.
About the Author
Paul Tremblay
Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, Sheridan Le Fanu, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the New York Times bestselling author of Horror Movie: A Novel, Another, The Beast You Are, The Pallbearers Club, Survivor Song, Growing Things and Other Stories, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. His novel The Cabin at the End of the World was adapted into the Universal Pictures film “Knock at the Cabin.” His next novel, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, will be published in summer 2026.
His essays and short fiction have appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and numerous “year’s best” anthologies. He lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts and has a master’s degree in Mathematics.
About the Narrator
Mur Lafferty
Mur Lafferty is the co-editor and sometime-host of Escape Pod.
She is an American podcaster and writer based in Durham, North Carolina. She is the host and creator of the podcasts I Should Be Writing and Ditch Diggers. Her books have been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Philip K. Dick, and Scribe Awards. In the past decade she has been the co-founder/co-editor of PseudoPod, founding editor of Mothership Zeta, and the editor or co-editor of Escape Pod (where she is currently).
She is fond of Escape Artists, in other words.
Mur won the 2013 Astounding Award for Best New Writer (formerly the John W. Campbell Award), and the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Fancast for Ditch Diggers. She’s been nominated for numerous other awards and is always doing new things, so check her website for the latest.
