PseudoPod

by Priya Sharma

Originally published in BOX OF DELIGHTS, you can read “The Show” online at NIGHTMARE MAGAZINE.

PRIYA SHARMA’s fiction has appeared in Interzone, Black Static, Albedo One and on Tor.com. She’s been anthologized in several of Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year series, Paula Guran’s Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror series, Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2014, Steve Haynes’ Best British Fantasy 2014 and Johnny Main’s Best British Horror 2015. She’s also been on previous Locus’ Recommended Reading Lists (2010, 2012, 2013 & 2015). She is a Shirley Jackson Award Nominee and British Fantasy Award nominee for her story “Fabulous Beasts”, which appeared on Tor.com in 2015. Find her online at Priya Sharma Fiction.

This story was also reprinted this month as part of Nightmare’s special issue People of Colo(u)r DESTROY Horror! Read along with the story over at their site. Listen to two more stories from this issue over on the Nightmare podcast feed, and add it to your podcatcher while you’re at it!

Your narrator – Andrea Richardson – came through at the last minute for us! Check her out at Andrea Richardson!

Pseudopod has launched our TEN YEAR Kickstarter! CHECK IT OUT!

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.

The camera crew struggled with the twisting, narrow stairs. Their kit was portable, Steadicams being all the rage. They were lucky that the nature of their work did not require more light. Shadows added atmosphere. Dark corners added depth. It was cold down in the cellar. It turned their breath to mist, which gathered in the stark white pools shed by the bare bulbs overhead. Martha smiled. It was sublime. Television gold.

The post PseudoPod 514: The Show appeared first on PseudoPod.

They walk serene / in spaces between

All three of these stories are runners up from the PSEUDOPOD flash fiction contest

Original to Pseudopod. “Zipper was written entirely on my smart phone (in the middle of the night…in bed…when I could not sleep). I intended it to be a writing prompt for a story to be finished later, but when I counted the words the next morning I decided to submit it to the Pseudopod contest without significant changes. Since it fared much better than my other submission, perhaps I should limit all my writing to my phone … but I hate touch screens so much.”

MURF FREEDMONT lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and 3 daughters and is an information technologist.

Your narrator – Spencer DiSparti -is a published poet and voice actor from Phoenix, Arizona. You can find most of his work at SKELETOPIA.

Have you ever tried to open a sleeping bag zipper silently?

This is a PseudoPod Original.

NICHOLAS CONLEY’s passion for storytelling began at an early age, prompted by a love of science fiction novels, comic books and horror movies. His a science fiction thriller novel PALE HIGHWAY (available now from Red Adept Publishing) is influenced by his experience working with Alzheimer’s patients in a nursing home, a subject that he has also written about for publications such as Vox and Alzheimers.net. PALE HIGHWAY is the story of Gabriel Schist, a genius Nobel Prize winner plagued by Alzheimer’s, who must find a cure for a terrifying new virus before his mind declines past the point of no return. When not busy writing, Nicholas resides in New Hampshire and spends his time reading, traveling to new places, and indulging in a lifelong coffee habit. To learn more about him, take a stroll over to Nicholas Conley.com

Your narrator – Rock Manor – has been a performer featured on The NoSleep Podcast, Chilling Tales For Dark Nights, StarShipSofa, and Tales To Terrify. He is the producer of Manor House: The Podcast, a horror anthology hosted by The Phantom Collector. Best selling author Brian Keene says “it’s like Tales From The Crypt. It’s really fucking cool.” Manor House: The Podcast is entering it’s third season which will feature stories by authors such as Adam Cesare and Stoker Award winner Eric J. Guignard. Sign up for Manor House’s free Fantom Zone membership to receive their monthly newsletter containing exclusives not found anywhere else. You can also become a premium Fantom Zone Access member to get full access to episodes not found on the regular podcast or webseries. For more details and for more info about the show, visit them online at ManorHouseShow.com (currently having server problems – please try back!).

I like the way that skin feels.

Pseudopod original. “The most terrifying thing is a life devoid of intrinsic meaning, and a universe which does not and cannot understand us.”

THOMAS VICINANZO works in Mount Vernon, NY and writes fantasy and horror when he gets the chance. Some day his fantasy novel will be done (not the bad one, the good one), and all his true friends will read it and say it’s nice.

Your narrator is Laurice White, who last read “Awaiting Redemption” for Pseudopod, part of episode 347 – Flash On The Borderlands XVI: Trial & Discipline.

I tripped on a little ridge where the turf was bunched up like a carpet. It was early morning and the park was empty, so I pulled at the grass, and it came up, revealing soil blacker than fresh asphalt. Then I saw it wasn’t soil but black empty space.

Pseudopod will be launching their own Kickstarter in the upcoming weeks. Visit our YEAR 10 page for more details.

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

The post PseudoPod 513: Flash on The Borderlands XXXIV: Interstices appeared first on PseudoPod.

by Damien Laughlin

Before being reprinted in Pseudopod, “Boys” was published in 2015 in The Cadaverine Magazine, which publishes Prose, Fiction and Nonfiction from writers under thirty. “I’ve always struggled with titles, so when submitting work to my creative writing group I had taken to giving my stories temporary headings derived from Latin terms for animals: Ursa (Bear), Haedus (Young Goat), Porcus (Pig). This eventually incurred the wrath of my peers who found it completely pretentious and overblown. Hell hath no fury like writers patronized. Out of sheer stubbornness, I was all set to continue with this practice when submitting my next story, an early draft of this story. “Bos” I was intending on titling it, from the Latin term for cow. So I put the word “Bos” at the top of the document and as soon as it was there I struggled to take my eyes off it. All my other Latin titles felt like placeholders, but this felt right – or very nearly right. It was only after an hour or staring that I finally put the vital ‘y’ between the ‘o’ and the ‘s’, giving myself “Boys”. After I got the title right, everything else with the story fell into place in subsequent drafts, thematically, narratively. In naming it I’d realized something: it wasn’t the cow, the bos, that gave the story its horror. It was the boys; the foul, abhorrent and distressingly relatable boys.”

DAMIEN LAUGHLIN is a twenty-three year old writer from Derry, Northern Ireland. He’s an incurable people-watcher, eavesdropper and notetaker, and in the last year he found an outlet for these habits while studying Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast. He’s recently been featured in a new zine called Penny Mag, which publishes 500-word prose pieces and puts them together with a illustration. Subscribers to Penny have three illustrated stories delivered to their email inbox every week – a fine alternative to the clickbait that invades all our electronic devices.

Your narrator – Phil Lunt – Hails from the rain-sodden, North Western wastelands of England, and has dabbled in many an arcane vocation. From rock-star to conveyor-belt scraper at a bread factory, milkman to world’s worst waiter. He’s currently a freelance designer, actor and sometime writer/editor. For his sins he’s Chair of the British Fantasy Society, a role that can be more complicated than herding cats, at times. He’s still considering becoming an astronaut when he grows up. He currently throws words at gameronomy.com but also welcomes folk to check out what they do at the British Fantasy Society because it’s not all about folk trying to shout louder than their neighbour, they do try to do good stuff!

Your guest host – Associate Editor Dagny Paul

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

Pseudopod will be launching their own Kickstarter in the upcoming weeks. Visit our YEAR 10 page for more details.

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.

It was Ethan’s thirteenth birthday and he had invited me to a sleepover, along with friends from his new school. We were making our way through the forest by his home when he signaled for me to slow down. We allowed the other boys to pull ahead. That’s when he grabbed my arm and uttered a warning in my ear: I wasn’t going to like what he was taking us to see at the river bay.

The post PseudoPod 512: Boys appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Authors : Annie Neugebauer, S. Siporin and Gary Emmette Chandler
• Narrators : Heather Welliver, Kris Straub, Louise Ratcliffe and Marc Bailey
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 511: Flash on The Borderlands XXXIII: Corpus is a PseudoPod original.

“Hand Off” by S. Siporin 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”

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

“Think of the Bones” 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. 

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.

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.

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.

When the bones first began to grow, David had watched them with something like lust. Each night, in his small apartment, he would sit at the edge of his bed and watch the bones shift, gradually taking form. It started with the feet: that multitude of delicate, tiny bones, slowly knitting themselves together.

It was a secret he kept for himself — a routine that kept the days in motion, swinging about in silence, with hope.

I’m here to turn up the volume. To press the stinking face of humanity into the dark blood of its own secret heart.

The post PseudoPod 511: Flash on The Borderlands XXXIII: Corpus appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Damien Angelica Walters
• Narrator : Rachael K. Jones
• Host : Dagny Paul
• 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:

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.

The post PseudoPod 510: Falling Under, Through the Dark appeared first on PseudoPod.

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.

The post PseudoPod 509: Night Games appeared first on PseudoPod.

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.

The post PseudoPod 508: Defects appeared first on PseudoPod.

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 the afternoon sky, and humidity thickened the September air so that it clung to Larry’s skin, heavy and wet. Mom wanted him back before the storm broke. 

No problem.

The Candy Palace was six blocks from home.

The post PseudoPod 507: The Candy Store appeared first on PseudoPod.

by Garrett Croker

“The Shopping Cart Apocalypse” is a Pseudopod Original, inspired by actual parking lots and actual injuries. Some details have been embellished.

GARRETT CROKER lives and writes in the San Francisco Bay Area. When he’s not a writer, he has at different times been a college English teacher, a copywriter, and a marketer. He received his MFA in creative writing from Mills College. His fiction has appeared previously in Mad Scientist Journal‘s anthology SELFIES FROM THE END OF THE WORLD. He can be found online at THE BALLPOINT APOCALYPSE, or follow him on twitter @garrettcroker.

Your reader – Alasdair Stuart – was just recently in the United States and is currently moving house (although not to the US, afaik). And I could not ask for a better boss.

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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!

**********************************************************************************************************************

I wanted 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!

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

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

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“Eli had never seen so many scattered across the lot so early, their sleek plastic frames a startling red against the radiating blacktop. Some congregated in small packs, propped haphazardly onto planters two by two, or grouped into neat lines just outside the cart returns, or facing outward from each other in small, defensive circles that only had the appearance of random chance. Others hunted alone, hiding behind cars, or rolling slowly down the lot’s near imperceptible incline, or simply waiting patiently in plain sight, loose wheels spinning slowly in the breeze. There was no order to unify the disparate groups, as he might have hoped. This was a disaster.”

The post PseudoPod 506: The Shopping Cart Apocalypse appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Dagny Paul
• Narrator : Tatiana Grey
• Host : Alasdair Stuart

PseudoPod 505: There Is No Road through the Woods is a PseudoPod original.

“Silly as it seems — no, is — I’m actually a bit afraid of plants. I like trees, and I have a garden, but there’s something unnerving about being among all these living things that we treat as though they’re just background. They’re alive. It freaks me out. The title of this story comes from a Rudyard Kipling poem, The Way Through The Woods. I read this poem when I was about three quarters of the way finished with the piece, and it really shaped the way it turned out.

The Way Through The Woods by Rudyard Kipling

They shut the road through the woods Seventy years ago. Weather and rain have undone it again, And now you would never know There was once a road through the woods Before they planted the trees. It is underneath the coppice and heath, And the thin anemones. Only the keeper sees That, where the ring-dove broods, And the badgers roll at ease, There was once a road through the woods. Yet, if you enter the woods Of a summer evening late, When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools Where the otter whistles his mate, (They fear not men in the woods, Because they see so few.) You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet, And the swish of a skirt in the dew, Steadily cantering through The misty solitudes, As though they perfectly knew The old lost road through the woods. But there is no road through the woods.

“The summer it happened, Mr. Mason cut down the diseased elm in his front yard and found a fist-sized clot of blood, bone, and hair in the middle of its trunk. I didn’t see it, but Ellie Langford, who was a year ahead of me and lived next door to Mr. Mason, said that she had been sitting on her front porch, waiting for her boyfriend to pick her up, when all of a sudden Mr. Mason’s chainsaw died and she looked up to see red splatters on his wife beater and a puzzled look on his face.”

The post PseudoPod 505: There Is No Road through the Woods appeared first on PseudoPod.