PseudoPod

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

This 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”

S. Siporin lives and writes in NYC where strange encounters are commonplace. Other genres include science fiction and romance.

Your narrator – Louise Ratcliffe is a scientist, artist and stay-home Mum. She lives in New Zealand having moved there from England 12 years ago when her Maori husband brought her home. They have 3 children, 3 cats, 9 chickens, 8 ducks and a goat called Steve. She spends her time creating Art Yarn,  and knitting body parts and blankets. Her work can be seen on Facebook at her Top o’ the Meadow fibre art page, or you can find her on Ravelry as Giggigoofer.

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 

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

Annie Neugebauer is a returning visitor to Pseudopod Towers. She last visited with “Jack and the Bad Man” for Halloween 2014. Annie Neugebauer is a novelist, short story author, and award-winning poet. She has work appearing in over fifty venues, including  Fireside, Buzzy Mag, and DarkFuse. She’s an active member of the Horror Writers Association, the webmaster for the Poetry Society of Texas, and a columnist for Writer Unboxed. She lives in Texas with her sweet husband and two diabolical cats.

Your narrators – Marc Bailey and Heather Welliver have been a part of the podcasting community since 2006 as voice actors and narrators. They are in the process of rebooting their podcast Grailwolf’s Geek Life with a new name, focused on positive reviews of all things geeky along with thoughtful essays on the continuing The Geek Renaissance.

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 

This 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. 

Your Author – Gary Emmette Chandler works from his apartment in Portland as a copywriter and web developer, mostly in pajamas, with a cat nibbling at his leg. His fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Pantheon, and Fantasy Scroll, among others. Yo[...]

Author : Damien Angelica Walters Narrator : Rachael K. Jones Host : Dagny Paul Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop Discuss on Forums “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; […]

by Damien Angelica Walters

 

“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.

Damien Angelica Walters’ work has appeared or is forthcoming in various anthologies and magazines, including The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2015, Year’s Best Weird Fiction: Volume One, Cassilda’s Song, The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction, Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, and Apex Magazine. She was a finalist for a Bram Stoker Award for “The Floating Girls: A Documentary,” originally published in Jamais Vu. Sing Me Your Scars, a collection of short fiction, was released in 2015 from Apex Publications. The titular story “Sing Me Your Scars” was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction. Paper Tigers, a novel, was released in 2016 from Dark House Press. Find her on Twitter @DamienAWalters or on the web at http://damienangelicawalters.com

Your narrator – Rachael K. Jones is a science fiction and fantasy author, and former editor of PodCastle.

Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Lightspeed, Accessing the Future, Strange Horizons, PodCastle, Escape Pod, Cast of Wonders, the Drabblecast, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Crossed Genres, Daily Science Fiction, and Penumbra.

She has a degree in English and is currently pursuing a second degree in Speech-Language Pathology. She lives in Athens, GA with her husband and perpetual alpha reader, Jason.

Your guest host – Associate Editor Dagny Paul

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.

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

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.

Author : Aeryn Rudel Narrator : Rish Outfield Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop Discuss on Forums “Night Games” was originally published by The Devilfish Review on June 27th, 2014. It is still available to read on their site here. “If you’re unfamiliar with baseball, consider these two things. One, the pitching […]

by Aeryn Rudel

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

AERYN RUDEL is a freelance writer and editor from Seattle, Washington. He is currently writing a series of novels set in the steampunk world of the Iron Kingdoms for Privateer Press. He is a notorious dinosaur nerd, an obscure polearms expert, a baseball connoisseur, and he has mastered the art of fighting with sword-shaped objects (but not actual swords). Aeryn runs a blog called Rejectomancy, which is a blunt and honest look at professional writing and the rejection that goes along with it. The tag line is: Writing, rejection, and taking it like a pro.

Your reader – Rish Outfield – can be heard regularly on THE DUNESTEEF.

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

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!

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

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.

Author : Colin Wolcott Narrator : Bill Ruhsam  Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop Discuss on Forums PseudoPod 508: Defects is a PseudoPod original. 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 […]

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.

Author : Christopher DiLeo Narrator : Brian Rollins Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop Discuss on Forums PseudoPod 507: The Candy Store is a PseudoPod original. 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 […]

by Christopher DiLeo

 

“The Candy Store” is a PseudoPod Original. Puberty, we recall, is a time of change, and it can be quite dangerous. 

Christopher DiLeo inherited his love of horror stories from his father, who left him a coffin filled with Stephen King novels. Chris teaches high school English in New York, infecting many students with a love for the macabre. Chris is currently searching for an agent for his novel DARK HEART, a psychological thriller that explores treacherous deceit, violence, and love, where the strongest heart is often as dark as it is virtuous. This story is dedicated to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s. His poem “The Pennycandystore Beyond the El” was very much in mind while Chris wrote this.

Your reader – Brian Rollins was born in California and grew up in and around the Western US. He currently resides in Highlands Ranch, CO where he works as a voice artist, primarily focused on audiobooks. He is probably best known for being the voice of the Glen and Tyler series of audiobooks, written by JB Sanders.

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 th[...]

Author : Garrett Croker Narrator : Alasdair Stuart Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop Discuss on Forums PseudoPod 506: The Shopping Cart Apocalypse is a PseudoPod original. “The Shopping Cart Apocalypse” is inspired by actual parking lots and actual injuries. Some details have been embellished. The beautiful Horror in Clay 01 – […]