Pseudopod Default

PseudoPod 512: Boys

Before being reprinted in Pseudopod, “Boys” was published in 2015 in The Cadaverine Magazine, which publishes Prose, Fiction and Nonfiction from writers under thirty.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:43 — 24.2MB)

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Show Notes

“I’ve always struggled with titles, so when submitting work to my creative writing group I had taken to giving my stories temporary headings derived from Latin terms for animals: Ursa (Bear), Haedus (Young Goat), Porcus (Pig). This eventually incurred the wrath of my peers who found it completely pretentious and overblown. Hell hath no fury like writers patronized. Out of sheer stubbornness, I was all set to continue with this practice when submitting my next story, an early draft of this story. “Bos” I was intending on titling it, from the Latin term for cow. So I put the word “Bos” at the top of the document and as soon as it was there I struggled to take my eyes off it. All my other Latin titles felt like placeholders, but this felt right – or very nearly right. It was only after an hour or staring that I finally put the vital ‘y’ between the ‘o’ and the ‘s’, giving myself “Boys”. After I got the title right, everything else with the story fell into place in subsequent drafts, thematically, narratively. In naming it I’d realized something: it wasn’t the cow, the bos, that gave the story its horror. It was the boys; the foul, abhorrent and distressingly relatable boys.”

Boys

by Damien Laughlin

 

It was Ethan’s thirteenth birthday and he had invited me to a sleepover, along with friends from his new school. We were making our way through the forest by his home when he signaled for me to slow down. We allowed the other boys to pull ahead. That’s when he grabbed my arm and uttered a warning in my ear: I wasn’t going to like what he was taking us to see at the river bay.

The Eighth Day Brotherhood is a new novel by Alice M. Phillips that should be of interest to PseudoPod listeners. If you want a novel with the milieu of The Stress of Her Regard but tighter pacing, look no further. Couple this with the sensibility of Fincher’s Se7en and you have a tense and relentless thriller. Alice’s love for the tenebrous portions of the Decadent period glows through Paris while the Eiffel Tower rises on the bank of the Seine and as the city prepares of the Exposition Universelle. It manifests with an abiding love for the period supported by an incredible depth of research. Do yourself a favor and pick up this book from Black Rose Writing.

The Eighth Day Brotherhood by Alice M. Phillips — Black Rose Writing

One August morning, in Paris, 1888, the sunrise reveals the embellished corpse of a young man suspended between the columns of the Panthéon, resembling a grotesque Icarus and marking the first in a macabre series of murders linked to Paris monuments. In the Latin Quarter, occult scholar Rémy Sauvage is informed of his lover’s gruesome death and embarks upon his own investigation to avenge him by apprehending the cult known as the Eighth Day Brotherhood. At a nearby sanitarium, aspiring artist Claude Fournel becomes enamored with a mesmerist’s beautiful patient, Irish immigrant Margaret Finnegan. Resolved to steal her away from the asylum and obtain her for his muse, Claude only finds them both entwined in the Brotherhood’s apocalyptic plot combining magic, mythology, and murder.

Pseudopod Default

PseudoPod 511: Flash on The Borderlands XXXIII: Corpus

PseudoPod 511: Flash on The Borderlands XXXIII: Corpus is a PseudoPod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:38 — 25.3MB)

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Show Notes

“Hand Off” by S. Siporin is a Pseudopod Original. “We all have parts of ourselves we are unhappy with; the trick is to accept them as part of who you are”

“Hide” was first published in Black Static Issue 43 by TTA Press in November 2014.

“Think of the Bones” is a PseudoPod Original. It is about struggling with body image, and whether the story’s resolution is comforting or unsettling is up to the listener. Recommended additional reading is “The Skeleton” by Ray Bradbury, which is included in the October Country collection. 

The suffering of strangers, the agony of friends. There is a secret song at the center of the world, and its sound is like razors through flesh.

Hand Off

by S. Siporin

She was wealthy; you could tell by the thick brown fur of her coat, by the elaborate, streaked hair that made her look ten years younger than she really was. Three slender fingers on her left hand gleamed smooth and ivory; they were heavy with silver and gold rings, mementoes of failed marriages. Her right hand was bare of decoration; it hung flaccid by her side, brushing against the soft fur like a sallow slab of flesh. She tried to hide it under her coat. It was defective, shriveled, half paralyzed.

Without warning, it twitched, the fingers diddling as if playing an invisible piano, as if restless, discontent. The line between her eyes deepened, darkened as if someone had drawn on her face with magic marker. Not again, she thought. Not here. Her left hand pressed its palm flat against her forehead; she felt the ache of an incipient migraine.

Hide

by Annie Neugebauer 

When I met Cecilia I’d only been dead for twenty years and she’d only been alive for about as many. She was all golden-brown skin and mahogany eyes and legs that stretched longer than the last week of summer, and I was cold – so cold.

I stood several yards away in the shade watching her with her friends. We were at an outdoor concert where a local band did a shitty job of playing good songs. Cecilia sat on the grass with those legs sprawled easily in front of her, catching the sun, leaned back and propped on her elbows. She wore a big white floppy hat that should have seemed silly and out of place but instead looked perfect.

Think of the Bones

by Gary Emmette Chandler 

When the bones first began to grow, David had watched them with something like lust. Each night, in his small apartment, he would sit at the edge of his bed and watch the bones shift, gradually taking form. It started with the feet: that multitude of delicate, tiny bones, slowly knitting themselves together.

It was a secret he kept for himself — a routine that kept the days in motion, swinging about in silence, with hope.

I’m here to turn up the volume. To press the stinking face of humanity into the dark blood of its own secret heart.

Pseudopod Default

PseudoPod 510: Falling Under, Through the Dark

“Falling Under, Through the Dark” originally appeared in May 2015 in Black Static. This story was On Ellen Datlow’s list of Honorable Mentions for Best Horror of the Year 8.

Content warnings:

Spoiler

Grief; Loss of a child

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:48 — 26.8MB)

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Falling Under, Through the Dark

by Damien Angelica Walters

Kara’s sitting at her desk when she falls. There’s no time for panic; it happens too fast. One moment she’s working; the next, she’s in the water. Gravity and the force of the fall plunge her into the depths and everything blurs. She wants to yell but her body needs to conserve oxygen and won’t allow it. Natural buoyancy kicks in and she bobs to the surface, eyes still burning from the chlorine.

Now her heart starts to race and she breathes in huge gulps of air, her mind already fumbling for statistics. Facts. Every day an average of ten people die from drowning, and of those, two are children fourteen and younger.

Pseudopod Default

PseudoPod 509: Night Games

“Night Games” was originally published by The Devilfish Review on June 27th, 2014. It is still available to read on their site here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:11 — 24.3MB)

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Show Notes

“If you’re unfamiliar with baseball, consider these two things. One, the pitching mound is a lonely place, not only because the pitcher is separated from the rest of the team, but also because he dictates the pace of the game. There’s a very real sense of isolation and pressure. Two, the catcher is both field general and psychologist to the pitcher. He calls the game (suggests which pitches to throw), and when the pitcher gets into trouble, the catcher goes to the mound to calm him down. As such, the relationship between pitchers and catchers is often quite strong. The pair are often called the “battery,” a word with appropriate military connotations, as the pitcher and catcher form a strategic plan throughout an at bat to get the hitter out.”

The beautiful Horror in Clay 01 – The Murders in the Rue Morgue mug Kickstarter can be accessed at the link! Check it out, for the love of God, Montressor!

Night Games

by Aeryn Rudel

 

 

Randall Simmons only plays night games. As he steps into the right-handed box and taps his bat on the plate, he reminds me why. His smile, aimed directly at the pitcher’s mound, is wide and predatory. The bright stadium lights catch for a moment on his teeth, and even from 60 feet, 6 inches away, I see those teeth are too long and too sharp.

The Eighth Day Brotherhood is a new novel by Alice M. Phillips that should be of interest to PseudoPod listeners. If you want a novel with the milieu of The Stress of Her Regard but tighter pacing, look no further. Couple this with the sensibility of Fincher’s Se7en and you have a tense and relentless thriller. Alice’s love for the tenebrous portions of the Decadent period glows through Paris while the Eiffel Tower rises on the bank of the Seine and as the city prepares of the Exposition Universelle. It manifests with an abiding love for the period supported by an incredible depth of research. Do yourself a favor and pick up this book from Black Rose Writing.

The Eighth Day Brotherhood by Alice M. Phillips — Black Rose Writing

One August morning, in Paris, 1888, the sunrise reveals the embellished corpse of a young man suspended between the columns of the Panthéon, resembling a grotesque Icarus and marking the first in a macabre series of murders linked to Paris monuments. In the Latin Quarter, occult scholar Rémy Sauvage is informed of his lover’s gruesome death and embarks upon his own investigation to avenge him by apprehending the cult known as the Eighth Day Brotherhood. At a nearby sanitarium, aspiring artist Claude Fournel becomes enamored with a mesmerist’s beautiful patient, Irish immigrant Margaret Finnegan. Resolved to steal her away from the asylum and obtain her for his muse, Claude only finds them both entwined in the Brotherhood’s apocalyptic plot combining magic, mythology, and murder.

Pseudopod Default

PseudoPod 508: Defects

PseudoPod 508: Defects is a PseudoPod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:59 — 21.4MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pandora | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | TuneIn | RSS

Show Notes

The Eighth Day Brotherhood is a new novel by Alice M. Phillips that should be of interest to PseudoPod listeners. If you want a novel with the milieu of The Stress of Her Regard but tighter pacing, look no further. Couple this with the sensibility of Fincher’s Se7en and you have a tense and relentless thriller. Alice’s love for the tenebrous portions of the Decadent period glows through Paris while the Eiffel Tower rises on the bank of the Seine and as the city prepares of the Exposition Universelle. It manifests with an abiding love for the period supported by an incredible depth of research. Do yourself a favor and pick up this book from Black Rose Writing.

The Eighth Day Brotherhood by Alice M. Phillips — Black Rose Writing

One August morning, in Paris, 1888, the sunrise reveals the embellished corpse of a young man suspended between the columns of the Panthéon, resembling a grotesque Icarus and marking the first in a macabre series of murders linked to Paris monuments. In the Latin Quarter, occult scholar Rémy Sauvage is informed of his lover’s gruesome death and embarks upon his own investigation to avenge him by apprehending the cult known as the Eighth Day Brotherhood. At a nearby sanitarium, aspiring artist Claude Fournel becomes enamored with a mesmerist’s beautiful patient, Irish immigrant Margaret Finnegan. Resolved to steal her away from the asylum and obtain her for his muse, Claude only finds them both entwined in the Brotherhood’s apocalyptic plot combining magic, mythology, and murder.

The beautiful Horror in Clay 01 – The Murders in the Rue Morgue mug Kickstarter can be accessed at the link! Check it out, for the love of God, Montressor!

Defects

by Colin Wolcott

So, last Thursday night I was at Gil’s Grill with Kirk and Jinny and some other people that I don’t know very much, and I was talking to this guy Bernard and we were talking about football, and I was saying how I played in school. And so we’re talking and, I don’t remember exactly how it came up, but he asks me, “Do you like to hurt people?” And that kind of shut everything down for me and really brought things back into focus, irregardless of the beer, and I’m eyeing him, and he’s looking at me like maybe he knows a little bit, and we’ve been real entertaining, our back-and-forth, so everyone’s paying attention, and I can tell from his pause the question wasn’t, like, rhetorical, or whatever, and he expects an answer. And because they’re all right there watching me say it, I say “No.”

But what was I supposed to say? What’s the point of saying anything other than “no?” And that’s a dumb-ass question to ask, anyway. It doesn’t matter if the truth is “no” or “yes,” because unless somebody wants to get flagged, or singled out, or maybe limit their options in the future, the answer is going to sound the same. And plus, I mean, even if they do like to hurt people, they probably still want to have folks to hang out with on Thursdays.

Pseudopod Default

PseudoPod 507: The Candy Store

PseudoPod 507: The Candy Store is a PseudoPod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:44 — 21.9MB)

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Show Notes

Puberty, we recall, is a time of change, and it can be quite dangerous. “The Candy Store” is dedicated to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s. His poem “The Pennycandystore Beyond the El” was very much in mind while Chris wrote this.

The Candy Store

by Christopher DiLeo

The Eighth Day Brotherhood is a new novel by Alice M. Phillips that should be of interest to PseudoPod listeners. If you want a novel with the milieu of The Stress of Her Regard but tighter pacing, look no further. Couple this with the sensibility of Fincher’s Se7en and you have a tense and relentless thriller. Alice’s love for the tenebrous portions of the Decadent period glows through Paris while the Eiffel Tower rises on the bank of the Seine and as the city prepares of the Exposition Universelle. It manifests with an abiding love for the period supported by an incredible depth of research. Do yourself a favor and pick up this book from Black Rose Writing.

The Eighth Day Brotherhood by Alice M. Phillips — Black Rose Writing

One August morning, in Paris, 1888, the sunrise reveals the embellished corpse of a young man suspended between the columns of the Panthéon, resembling a grotesque Icarus and marking the first in a macabre series of murders linked to Paris monuments. In the Latin Quarter, occult scholar Rémy Sauvage is informed of his lover’s gruesome death and embarks upon his own investigation to avenge him by apprehending the cult known as the Eighth Day Brotherhood. At a nearby sanitarium, aspiring artist Claude Fournel becomes enamored with a mesmerist’s beautiful patient, Irish immigrant Margaret Finnegan. Resolved to steal her away from the asylum and obtain her for his muse, Claude only finds them both entwined in the Brotherhood’s apocalyptic plot combining magic, mythology, and murder.

We want to bring your attention to a project from Orrin Grey and Strix Publishing. You already know and love Orrin Grey.

PSEUDOPOD 155: THE WORM THAT GNAWS

PSEUDOPOD 262: BLACK HILL

PSEUDOPOD 415: NIGHT’S FOUL BIRD

Strix Publishing has launched a Kickstarter to bring us a new and expanded hardcover edition of Orrin’s collection NEVER BET THE DEVIL AND OTHER WARNINGS. This new edition includes all ten stories from the original, as well as the heretofore hard-to-find “A Night for Mothing” and an all new story, “Goblins.” As of the time of this recording, it’s just passed the halfway mark with almost three weeks to go, so it’s time for the add-ons and additional goals to creep out of the corners.

So, please check it out: NEVER BET THE DEVIL AND OTHER WARNINGS Kickstarter. You’ll be glad you did!

The beautiful Horror in Clay 01 – The Murders in the Rue Morgue mug Kickstarter can be accessed at the link! Check it out, for the love of God, Montressor!

The CAST OF WONDERS Flash Fiction Contest info can be accessed at the link.

Info on Anders Manga’s album (they do our theme music!) can be found here.

Pennies jangled in his pockets.

Larry ran along Jamaica Avenue beneath the elevated railway, the bridge stretching on for miles. Cars’s headlights flickered down the corridor, winking like giant eyes.

Dark clouds clotted the afternoon sky, and humidity thickened the September air so that it clung to Larry’s skin, heavy and wet. Mom wanted him back before the storm broke. 

No problem.

The Candy Palace was six blocks from home.

Pseudopod Default

DragonCon 2016

dragoncon logo

If you want to visit with Escape Artists folks at DragonCon this weekend and hear the latest news about Escape Artists, here are a few options:

Sunday 1pm:

Story Time! – PodCasting Track, Hilton 202

This panel is all about Escape Artists and will include announcements for events coming up for the remainder of this year and in 2017.

Sunday 4pm:

Niche Markets in eBooks & Print (for writers) – EFF Track, Hilton 208-209

PseudoPod co-editor Alex Hofelich will be a presenting panelist

Sunday 7pm:

Horror in Clay Tiki Mug Meetup – Comics and Pop Art Track – Mart2 204 C

Come hang with us and EA friend Jonathan Chaffin of Horror in Clay to discuss upcoming projects.

Pseudopod Default

PseudoPod 506: The Shopping Cart Apocalypse

PseudoPod 506: The Shopping Cart Apocalypse is a PseudoPod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:51 — 24.1MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pandora | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | TuneIn | RSS

Show Notes

“The Shopping Cart Apocalypse” is inspired by actual parking lots and actual injuries. Some details have been embellished.

The beautiful Horror in Clay 01 – The Murders in the Rue Morgue mug Kickstarter can be accessed at the link! Check it out, for the love of God, Montressor!

I wanted to bring your attention to a project from Orrin Grey and Strix Publishing. You already know and love Orrin Grey.

PSEUDOPOD 155: THE WORM THAT GNAWS

PSEUDOPOD 262: BLACK HILL

PSEUDOPOD 415: NIGHT’S FOUL BIRD

Strix Publishing has launched a Kickstarter to bring us a new and expanded hardcover edition of Orrin’s collection NEVER BET THE DEVIL AND OTHER WARNINGS. This new edition includes all ten stories from the original, as well as the heretofore hard-to-find “A Night for Mothing” and an all new story, “Goblins.” As of the time of this recording, it’s just passed the halfway mark with almost three weeks to go, so it’s time for the add-ons and additional goals to creep out of the corners.

So, please check it out: NEVER BET THE DEVIL AND OTHER WARNINGS Kickstarter. You’ll be glad you did!

The Shopping Cart Apocalypse

by Garrett Croker

Eli had never seen so many scattered across the lot so early, their sleek plastic frames a startling red against the radiating blacktop. Some congregated in small packs, propped haphazardly onto planters two by two, or grouped into neat lines just outside the cart returns, or facing outward from each other in small, defensive circles that only had the appearance of random chance. Others hunted alone, hiding behind cars, or rolling slowly down the lot’s near imperceptible incline, or simply waiting patiently in plain sight, loose wheels spinning slowly in the breeze. There was no order to unify the disparate groups, as he might have hoped. This was a disaster.