PseudoPod 528: Unsent Letter From An Unnamed Student
Show Notes
Pseudopod wants to direct your attention to a project by one of our Authors, Greg Stolze. This is a good time to go back and relisten to episode 317, Enzymes.
YOU is a novel, set in the universe of the democratic horror game Unknown Armies, which pits readers against a book that hates them while situating them in the person of a middle-aged businessman named Leo Evans.
Leo is divorced, a fan of racquet sports, and a cultist of the Necessary Servant—a quasi-religion he freely admits seems silly, except for the way it grants him extra senses and paranormal abilities. The chief cultist, however, is his ex-wife, and the two of them clash over a key question of what it means to truly “serve” with integrity.
In the process of hashing all this out, Leo must survive a couple attempts on his life, come to grips with an enchantment that makes him hate the person he previously loved most, and deal with lingering issues between himself and his son.
This novel is Kickstarting in February, check the trailer at www.gregstolze.com/you
Unsent Letter from an Unnamed Student
by Aaron Fox-Lerner
The first time you killed me was the scariest. Those large hands, holding me down until I breathed water and then nothing at all. Those hands that had previously stroked me and caressed me and ranged all over my body now shoving my head under the light ice on the pond, steadying me as my thrashing grew gradually more feeble.
A test of trust, you said, joking but not. To break the tension after our argument. I lay my head right by the water, and I even let you push it down, betrayed by the jocular smile on your face. It went on so long and became so hard to breathe and the water was so cold, but it wasn’t until I started to struggle and you refused to let me go that I realized I never should have trusted you at all, that was the test that I’d failed. That realization was the scariest part.
And after the enveloping terror and darkness, I came to in my bed early in the morning. Nothing wet, nothing cold, my roommate still asleep across the room. I thought it was a dream, a dream so powerful I had believed it to be real. I stayed that way, stalking disoriented through the school corridors until I came into your class at 10:30 and saw your face, looking as if you were the one who had been in the cold pond rather than me. (Continue Reading…)