PseudoPod 638: ARTEMIS RISING 5: A Strange Heart, Set in Feldspar

A Strange Heart, Set in Feldspar

by Maria Haskins

Beneath

Alice is kneeling in the darkness, breathing hard, heart thumping behind her ribs.

The kids are gone. She feels it in her cold flesh and aching bones, as surely as she felt them being pulled out of her body at the hospital when she gave birth to each of them all those years ago.

She calls their names anyway: “Anne! Lisa! Eric!”, but they don’t answer.

The guide is nowhere to be found either, but she doesn’t really want to think of him anyway, that smile turned to lips and teeth, the way he shook his head when she asked for help before he sunk into the darkness without a trace.

The tunnels of the old mine seem to throb and twist and shift around her, like the intestine of some strange, gigantic animal; she has to reach out and touch the rough walls on either side to steady herself and stop the world from lurching.

What now? (Continue Reading…)

PseudoPod 637: ARTEMIS RISING 5: White Noise

White Noise

by Kai Hudson

“It’s a hearing aid,” Nina says, with a careful smile.

Robert frowns at the little device on the table. It’s innocuous-looking enough: a silver teardrop roughly the size of his thumb—not brown? Aren’t hearing aids brown?—with the clear plastic tube part that wraps around the shell of the ear. It looks delicate, and expensive.

He wants to smash it to bits.

(Continue Reading…)

PseudoPod 636: Hag Ride

Hag Ride

by Eden Royce

Frieda stood in the kitchen’s dull light with a chopping knife clutched in one hand. The dinner on the table lay untouched, ice-cold and bathing in congealing fat. Her cinnamon coloring disguised the angry flare of heat in her cheeks. Still, she knew yelling wouldn’t get her husband’s attention, so she forced a calm tone into her voice.

“Why aren’t you staying for dinner? I made your favorite.”

“I told you, I got to go out.” Henry came out of their bedroom, buttoning up his good shirt and tucking it into slacks she had taken her time to iron that morning. (Continue Reading…)

PseudoPod 635: Last Week I Was Esther

Last Week I was Esther

by Deborah L. Davitt

Last week, I was Esther. I remember her plump face, pearl earrings, and huge handbag, stuffed with treats for her grandchildren—as stuffed as she was inside, with sweetmeats and perfumed memories of the postwar years. I’ve tended to pursue older people for a while, with their minds full of experiences. Dementia patients don’t work, though. When I’m them, I’m even more confused as to who I am, than I usually feel.

And then we get hungry again. (Continue Reading…)

Snowbird Gothic

I picked this collection up after my revisitation to the Vampire Clan Novel Saga, because I was thoroughly impressed with Dansky’s excellent characters and action. Dansky pulls off the same trick that Stephen King does of making his characters fully inhabited and easy to settle into, and his plotting drags you along at a rollicking pace. Also, as an extra bonus, his story “Good Advice” was the second full length story to roll out on the PseudoPod feed.

This collection is thoroughly enjoyable and covers the territory from cryptozoology in “The Road Best Not Taken” to the unsettling dread wrought by an uncaring universe in “The Mad Eyes of the Heron King.” The latter story is ostensibly existential office dread and the dangers of not knowing your place. It is truly weird and unsettling. “And the Rain Fell through Her Fingers” is a Weird exploration of inertia and being trapped. (Continue Reading…)

Fan Favorite PseudoPod Fiction from 2018

The results of our poll are in! The listeners voted Epsiode 610: Beneath Their Hooves by Katharine E.K. Duckett as their favorite!

Runners up were Episode 578: Alarm Will Sound by Christopher Shultz, Episode 617: The Culvert by Maxwell Price, and Episode 624: Ten Things I Didn’t Do by Maria Haskins.

Our stories are only half of what they can be without our narrators. Many thanks to the voice work of Larissa Thompson, Scott Campbell, Susan Gage, Paul Cram, and Rebecca Wei Hsieh.

Please give your congratulations to these winners! (Continue Reading…)

PseudoPod 634: Flash On The Borderlands XLVI: The Accursed and the Monstrous

Ecdysis

by Kurt Hunt

narrated by Hollis Munroe

Only one rule: do not speak to them.

Even when they crawl into your room at night, their claws gripping the floorboards — do not speak to them. Even when their breath is hot on your tightly closed eyes, their double-jointed elbows braced against the headboard above you — do not speak to them. Even when they chitter about their loneliness — do not speak to them. (Continue Reading…)

The Clan Novel Saga: Final Thoughts

In 1999, White Wolf embarked on their most ambitious fiction project to tie in to their Vampire: the Masquerade game line. This may be the most ambitious fiction tie-in for any role-playing product, ever. They repeated this one more time with a Clan Saga to tie in to their Vampire: The Dark Ages set. There was also another for Werewolf that bundled tribes into a two-per-book format, so the ambition is already dwindling. While there are some D&D products that have massive catalogs for a setting, I’m not sure that any reach this scope and scale. Maybe Drizzt books, although those were not envisioned as a set of thirteen (or fourteen) linked books. (Continue Reading…)