“Perhaps when one is about to die one sees every kind of bird pass; when one sees the crow it means one’s time has come.”

A bit of a weird one: hosts John Cribbs & Christopher Funderburg each picked a “war story” to discuss. The podcast loves to dig into short stories (in the past it has looked at everything from Edogawa Ranpo to Patricia Highsmith) and, as a way of exploring the short fiction format, this episode deeps on a pair of only tangentially stories brought together around a loose theme.

The two “war stories” selected are Harlan Ellison’s hugely influential sci-fi classic “Soldier” and Italo Calvino’s bizarre & poetic “The Crow Comes Last.” While these two stories couldn’t be more different in approach, the conversation ends up being surprisingly revealing about both works and how they relate to each other. At very least, it provides the hosts an opportunity to talk about two of their absolute favorite authors!

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Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two”

Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"