PseudoPod

Escape Artists would like to draw your attention to a fantastic event happening next week at DragonCon, the Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Fiction.

This annual award will be presented for the first time in 2016—for works published in 2015.The Eugie Award honors stories that are irreplaceable, that inspire, enlighten, and entertain. It will shine the spotlight on stories that are beautiful, thoughtful, and passionate. That change us and the field. The recipient will be a story that is unique and will become essential to speculative fiction readers.

The finalists for this award are:

“The Deepwater Bride” by Tamsin Muir “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” by Alyssa Wong “The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild” by Catherynne M. Valente “Pocosin” by Ursula Vernon “Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight” by Aliette De Bodard

To highlight how fantastic these authors are, we are re-running three stories on Escape Pod, PodCastle, and Pseudopod:

Escape Pod 408: Immersion by Aliette De Bodard Podcastle 198: Urchins, While Swimming by Catherynne M. Valente Pseudopod 492: The Fisher Queen by Alyssa Wong

Also make sure to check out Ursula Vernon’s story “Jackalope Wives” available to read for free at Mothership Zeta. And mark November on your calendar for an upcoming story by Tamsin Muir.

by Alyssa Wong

“The Fisher Queen” was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June 2014. It is available to read free online at fu-GEN.org. “The Fisher Queen” was on the shortlist for the 2014 Nebula along with Eugie Foster’s last story, “When It Ends, He Catches Her” which ran last year on Pseudopod. It has been translated into Chinese, French, and German. “The Fisher Queen” is set up in the fashion of traditional oral storytelling, where truth and myth blend together. However, it’s about the very real effects of societal, systematic violence against women.

Alyssa Wong is a Shirley Jackson-, and World Fantasy Award-nominated author, shark aficionado, and 2013 graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. She made the shortlist for the 2015 Stoker Award and won the 2015 Nebula Award for “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” which you should go check out at Nightmare Magazine. Her work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Uncanny Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, and Black Static, among others. She is an MFA candidate at North Carolina State University and a member of the Manhattan-based writing group Altered Fluid, and can be found on Twitter @crashwong. Alyssa Wong has been deservedly shortlisted for the Joseph W. Campbell Award for New Writers this year, and “The Fisher Queen” is part of why she made it to the list.

Your narrator – Mae Heaney is originally from Manila, Philippines and currently lives in Melbourne, Australia with her Irish husband, 2 young children and Parmi the Chook. She is an IT professional who once briefly dabbled in theater, and loves to bake to tame the voices in her head. She is very successful in changing nappies under five minutes, but fails miserably in trying to read her toddler’s mind and in updating her blog celticpinaymom.blogspot.com.

Your guest host this week is Associate Editor Dagny Paul. Dagny is an 8th-grade English teacher who lives in New Orleans with her husband and four-year-old son. She has an unhealthy (but entertaining) obsession with comic books and horror movies.

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

MY MOTHER WAS A FISH. That’s why I can swim so well, according to my father, who is a plain fisherman with a fisherman’s plain logic, but uncanny flair for the dramatic. And while it’s true that I can cut through the water like a minnow, or a hand dipped over the edge of a speedboat, I personally think it’s because no one can grow up along the Mekong without learning two things: how to swim, and how to avoid the mermaids.

Mermaids, like my father’s favorite storytale version of my mother, are fish. They aren’t people. They are stupid like fish, they eat your garbage like fish, they sell on the open market like fish. Keep your kids out of the water, keep your trash locked up, and if they come close to land, scream a lot and bang pots together until they startle away. They’re pretty basic.

My sisters tried to talk to a mermaid once. It was caught up in one of Dad’s trammel nets, and when they went to check the net out back behind the house, they found this mermaid tangled in it. It was a freshwater one, a bottom-feeder, with long, sparse hair whose color my sisters still argue about to this day. Iris, the oldest, felt bad for it and made May splash some water on its fluttery gills with her red plastic pail. She asked the mermaid if it was okay, what its name was. But it just stared at her with its stupid sideways fish eyes, mouth gaping open and closed with mud trickling out over its whiskers. Then Dad came home and yelled at Iris and May for bringing in the nets too early and touching the mermaid, which probably had sea lice and all kinds of other diseases.

The post PseudoPod 492 Replay: The Fisher Queen & The Eugie Award appeared first on PseudoPod.

by John Mile Deisinger

“Cuernavaca” is a Pseudopod Original. “I’d like the audience to ask themselves what ‘belief’ means to them, and whether they think the things we believe in can protect us from a world that doesn’t seem to believe in much at all.”

JOHN M. DEISINGER is a writer from Milwaukee who lives in Michigan. He blogs at JohnMDeisinger.com

Your reader – Luis Moreno – is an actor from New York City. He holds an MFA in acting from Columbia University, and you can learn more about him at his website, luismorenotheactor.com. He loves recording audiobooks, and does so for many publishers; his narration work can be found on Audible and other commercial platforms.

Luis’ audio producer is the impeccable Branan Edgans (whom you last heard reading on Pseudopod in The Influence Of Thomas Glittio. Dan Powell is a podcast producer, audio engineer and sound designer. He is one half of Dead Signals, the production team between found-footage horror podcast Archive 81 and their more recent sci-fi adventure story, The Deep Vault. He can be tweeted @stereophobe.

And we would also like to thank Chris and Rob at BrickShop Audio in Industry City, Brooklyn for the recording help!

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

Info on Anders Manga’s album can be found here.

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

“Morelos state, as you know, is the crucible of the People’s Revolution. This was where the Grito de Dolores found its most fervent listeners. This was the homeland of Zapata, who I rode with and followed. You should have seen the landlord’s faces when we asked them for the taxes. When we burned their fields of sugar cane, so that the campesinos could plow them fresh and plant corn and peppers. They squealed like pigs in hot grease. How they threatened us, with their army, with their policemen, with their money, with their God. And all of this is to say nothing of the ones whose houses we burned.

But excuse me. My point is, I know the land well. The mountains that separate the city from the Distrito to the north. The patchwork fields, the lakes and small forests, where the peasants trap snakes for meat and smoke little green cigars. You are a peninsulare, of course, yes? You would have been lost, camarada. Your Spanish might serve you well in Monterrey or Madrid, but you’d be lost in the cornfields. The tongue of conquered peoples lives there still, it’s more Nahua than nacionale down there.”

The post PseudoPod 504: Cuernavaca appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Robert E. Howard
• Narrator : Anson Mount

by Robert E. Howard

“The Horror From The Mound” was first published in WEIRD TALES, May 1932.

Most famous for inventing the modern sword & sorcery tale with his Conan stories, ROBERT E. HOWARD (1906-1936) often introduced horror elements as a threat in his short fiction but the evocation of supernatural dread is only incidental in most of his tales; the chronicling of titanic adventure is the primary purpose. When Howard later switched from fantasy to westerns, he made the transition with this story. Howard’s major horror genre reputation rests with three stories (sadly, all of which are a bit too long for the podcast): “Black Canaan” (Weird Tales, 1936) was praised by Lovecraft for its “genuine, regional background and its compelling picture of the horror that stalks through the moss-hung, shadow-cursed, serpent-ridden swamps of the American far south”; “Pigeons from Hell” (Weird Tales, 1938) was praised by Stephen King as “one of the finest horror stories of our century” and “Worms of the Earth” (Weird Tales, 1932) is thought by many Howard fans to be his best story. The Del Rey series of Howard’s collected fiction includes Horror, Historical Adventures and Desert Adventures, in addition to his better known Conan, Kull and Solomon Kane tales. Please see this site. More info on Howard can be found at the REH Foundation and Project Pride, the caretakers of the REH House and Museum in Cross Plains, TX.

Your reader – Anson Mount – should need no introduction, but just in case we hope you’ve been watching him on AMC’s HELL ON WHEELS. He was last heard on Pseudopod in the Artemis Rising episode Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose by Kelly Link.

Anson’s audio producer is the impeccable Branan Edgans (whom you last heard reading on Pseudopod in The Influence Of Thomas Glittio. Dan Powell is a podcast producer, audio engineer and sound designer. He is one half of Dead Signals, the production team between found-footage horror podcast Archive 81 and their more recent sci-fi adventure story, The Deep Vault. He can be tweeted @stereophobe.

And we would also like to thank Chris and Rob at BrickShop Audio in Industry City, Brooklyn for the recording help!

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

Info on Anders Manga’s album can be found here.

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

“Steve Brill did not believe in ghosts or demons. Juan Lopez did. But neither the caution of the one nor the sturdy skepticism of the other was shield against the horror that fell upon them — the horror forgotten by men for more than three hundred years — a screaming fear monstrously resurrected from the black lost ages.”

The post PseudoPod 503: The Horror From The Mound appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : D. Morgan Ballmer

by D. Morgan Ballmer

“The Trauma Box” is a PseudoPod Original.

D. MORGAN BALLMER lives in Maple Valley, Washington. His short fiction can be found in “Three-Lobed-Burning-Eye Magazine”, the NOT YOUR AVERAGE MONSTER Anthology, and the upcoming SILENT SCREAMS Anthology. I maintain a small web presence on Facebook.

Your reader – Jairus Durnett – was last heard on Pseudopod in THE SCREWFLY SOLUTION.

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

Info on Anders Manga’s album can be found here.

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

“Most everyone in Fairview knows of the Trauma Box. None agree on its origins. Some claim the box was brought in by bootleggers during Prohibition as a place to stash illicit booze. Others claim it was used by the FBI to interrogate suspected communists back in ’50s. The Reverend, should you bump into him, will whisper of a family whose sole heir was a malformed child. The deranged boy was supposedly chained inside the box until his untimely death some eighteen years later (or ‘six-six-six years later’ as the Reverend puts it).”

The post PseudoPod 502: The Trauma Box appeared first on PseudoPod.

Devils speak of the ways in which she’ll manifest

Angels bleed from the tainted touch of my caress

This is a PseudoPod Original. This story takes its inspiration from the phenomenon of the “rat king”: a group of rats whose tails have gotten knotted and stuck, so that the rats all live and die together in a big tangled, biting mass.

Lia Swope Mitchell is a PhD student in French literature at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. She studies visual media and speculative fiction in the nineteenth century, teaches grammar, and writes fiction on the sly.

Your narrator – Rish Outfield can be found regularly at The Dunesteef podcast, which he produces with Big Anklevich, and you can hear him pretty much everywhere in the genre story pod-o-sphere. And for good reason!

Listen. This is just a free consultation. We’re just two men in a bar, you and I. Respectably dressed with respectable drinks, talking business, like everyone else. But I can see it on your face, written underneath your eyes. I can smell it. Underneath the bourbon, underneath the cigarettes and lies. Something’s in there, crawling around inside. You’ve got a secret. And you want to do business, I can tell.

This is a PseudoPod Original.

David Murphy’s latest book Walking on Ripples was published by the Liffey Press in Dublin, Ireland, in 2014. His previous books includes a contemporary fantasy novella Bird of Prey (2011), Arkon Chronicles (also a novella, 2003) and the well received novel Longevity City (2005), each of which was published in the USA. His award-winning short fiction has been published and translated worldwide; over one hundred appearances including magazines and anthologies, two chapbooks and a short story collection brought out first in Dublin in 2004 and re-issued in 2013. The title story of that collection, Lost Notes, won the inaugural Maurice Walsh Award for short stories.

Your narrator – Siobhan Gallichan, is a voice-over artist available for work at macfadyan-at-gmail.com. Listen to Siobhan’s podcast at The Flashing Blade or watch the show on YouTube.

Incisions are made within the clinical white surrounds of the operating lab; incisions in space and time in the operating theatre itself – and incisions into the flesh of the patient. These cuts and alterations take place in a lab so pristine that ceiling, walls and floor blend in a haze that fuses dimensions of distance, height and depth; a shining cleanliness so all-pervasive that light and surface intermingle, making it difficult to distinguish what is vertical from what is horizontal. Concentration and precision are of vital importance in this facility. All tables are smooth, all medical equipment sharp. Follow the instruction manual carefully. Do not – repeat: do not – attempt any ancillary procedures beyond those outlined in this manual.

This story originally appeared in PERSONAL DEMONS in 1998.

Author: Christopher Fowler is the award-winning author of many novels and short story collections, and the Bryant & May mystery novels, which record the adventures of two Golden Age detectives investigating impossible London crimes. His latest books are the Dubai-set thriller ‘The Sand Men’ and the Bryant & May novel ‘Strange Tide’. Other recent work includes a graphic novel, ‘The Casebook of Bryant & May’, and a Hammer horror radio play under the Hammer Chillers label.

Your narrator is Jon Grilz. Jon is mystery writer as well as the creator of the Small Town Horror podcast who isn’t entirely sure which day of the week it is, but is pretty happy every time the sun rises. Most of the time you can find him wandering somewhere between the line dividing reality and wherever that laughter is coming from.

‘Look,’ said Albert, ‘they’re beating up Mrs Tremayne.’

‘She’s not done anything wrong, has she?’ asked Dr Figgis. ‘No. Perhaps that’s why they’re beating her up.’

‘Doesn’t follow, does it? God, she’s making a lot of noise.’ He shouted through the bars. ‘Hey, keep it down!’

‘This thing’s hard on my arse.’ Albert fidgeted on the rungs. After a few hours they cut into your buttocks and forced you to change position. At least, that was the effect they had on Albert. He noticed that many of the others never seemed to move at all.

Your guest host this week is Associate Editor Dagny Paul. Dagny is an 8th-grade English teacher who lives in Baton Rouge with her husband and four-year-old son. She has an unhealthy (but entertaining) obsession with comic books and horror movies. There’s a small but nonzero chance she was sent here from the future to stave off the awakening of an AI.

The post PseudoPod 501: Flash on The Borderlands XXXII: Punishments appeared first on PseudoPod.

by Fritz Leiber

“A Bit Of The Dark World” originally appeared in Fantastic Stories of Imagination, February 1962. It is presented here as the 7th part of our 10 episode “A CENTURY OF HORROR” celebration – with 9 other episodes made available only to subscribers!

FRITZ REUTER LEIBER JR. (1910-1992) was an American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He was also a poet, actor in theater and films, playwright and chess expert. With writers such as Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock, Leiber can be regarded as one of the fathers of sword and sorcery fantasy, having in fact created the term. Leiber was heavily influenced by H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Graves in the first two decades of his career. Beginning in the late 1950s, he was increasingly influenced by the works of Carl Jung, particularly by the concepts of the anima and the shadow. From the mid-1960s onwards, he began incorporating elements of Joseph Campbell’s THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES into his work.

Your Reader – Norm Sherman – did a heroic reading job for this extra-long story! Give him a hand!

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

“… and then one of the last rays of the sun must have struck a mirror-surface in the summit-crag, perhaps an outcropping of quartz, for it struck back at me like a golden rapier, making me blink, and then for an instant the beam was glitteringly black and I thought I saw (though nothing as clearly as I’d seen the black all-knowing spider-centipede on the pinnacle) a black shape — black with the queer churning blackness you see only at night with your eyes dosed. The shape coiled rapidly down the crag, into the cavern gullies and around the rocks and finally and utterly into the undergrowth above the fold and disappeared.”

The post PseudoPod 500: A Bit Of The Dark World appeared first on PseudoPod.

by Russel McLean

“The Tooth Fairy” is a PseudoPod Original. “I hope the story works on its own without needing to know too much. But I’ve always been fascinated by the fascination that people have with serial killers, and how our perception is affected by both the fiction and the mythologizing of fact. To say much more would of course be to give away some of the story. Its also an unusual piece for me in that its one of very few stories I’ve written set in the US. I’ve always wanted to write more US based fiction as that is mostly what I read, although I’m known for writing about Scotland and, more generally, the city of Dundee. It was refreshing to be able to write about a subject matter and location that was new to me, and the enthusiasm of Pseudopod for the story has been a great reward for taking that risk.”

RUSSEL MCLEAN is the author of five novels featuring Scottish private investigator J McNee. His debut, THE GOOD SON, was shortlisted for a Shamus Award for Best First Novel by the Private Eye Writers Association of America. Russel’s short fiction has appeared in several anthologies and magazines including Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and the recent anthology, THE ADVENTURES OF MORIARTY. He spent over a decade as a bookseller before writing full time. His reviews and interviews with writers have appeared in The Herald, The Independent on Sunday, The Skinny and the TLS, and he frequently interviews writers for literary festivals and library events. When not writing his own fiction, he also works as a freelance editor. He lives in Glasgow with his partner and three cats: Moriarty, Mycroft and Magwitch. His latest book out in the UK and US from Severn House is CRY UNCLE, the fifth in the J McNee series.

Jon Padgett lives in New Orleans with his spouse, their daughter, and two cats. Padgett has work out or forthcoming in Pseudopod, The Lovecraft eZine and Xnoybis. Padgett’s chapbook, THE INFUSORIUM, was released in spring of 2015, and his first short story collection, The Secret of Ventriloquism, is forthcoming from Dunhams Manor Press, Autumn 2016. Also later in 2016, Padgett–along with a team of editors and the artistic wizardry of Dave Felton–will be releasing the first issue of Vastarien: a source of critical study and creative response to the corpus of Thomas Ligotti and the authors who influenced and are influenced by him.

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

“The package, when it arrives, is innocuous. Plain envelope. Bubble wrap. A little box inside. Black cardboard. Red ribbon.

Could be anything.

Anything at all.

It comes standard delivery. Anything else would provoke suspicion. Signing for packages, someone, somewhere has to say what’s inside.

How would you explain the contents of that black box?

I sit it, for a while, on the black onyx stone of the kitchen worktop. I look at it. I anticipate opening the box. Think of Schrodinger’s Cat.

Dead?

Alive?

Present?

Gone?

I won’t know. Until I open the box.”

The post PseudoPod 499: The Tooth Fairy appeared first on PseudoPod.

by Kim Newman

“The Only Ending We Have” was first printed in Psycho-Mania! in October 2013, edited by Stephen Jones, then in a Year’s Best edited by Ellen Datlow. Have a biscuit (US: cookie) every time you clock a reference to an Alfred Hitchcock title.

Kim Newman is a novelist, critic and broadcaster. His fiction includes the Anno Dracula series, Life’s Lottery, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D’Urbervilles and An English Ghost Story; his non-fiction includes Nightmare Movies and BFI Classics studies of Cat People, Doctor Who and Quatermass and the Pit. He co-wrote the comic miniseries Witchfinder: Mysteries of Unland and the plays The Hallowe’en Sessions and The Ghost Train Doesn’t Stop Here Any More. He is a contributing editor to Sight & Sound and Empire magazines. His latest novel is The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School. He is on Twitter as @AnnoDracula.

Your narrator – Christiana Ellis is an award-winning writer and podcaster, currently living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her podcast novel, Nina Kimberly the Merciless was both an inaugural nominee for the 2006 Parsec Award for Best Speculative Fiction: Long Form, as well as a finalist for a 2006 Podcast Peer Award. Nina Kimberly the Merciless is available in print from Dragon Moon Press. Christiana is also the writer, producer and star of Space Casey, a 10-part audiodrama miniseries which won the Gold Mark Time Award for Best Science Fiction Audio Production by the American Society for Science Fiction Audio and the 2008 Parsec Award for Best Science Fiction Audio Drama. In between major projects, Christiana is also the creator and talent of many other podcast productions including Talking About Survivor; Hey, Want to Watch a Movie? and Christiana’s Shallow Thoughts.

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

“The windshield wipers squeaked … like shrilling fiddles, scraped nerves, the ring of an unanswered phone. Another reason to trade in her ‘57 Ford Custom. For 1960, she’d like something with fins. Not that she could afford next year’s showroom model.

Unless Hitch coughed up the ransom.

For the thing it was all about. The mcguffin.

The thing the audience doesn’t care about, but the characters do.

‘Good eeeev-ning,’ Hitch said, every goddamn morning … like in his TV show with that nursery/graveyard tune burbling in the background. ‘Funeral March of the Marionettes’. Dump-da- dumpity-dump- da-dump…”

The post PseudoPod 498: The Only Ending We Have appeared first on PseudoPod.

by Sean Ganus

“Killer” is a PseudoPod Original. “Killer” is the second sequence of “The Murderer Cycle,” a loosely connected set of stories written to deconstruct the near-mythic portrayal of killers in modern horror.

Sean Ganus lives and work in Macon, Georgia. He’s a struggling writer and graduate student, currently working on his Master’s in School Psychology, though with any luck he’ll have wrapped that up by the time this story is released. He passes the time by working in a coffee shop. He’s previously written book reviews for the UK-based Horrifically Horrifying Horror Blog, and he’s tremendously thankful to its founder Emma Audsley for giving him the opportunity to be a part of her amazing website. His only other published (or, rather, produced) work is the short story “Write Away,” featured on the October 24, 2014 episode of “Tales to Terrify.” He posts original writings on his blog, “Writing Myself Into a Hole,” at seanganus.wordpress.com, and run ongoing horror serials from his Twitter handle, @TweetTheHorror. He’s in the process of revising his first novel, and a small film company he runs with a close friend has just finished production on two independent horror films: “The Last Haunted House” and “The Rabbits.”

Your narrator is Jen R. Albert. Jennifer Albert is an entomologist, writer of science fiction and fantasy, gamer, and (in her own words) all around geek. She is co-editor at PodCastle and submissions editor at Uncanny.

Her first story appeared in Mad Scientist Journal in June 2015.

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

There’s a killer in my kitchen. I don’t know how long he’s been here, sitting in the dark. I didn’t notice him until I was already six steps inside, obliviously hitting the light and grabbing a pear from the basket by the stove. He’s sitting at the little wooden table I keep by the window. He looks like he’s waiting for dinner. His elbows hang over the edge and his hands rest on top of each other. One hand clenches the handle of a machete. The tool sports a fresh, gleaming edge. It was sharpened with obvious care. It’s wet and glistening in the fluorescent light.

He’s massive, so unbelievably *big*. He’s a heavy chunk of muscle and bone, tied off in a mechanic’s jumpsuit. Clumps of drying mud peel from his boots.

I know him. I mean…I know who he is. Velstrom. Robert Velstrom. Robby’s been dead and buried for thirteen years, but he’s sitting here now.

The post PseudoPod 497: Killer appeared first on PseudoPod.

by Sam J. Miller

“Nothing is Truly Yours” is a PseudoPod Original. “This story is an homage to the work of Julio Cortazar, a brilliant amazing writer who wrote horror, fantasy, science fiction that a lot of genre readers miss because people think of “magical realism” as lit-fic with ghosts, instead of a unique Latin American evolution of all that is wonderful about SF/F/H. He also translated the complete stories of Edgar Allan Poe into Spanish, and those translations are magnificent. So if folks like this story they should seek him out – “House Taken Over” is the spiritual antecedent to this story, but “Axolotl” & “We Love Glenda So Much” and “Blow Up” and “The Southern Highway” and tons of his other stories, and his novel “Hopscotch” are all genius. And if you DON’T like this story, you should still seek him out, because it just means I horribly botched my homage.”

SAM J. MILLER is a writer and a community organizer. His fiction is in Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and The Minnesota Review, among others. He is a nominee for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, and a graduate of the Clarion Writer’s Workshop. His debut dark, edgy, fucked-up young adult science fiction novel THE ART OF STARVING is forthcoming from HarperCollins. He lives in New York City, and at Sam J. Miller where you can find a whole bunch of his stories.

Your narrator – Karen Bovenmyer – earned an MFA in Popular Fiction from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Program in 2013. She spent many hours as a kid among beaten earth and bare roots avoiding predators and whispering to imaginary people of various moralities. She never had a pet rabbit, but she did have a hamster named Chucky Cheeks who wanted to be an astronaut. Karen is the Nonfiction Assistant Editor for Mothership Zeta, Escape Artists’ new e-zine and has been having a spectacular time helping set up the first issue. Check out book, short story, and movie reviews, a “Story Doctor” article from award-winning science fiction author James Patrick Kelly, and a science column from a real astronomer—as well as plenty of fabulous fresh stories from amazing authors both new and experienced.

This episode is sponsored by J.R. HAMANTASCHEN (who podcasts at The Horror Of Nachos And Hamantaschen) and his new story collection WITH A VOICE THAT IS OFTEN STILL CONFUSED BUT IS BECOMING EVER LOUDER AND CLEARER (which can be ordered here from AMAZON

The follow-up to his critically acclaimed collection, YOU SHALL NEVER KNOW SECURITY, J.R. Hamantaschen returns with another collection of his inimitable brand of weird, dark fiction. At turns despairing, resonant, macabre and insightful, these nine stories intend to stay with you.

9 out of 10 – “there are nine tales in this collection, each of satisfying length and immediately striking, from first page to last . . . stories that will grip you for their humanity and soul.” – Starburst Magazine

“eclectic, poignant, thought provoking .. . too awesome to pass up” – HorrorTalk

“Perturbing, anomalous stories that will bore into readers’ minds.” – Kirkus

Unequivocal Recommendation – ShockTotem

“True, great horror. I love this book.” – Chris Lackey, HP Lovecraft Literary Podcast

“Those who an artistic approach, psychological depth and small details are going to read through this collection and remember it for days to come.” — HorrorPalace

“Resonating, delectably weird and spooky collection, thoroughly enjoyable” – IndieReader (received Official IndieReader Stamp of Approval)

4 out of 5 – Scream Magazine

4 out of 5 – Hungry Monster Review

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

“It started in the room you call your studio, the spare bedroom at the end of the hall, where you keep the tools of your creative trade, the room you swear you’ll start making better use of—just as soon as this work project or upcoming event is over, or your brother’s current life crisis settles down. It started late at night, in the long dark dead hours of the morning when the call of the toilet summons you from sleep, and you stagger to the bathroom in a haze of fury and fear, terrified you’ll never fall back to sleep, convinced that here, now, is the beginning of the end, of your brain and your body conspiring to finally kill you. It started in the instant after you flushed, in the space of white noise where the ear is especially sensitive to possibly-imagined sounds. What was this one: a breath sucked in? A cough stifled? No. Nothing so concrete. But a house feels different when you are not alone. Sound echoes distinctly in an empty apartment. You had felt this before. Vague blurry feelings, indistinct impressions when drunk or depressed, knowledge that came from somewhere other than reason or the senses. Adrenaline unspooled in your abdomen. Tiny hairs along your neck and arms quivered, then stood up straight.

And in that moment you knew: someone was in there. Someone was in your home, sitting at the cluttered desk of your studio, silently, perfectly still but not asleep, in darkness, eyes open, looking in your direction. And you stood at the door—put your fingers against the cold firm real non-nightmare wood—and turned and hurried back to bed.”

The post PseudoPod 496: Nothing is Truly Yours appeared first on PseudoPod.