On The Isle of Blue Men

by Robert William Sneddon

Sometimes I sit for hours weighing myself in the balance of reason. Have I dreamed all this? Am I what I am, a castaway? Have I always been the creature, scarce human, whom the fishermen regard with pity and compassion, thinking me mad? Or have I really been John Scott of New York, the painter of pictures which hang in the Metropolitan Museum of New York, the Corcoran Art Gallery of Washington, the Philadelphia Art Gallery, the Luxemburg of Paris? Surely knowing these names indicate my knowledge of art, yet were canvas and palette set before me I would hesitate to touch them. I shall never paint again.

I shrink from the task I have set myself. Can I bear to re-live those days of horror? And yet there is some power stronger than my puny will that prompts me to write, to assure myself I am still capable of sane and ordered thought I have begged pen, ink, and paper from the schoolmaster. He gave them to me as though to a child, and I felt his little eyes follow me with a strange surmise.

And when I have written, what then? What shall I have proved? I do not know— (Continue Reading…)

Ye Goode Olde Ghoste Storie

by Anthony Boucher

‘‘But there ain’t no sech thing!” said Jed Hoskins’ old man forcefully.

‘‘No such thing as what?” queried the stranger with the black bag, who had justed seated himself near the group.

“Ha’nts,” Jed hastened to explain. ‘‘Grandad Miller there, he says the old Lawrence home’s ha’nt-ed, and my dad, he says it can’t be, ’cause there ain’t no ha’nts.”

“Aren’t there, though?” said the stranger, half to himself. (Continue Reading…)

The Oval Portrait

by Edgar Allan Poe

The chateau into which my valet had ventured to make forcible entrance, rather than permit me, in my desperately wounded condition, to pass a night in the open air, was one of those piles of commingled gloom and grandeur which have so long frowned among the Appenines, not less in fact than in the fancy of Mrs. Radcliffe. To all appearance it had been temporarily and very lately abandoned. We established ourselves in one of the smallest and least sumptuously furnished apartments. It lay in a remote turret of the building. Its decorations were rich, yet tattered and antique. Its walls were hung with tapestry and bedecked with manifold and multiform armorial trophies, together with an unusually great number of very spirited modern paintings in frames of rich golden arabesque. In these paintings, which depended from the walls not only in their main surfaces, but in very many nooks which the bizarre architecture of the chateau rendered necessary—in these paintings my incipient delirium, perhaps, had caused me to take deep interest; so that I bade Pedro to close the heavy shutters of the room—since it was already night—to light the tongues of a tall candelabrum which stood by the head of my bed—and to throw open far and wide the fringed curtains of black velvet which enveloped the bed itself. I wished all this done that I might resign myself, if not to sleep, at least alternately to the contemplation of these pictures, and the perusal of a small volume which had been found upon the pillow, and which purported to criticise and describe them.

(Continue Reading…)

Mother Trucker

by Wailana Kalama

My mother hits the moose in the pitch black of 4:32 a.m. There’s almost nothing to see, just a blur of limbs burnt sepia by the headlights of her truck. But it’s the noise that really grinds its hooves in—a startling, thunderous clap that blooms from the moose’s body into the hood, into the steering wheel, shaking the world around my mother with shocks and aftershocks, and all that metal and flesh that make up her and her truck absorb it like a dried-out towel.

But that isn’t the strangest thing that happens that day. (Continue Reading…)

Corporation

by Tyler Jones

Sunlight blooms in the sky, rising up from behind all those glass and steel buildings. It burns away the dark blue. The Windows are still tinted from yesterday when I dimmed them. I touch the tablet to wake it up, then press the office icon. A new menu opens, I push the square with curtains. A control panel appears and I drag the fader down.

The glass grows clearer, lets in more light.

A shudder moves through the building. Framed awards, signed photographs of CEOs and politicians rattle against the walls. A golden apple paperweight shivers across the surface of the desk. The window vibrates, warps my reflection in the glass.

Work here long enough you get used to this, this shivering building.

I’m always the first to arrive because I still have some thing to prove. (Continue Reading…)

Featuring the story Celestial Shores

by Sarah Day and Tim Pratt

Towards the end of July 2022 we released a special episode to mark Alasdair Stuart’s 15 years as the voice of PseudoPod. It included the story Celestial Shores, written by Sarah Day and Tim Pratt and narrated by Alasdair and his partner, Marguerite Kenner, as well as special tributes to Al and other bits of voice goodness.

But it turned out there were things we hadn’t, quite, managed to squeeze into that release. So now, as a special early holiday gift, we present… THE DIRECTOR’S CUT! There’s some extra introductory chat, there are new, previously unheard tributes, there’s a beautiful selection of samples from the very best of Al’s outro work from across the years, there are even more hilarious out-takes, and the story itself, Celestial Shores, has a fabulous new sound bed.

We hope you enjoy it. And we promise you, it’s all true.

Britt drove silently while Ray gazed past her at the beauty of the rock-strewn ocean, beyond the sheer drop-offs and flimsy guardrails that separated the coast road from the end of the continent. They were farther north than he’d ever been in California, heading for Celestial Shores, a stretch of property that began life in the ‘70s as an intentional community and was now full of wealthy retirees with strong opinions about quiet hours and the evils of artificial light… and a few vacation rentals, one of which he’d snapped up at a reduced price on short notice as a way of apologizing for certain things without having to actually say he was sorry. (Continue Reading…)