Archive for Podcasts

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Pseudopod 296: The Squat

“The Squat” was first published in the 2007 charity anthology THE VAULT OF PUNK HORROR and Sean says “at the time I was thinking about what ‘punk’ means beyond the music and the esthetics. I remembered stories I’d heard about runaway kids living on the streets in San Francisco and the ways they used to take care of each other–the older kids looking out for the younger ones, sometimes prostituting themselves to provide for them. Somehow these acts of kindness and generosity from people who were in desperate situations themselves said ‘punk’ to me more than any loud music or mohawk ever could.”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:56 — 28.9MB)

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The Squat

by Sean Logan

The floor underneath him was sticky, as if it was covered in warm honey, and it made the skin on his hands and the side of face sting slightly where he’d touched it. All around him he heard the wet sounds of sliding, a thousand separate sounds, a thousand entities sliding toward him in the darkness. And all of these sounds seemed to echo down through a vast space, along with a deep, distant rumbling.

The sliding noises were closer now, and there was a wet, fleshy slapping against his feet, and creeping up his legs, under the pantlegs, thick coiling muscles, like long slugs or smooth tentacles, up and around his torso and arms, his neck and covering his face.

The old man felt himself being stretched and pulled and smothered, but the panic that had been rising in his mind was melting away. He didn’t remember how he’d gotten himself here, but for the first time in a long, long while he knew exactly where he was going. And he found comfort in that as his body and its extremities were pulled asunder.

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Pseudopod 295: Just Outside Our Windows, Deep Inside Our Walls

“Just Outside Our Windows, Deep Inside Our Walls” was first published April 2010 as a digital short by Darkside Digital, the e-book division of Delirium Books (click link for website). In 2011 it was reprinted in the two premier year’s-best anthologies: THE BEST HORROR OF THE YEAR Volume 3, edited by Ellen Datlow, and THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST NEW HORROR #22, edited by Stephen Jones.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:30 — 27.9MB)

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Just Outside Our Windows, Deep Inside Our Walls

by Brian Hodge

She seemed not to have heard me even though I knew she had, and I started to feel bad for asking it at all. While at first I’d found her not very nice to look at, I began to wonder if I wasn’t wrong, because now it seemed I’d only been misled by a trick of light and her annoyance. I wondered, too, if she might jump from the window, or lean forward and let herself fall. In that other world three floors down, the neighbors’ house was ringed with square slabs of stone to walk on. Nobody could survive a fall like that.

“I draw,” I told her, volunteering a distraction to save her life. “Want to see?”

I’d sneaked up some old ones, at least, even if I couldn’t make new ones.

“Later, maybe,” she said, and pulled away. Like before, her hand went to the bottom of the window, lingering a few moments, but as she moved back into the room she again left it open.

That night after the lights were out I lay in my bed and imagined her doing the same. I fought to stay awake as long as I could in case there were other songs to hear, or a repeat performance of the first one. Barring that, it seemed possible that she might cry instead, because that’s what I’d done the first night they’d moved me up here, but just before I fell asleep I wondered if the reason I hadn’t heard anything from her was because she was lying in the dark listening for some sound out of me.

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Pseudopod 293: Flash On The Borderlands XII – (Black) Arts & (Dead) Letters

Pseudopod 293: Flash On The Borderlands XII – (Black) Arts & (Dead) Letters is a PseudoPod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:15 — 22.2MB)

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Show Notes

“Dancing” is a PseudoPod original and was written at Odyssey 2011, inspired by Ben Bova’s “Leviathan” and owes a lot to the feedback it got from Evil Overlord Jeanne Cavelos and her Minions.

“Lost For Words” was won first place in FANTASY MAGAZINES 2009 Halloween Flash Fiction contest, which was overseen by writer Rae Bryant and under the ezine’s publisher, Sean Wallace. It can be read here.

“Music on the Michigan Avenue Bridge” was originally published in Mort Castle’s 2002 anthology NATIONS OF THE LIVING, NATIONS OF THE DEAD. Originally was a story in the comic book NIGHT CITY (with art by Mark Nelson).

Three flash fictions about the creative impulse that drives and maddens…

Dancing

by Donna Glee Williams

“I do not pay you to tell me what cannot be done.” They used to call her Freedom on the Wing. And now… This fool said it could not be fixed.

“But this… This isn’t an illness, Diva,” he creaked. “This is natural. You’re maturing.”

The dancer hated being soothed. “I’m hardening,” she snapped. “I’m losing my range of motion. I’m stronger than I’ve ever been, but suddenly my turn-out is shrinking. My forefoot extension is down. Do something. Why do I keep you if you can’t do something?” (Continue Reading…)

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Pseudopod 294: Demon Rum

“Demon Rum” was first published around 1995 in the fiction magazine Pirate Writings, and was written by request of the editor, using a painting of a mouthless man holding a glass of a distilled spirit as a prompt. It is included in Charles’ fiction collection QUIET YET SOMEHOW WRONG, along with 16 other horror stories. Click the link under the title to purchase from Amazon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:38 — 23.2MB)

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Demon Rum

by Charles M. Saplak

The scene on the other side of the glass resolved itself. Spangler’s suspicions were confirmed; he made out men bent over scattered tables; behind a bar at the far wall a man handled bottles.

Spangler felt his way along the stone wall (unsteadily, for his drinking had started hours ago) to a place where an unmarked door stood slightly ajar. From inside came the sounds of glass against wood, and the smells of tobacco smoke and stale sweat.

There were no signs or outside lights. As a bar this place struck Spangler as just what he needed. No frills, no B-girls, no blaring bands or flashing lights, just a place where a seaman could get one last drink before returning aboard.

It was just what Spangler was looking for on this cloudy Mediterranean night. It was just what he had been looking for on most nights of his life, these past ten years.

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Pseudopod 292: Coming Soon To A Theatre Near You

“Coming Soon To A Theatre Near You” originally appeared in Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone Magazine in 1984 under the pseudonym “Oliver Lowenbruck.” It won the Dimension award in 1985. “Red Light” won the 1987 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 54:17 — 37.4MB)

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Coming Soon To A Theatre Near You

by David J. Schow

The Omicron reminded Jack of a kid’s bedroom. To an adult, a non-initiate, it sure looked like a trash heap. But there was a comforting order inside for those who cared to delve past the superficial. It would never appeal to the Rolls Royce trade, yet was not as bad as the kung-fu sleaze pits of downtown L.A. which looked razed by Mongols. The Omicron was, in essence, a “normal” theatre stripped down for combat; its patrons exemplars of the no-frills class.

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Pseudopod 291: Lizardfoot

“Lizardfoot” originally appeared in A capella Zoo #3 and is readable by clicking the link. It was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:51 — 17.2MB)

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Lizardfoot

by John Jasper Owens

It was Rayletta that made the lizard boots what had the footprints we used to track around. I never asked, on account of Missy-Bee don’t like me talking to Rayletta, who is divorced and therefore hell-bound and has those huge boobs, but I suspect Rayletta made the LizardFoot boot bottoms by way of a gator foot, which she put on butcher paper, and traced around it to make it bigger. And as y’all also know, the swamp out back of my trailer was the ideal place to stomp around in the boots, because that marsh goes back about a hundred miles to the coast and is too shallow for skiffs, too deep and pock-holed for hiking, and impossible to drain, unless you are also willing to drain the Santeechee river what feeds it. Plus the gulf.

It seems like that swamp goes on forever, under them cypress trees.

Sometimes at night, sitting out on my deck, I watch the moonlight coming through the branches and hanging moss and then I hear a hoot owl, and I will admit I have sometimes wondered if the alleged sightings of LizardFoot have had some truth to them. Although during the day, like most people, I believed those sightings to have been moonshine and/or crank induced. My own daddy claims to have seen old LizardFoot once or twice, but mostly when in trouble with mama for gigging till dawn. And Daddy is not afraid of a drink.

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Pseudopod 290: The American Dead

“The American Dead” originally appeared in Interzone Issue 203, and was reprinted in several “Year’s Best” volumes, including Stephen Jones’ THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST NEW HORROR Volume 18.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:34 — 21.8MB)

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The American Dead

by Jay Lake

When he was very young, Pobrecito found a case of magazines, old ones with bright color pictures of men and women without their clothes. Whoever had made the magazines had an astonishing imagination, because in Pobrecito’s experience most people who fucked seemed to do it either with booze or after a lot of screaming and fighting and being held down. There weren’t very many ways he’d ever seen it gone after. The people in these pictures were smiling, mostly, and arranged themselves more carefully than priests arranging a corpse. And they lived in the most astonishing places.

Pobrecito clips or tears the pictures out a few at a time and sells them on the streets of the colonia. He knows the magazines themselves would just be taken from him, before or after a beating, but a kid with a few slips of paper clutched in his hand is nothing. As long as no one looks too closely. But even if he had a pass for the gates, he dares not take them within the walls, for the priests would hang him in the square.

What he loves most about the magazines is not the nudity or the fucking or the strange combinations and arrangements these people found themselves in. No, what he loves is that these are Americans. Beautiful people in beautiful places doing beautiful things together.

“I will be an American some day,” he tells his friend Lucia. They are in the branches of the dying tree, sharing a bottle of pulque and a greasy bowl of fried plantains in the midday heat. Pobrecito has a secret place up there, a hollow in the trunk where he hides most of his treasures.

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Pseudopod 289: The Rainbow Serpent

“The Rainbow Serpent” was first published by Shock Totem in their second issue, July 2010.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:31 — 21.1MB)

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The Rainbow Serpent

by Vincent Pendergast

read by Daniel Foley

People were clever. They knew Rainbow Serpent, they knew his story. When he sang to them they saw his form and would not come close.

So Rainbow Serpent swallowed the sun, bringing darkness to the land and hiding his true form. When he sang they came willingly, he grew fat again, and everything was good.