by Colin Wolcott

COLIN WOLCOTT lives in sunny Beaverton, Oregon where (he may or may not be lying by telling you) it actually doesn’t rain all that much. He spends most days juggling work, writing classes at the local Community College, and beanbags. In his free time, he enjoys both writing and reading things he finds interesting. His work has previously appeared in the pages of Strangelet Journal and the 2015 Write Well Award Anthology.

Your reader – Bill Ruhsam – lives in Atlanta, Georgia with his wife, son and two cats.

Dock at MOTHERSHIP ZETA for all your far-flung fiction and non-fiction needs!

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!

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.

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.