PseudoPod | Page 134 | The Sound of Horror

January 18, 2008

PseudoPod 73: Blood, Gridlock, and PEZ

Author : Kevin Anderson
Narrator : Kris Johnson
Host : Alasdair Stuart
Audio Producer : Ben Phillips
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PseudoPod 73: Blood, Gridlock, and PEZ is a PseudoPod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:17 — 26.4MB)

Blood, Gridlock, and PEZ

By Kevin Anderson

Blood gathered in pools around the body as the afternoon sun gave it a sickly glimmer. I remember thinking how much the dark liquid really seemed to belong on the pavement. Like oil, transmission fluid or lizard-green coolant, the blood was at home on the asphalt.

It’s amazing the things you notice when events force you to grown up in the span of a moment. But I’m getting ahead of myself. This story really starts two hours earlier, with Gina.

Full text available here

January 11, 2008

PseudoPod 72: Heavy Rains

Author : Andrew Nicolle
Narrator : A.J. Fitzwater
Host : Alasdair Stuart
Audio Producer : Ben Phillips
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Heavy Rains first appeared online in Spacesuits & Sixguns #3, Summer 2007.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:57 — 31.0MB)

Heavy Rains

by Andrew Nicolle

The place we’re heading for is called Island Lagoon, smack-bang in the middle of the South Australian Outback. It looks like everything else out here in the bush: dry, dusty, the odd saltbush scattered along the plain. But I know this place is different.

First, the name is a bit inaccurate. You’d think a place called Island Lagoon would have some water, or maybe some swampland. It doesn’t. Not usually, anyway. Most of the year it’s just a dry saltpan, and if you blinked, you’d probably miss it.

Sometimes though… sometimes after heavy rain it turns into a salt lake. And when it does, things can get disturbed.

January 4, 2008

PseudoPod 71: The Intrusion

Author : Joel Arnold
Narrator : Ben Phillips
Host : Alasdair Stuart
Audio Producer : Ben Phillips
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“The Intrusion” first appeared in Brainbox II: Son of Brainbox

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:17 — 13.3MB)

The Intrusion

by Joel Arnold

Okay, this is where it gets tricky. Confession time. The night I cheated on my wife –

No – let’s save that for later.

The night Mary wakes up and screams “I can hear him! Make him stop!”

“Honey, it’s nothing. Go back to sleep.”

She sits up staring blindly as I turn on the bedside lamp, “No, I heard him. I saw him. His shadow – like he was over me, breathing.”

“Settle down. You were having a bad dream.”

“No,” she insists. The bed shakes with her tremors. “No.”

“You were dreaming.”

She starts to cry.

January 1, 2008

Flash Fiction: Garbage Day

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Garbage Day first appeared as a digital audio download on the author’s website, Come, Let Me Whisper, March 3, 2007.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:25 — 2.4MB)

Garbage Day

by Russell L. Burt

Kenneth was twelve when the significance of garbage day first struck him. That’s when it became his job to patrol the household’s trash bins, bag their contents, and then toss the bags into the huge plastic garbage can outside his kitchen door. Well, now it was a huge blue can. Back then it had been a couple of smaller, metal cans. But superficial differences aside, the result was always the same. The detritus that had accumulated over the week was gone, disappearing while you slept, as if by magic.

December 28, 2007

PseudoPod 70: Rapunzel’s Room

Author : John Dodds
Host : Alasdair Stuart
Audio Producer : Ben Phillips
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Rapunzel’s Room first appeared in Horror Express magazine, 2007.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:04 — 24.9MB)

Rapunzel’s Room

By John Dodds

In the showers later, she raised her right arm and examined her armpit minutely. Even after having shaved it yesterday with the LadyShave it still seemed hairier than it should. Normally, at worst, it was like the chin of a cartoon character like Desperate Dan or Fred Flintstone, a constellation of black dots. Now it was almost full length again. The hair had grown long enough to curl into a matted bush beaded with droplets of perspiration. It simply wasn’t possible. Unless it was caused by those vitamin supplements she had been taking. Those, and the performance enhancers so she could work out longer and harder.

December 25, 2007

Flash Fiction: I Am Nature

Author : J.M. McDermott
Narrator : Ben Phillips
Audio Producer : Ben Phillips
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I Am Nature first appeared in Dark Recesses Press #7, 2006.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 10:51 — 7.6MB)

I Am Nature

by J.M. McDermott

Detroit is dying. All the ornamental structures from the glory days of American industry wilt in ruin. There’s one building — found it myself — where the roof caved in one winter. There’s a tree that used to be in the lobby — and it’s dead — but its children are growing there. The forest has taken over the lobby. Birds hide everywhere, in the trees and the rafters, and their shit covers everything, but their singing is so beautiful.

December 21, 2007

The Pseudopod Autopsy: “John Carpenter’s Halloween”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:53 — 9.5MB)

A shape in the distance, a killer in suburbia, a psychiatrist pushed to his limits and an innocent girl in the firing line. Halloween is one of the acknowledged classics of horror, the patient zero of slasher movies. Now, we take a look behind the scenes, examining how it’s structured, what it says about the times and crucially what makes it tick. Welcome to the Pseudopod Autopsy. Now glove up…