by Aaron Fox-Lerner

 

“Unsent Letter From An Unnamed Student” is a Pseudopod original.

AARON FOX-LERNER is from Los Angeles and currently lives in Beijing. His fiction has appeared in Grimdark magazine, Akashic Books, Thuglit, The Puritan, and other publications. His portfolio can be found here.

This week’s reader – Kenny Kinlund – is a musician from Lincoln, NE. His band Warbonnet has a self-titled album out on iTunes with Tremulant Records, but he would rather you send your money to the ACLU or the Electronic Frontier Foundation right now. His twitter handle is @svenskjaevel.

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

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

“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.”