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PseudoPod 445: Sweetness

“Sweetness” first appeared in 2010 in the anthology ZOMBIALITY: A QUEER BENT ON THE UNDEAD (edited by Bill Tucker) and was reprinted in THE AVERSIVE CLAUSE, Edwards’ debut collection of short stories.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:12 — 20.8MB)

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Show Notes

“When it comes to the classic zombie myth, I’ve always been curious about what it must feel like to change from human to monster. It seems to me something of a huge cop-out to have the transformation happen only after the person was dead. And I’ve always been interested in why zombies act the way they do. Why the hunger?”

Sweetness

by B.C. Edwards

It starts in the back of the throat, that spot where coughs gets caught when you’ve got a cold. It is sweet, like too much caramel, like cheap air freshener, like that perfume my grandmother wore constantly and which always made me gag.

Now I wonder if this is the last time I’ll think about my grandmother.

It will consume me piece by piece until there is nothing left and I am one of those that has been overcome by it. That is how it works, they say. The people on the news say.

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PseudoPod Bonus Flash (444B): Fan Letter to Joe Lansdale

PseudoPod Bonus Flash (444B): Fan Letter to Joe Lansdale is a PseudoPod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 13:19 — 9.2MB)

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Fan Letter to Joe Lansdale

by Adrian Simmons

Dear Mr. Landsdale:

I would like to congratulate you on your story “Boys Will Be Boys” in the FenCon 2010 program booklet.

For years I have tried to write a story that gets into the head of a sociopath, and you’ve put together one that gets into the heads of not one, but two of them!

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PseudoPod 444: Boys Will Be Boys

“Boys Will Be Boys” first appeared in the Winter 1985/1986 issue of Hardboiled. This story, slightly revised, became a portion of the 1987 novel THE NIGHTRUNNERS.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:11 — 33.9MB)

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Boys Will Be Boys

by Joe Lansdale

Not long ago, about a year back, a very rotten kid named Clyde Edson walked the Earth. He was street-mean and full of savvy and he knew what he wanted and got it anyway he wanted.

He lived in a big, evil house on a dying, grey street in Galveston, Texas, and he collected to him, like an old lady who brings in cats half-starved and near-eaten with mange, the human refuse and the young discards of a sick society.

He molded them. He breathed life into them. He made them feel they belonged. They were his creations, but he did not love them. They were just things to be toyed with until the paint wore thin and the batteries ran down, then out they went.

And this is the way it was until he met Brian Blackwood.

Things got worse after that.

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PseudoPod 443: Watchers

“Watchers” was originally published in World War Cthulhu, ed. Jonathan Oliver, publisher: Cubicle 7, 2013.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:19 — 25.0MB)

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Show Notes

“Very little of this is made up. The coastwatchers on Leserser were there  as described – as was I, half a century later.”

Sounds used in this episode:

Watchers

by Lavie Tidhar

1.

The city is buried deep under the South Pacific ocean, and that is all I want to tell you about it.

In 1942 South Pacific Command was established on the island of New Caledonia following the hurried departure of its French colonial administration. Nouvelle Caledonie, unlike the other islands of Melanesia, was not volcanic. It was, in fact, the sole remnant of an entire sunken continent called Zealandia, a fragment of the once-mighty Gondwanaland.

There had been monsters on New Caledonia, before humans came. Meiolania, a giant horned turtle, two and a half meters long with an elongated skull and multiple horns protruding from of it. Or the Sylviornis, an almost two meters tall, flightless bird with a long reptilian tail. Or the enormous, armoured Mekosuchus crocodiles.

Real monsters, all of them. But when the humans came, when the ancient Lapita people crossed the ocean in their giant canoes, they settled the islands, and they killed the monsters.

I was not in New Caledonia. I was with III Island Command, first on Espiritu Santo and then on Vanua Lava, in the islands of the New Hebrides.

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PseudoPod 442: The Only Child

PseudoPod 442: The Only Child is a PseudoPod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:22 — 16.1MB)

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Show Notes

“While writing this story I was wondering why death sometimes makes people feel special – touching it, escaping it, even causing it. Yet it’s not special. It’s something that happens to all of us eventually and it’s usually terrible.”

The Only Child

by Leslie J. Anderson

Annabell Crowley lay on the dirt floor and looked up at Death. She remembered that a man had cut her throat. It was so hard to hold onto ideas. Her parents were already dead. Death had taken their spirits hours ago. She thought she should be afraid of him, but wasn’t. The human mind has amazing capabilities of adjusting to a new reality. The world was very peaceful. She looked up at Death, who looked back down at her. How funny that everything felt normal now. A man had cut her throat and she was not dead, even though that was impossible. Her arms lay at her sides. She didn’t have the power to raise them.

Death tilted his head. His skin was pulled close over his skull and his eyes were closed and sunken. Maybe he had no eyes at all. After looking at her for a long time he flicked the cigarette away and walked out the door. He was dressed in flannel and jean, with a brown hat. He had taken the hat from a hanged man because he’d liked it and it fit well. He stepped over Anna’s father.

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PseudoPod 441: Deep Deep

“Deep Deep” originally appeared in Electric Spec, May 2012.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 21:59 — 15.2MB)

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Show Notes

“I once worked as a summer camp counselor, and I love swimming in lakes. (You might not think so, but it’s true!)”

Deep Deep

by Karen Munro

If a kid got lost in the lake, all the counselors had to dive. They were supposed to line up an arm’s length from each other, dive to the bottom, swim a few feet, then come straight up for air. If you dove close to shore it wasn’t bad. You only had to go down a few feet. But out at the end of the dock, beneath the diving board, it was twelve or fifteen or twenty feet to the bottom. That’s what we called deep-deep.

I wasn’t a counselor. I wasn’t counselor material, especially not at Wanderwell Reformatory Boys’ Camp. I wasn’t there to reform anyone, I just wanted to get out of my mom’s basement for the summer. Bagging cream of wheat and counting bowstrings in the quartermaster’s A-frame was better than listening to my mom and Shouty Phil rampage through the house. I didn’t want to be a counselor. I didn’t want to be responsible for anyone . . . but they still made me dive.

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PseudoPod 440: Octavius Bound

PseudoPod 440: Octavius Bound is a PseudoPod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:58 — 27.5MB)

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Show Notes

“Although the events in this story are fictional, the Octavius itself is somewhat less so. Legends of this ship’s disappearance have existed for centuries, and nothing conclusive about its existence has been documented either way.”

Octavius Bound

by Nathan Ehret

Sept 17, 1762

Five Months now we have been at Sea, tho’ it seems but half a Week since the _Octavius_ embarked from Peking and the Orient. I have decided to eschew the Horn & attempt a Course through the New World for our return Journey. If, by God’s Grace, the Weather is clear & we maintain our current Heading, we should find Passage eastward through the Arctic within the next Fortnight.

June 1, 2014

Saw my first iceberg today. Not sure when we can expect pack ice, but everyone just tells me, ‘relax, we’re on an icebreaker’. Kinda takes the excitement out of sailing into the Great White North to chase down a ghost ship, but hey–at least we’ll be safer than the _Octavius_.

It’s funny–we really don’t know much more about the _HMS Octavius_ than what anyone’s grandma could find on Google. It was last seen in 1775, some thirteen years after its disappearance, by the _Herald_, an English whaling ship. When the whalers went on board, they discovered the entire crew of the _Octavius_ frozen dead at their stations. The captain, William Perington, was still at his desk, pen in hand, along with a woman and small child. I guess the whole ‘freezing-to-death-at-your-post’ business kinda freaked the hell out of the whalers, and they legged it pretty quick. But not before purloining the captain’s log book from right under his stiff, dead hand…

Course it was all basically hearsay until good ol’ Robert came across the log book in an auction for maritime memorabilia. It was vetted by a dozen historians, and it seems to be legit. Turns out the coordinates for the _Octavius’_ last known location were in the book. Also turns out that Yours Truly is Robert’s favourite student of maritime archaeology, hence my place aboard the _Liberator_! Sweet deal.

(OK, cards on the table–Robert knows about what happened with Dylan, and maybe he figures this trip will help me get over things? Yeah, right. But it’ll be a good voyage nevertheless. Right? Of course it will.)

_And why, O Wise and Lovely Amelia Finley, are you writing in a diary?_ My distinguished advisor, Prof Robert Winston, thinks it will actually help organize my thoughts when it comes to writing my thesis. Huzzah.

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PseudoPod 439: Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics as Employed Against Lycanthropes

“Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics as Employed Against Lycanthropes” was published in RUNNING WITH THE PACK (ed. Ekaterina Sedia), in 2010, and reprinted in MAD SCIENCE CAFE (ed. Deborah J. Ross) in 2013.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:19 — 23.0MB)

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Show Notes

“The story was directly inspired by a set of online essays written by Michael Briggs, husband of the urban fantasy author Patricia Briggs, in which he attempted to make silver bullets and discovered that it’s insanely hard to do.”

Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics as Employed Against Lycanthropes

by Marie Brennan

_Abstract_

This study seeks to establish a hierarchy of efficacy for various antipathetic materials and delivery mechanisms thereof as used in the extermination of lycanthropes. Pre-existing data on this issue consists solely of folkloric narratives and unsubstantiated anecdotes on Internet communities, neither of which are based upon suitable experimental trials. It is hoped that this study will be only the beginning of a proper body of scientific literature, which might be expanded to include hyena men, were-jaguars, and other therianthropes.