Radio Drama Revival

This week, join us as we go urban-exploring in a spooky, abandoned house with Five Levels of Fear, a new audio series written by Sable Jak, and directed, designed, and edited by our very own Matt Boudreau and Eli McIlveen.



You can find out more about Five Levels of Fear by searchin' for it on that internet!

Peri is a quiet woman who keeps to herself in a lighthouse overlooking the ocean, but one day, she wakes up somewhere totally unfamiliar; she's still in the lighthouse, but the lighthouse no longer overlooks the ocean...

It's The Far Meridian by Eli Barraza, a writer and actor on ars PARADOXICA and a thoughtful, fascinating creator.

Join us as we listen to the first two episodes of The Far Meridian's first season; then Eli herself joins me for a conversation about the origins of this show, magic realism, and dope space news.



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Northwestern University professor of Sound Studies Neil Verma joins me for a segment we call GOING DEEP. This week, we're exploring the classic horror of Arch Oboler's Lights Out, in a 1943 episode called "Murder in the Script Department". After the feature, Professor Verma teaches me about what was going on in this period of audio drama, I learn about how Oboler was a scriptomaniac man-about-town, and how voice actress Mercedes McCambridge (of EXORCIST fame) exerted absolute control over her instrument.



Neil's book, Theater of the Mind

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What a suntabulous bicuspid of a day! It's time for the Sunshine Smile Hour, a dental hygiene-themed children's program! Oh golly, this is a good one, and ain't that the tooth.

So this episode is utterly wackadoo: imagine a musical comedy along the lines of Book of Mormon, Avenue Q, or Reefer Madness, with a solid helping of noir pastiche and cosmic horror alongside. The Fall of the House of Sunshine is like if you put all of the above musicals into a high-powered blender along with a collection of H.P. Lovecraft short stories, a pint of ether and a handful of dexedrine. It is hilarious! It is offensive! It is stylistically all over the place! It is RELENTLESS!

And I love it? You will too, I reckon.

This week, we're presenting writer, director, and film professor Faith McQuinn's Boom, a story of loss, recovery, secrets, and murder. Porter, the protagonist, must deal with the murder of his best friend—and the police consider him the prime suspect. We get inside Porter's head as he struggles to come to grips with the crime and reassemble his life.
Faith gave us episodes 1 and 2 of Boom for you. Listen, follow and subscribe!


Find out more about Faith McQuinn!


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Content warning: violence, murder

Bronzeville is a story of the Great Migration: it follows Jimmy Tillman (Larenz Tate), a papermill worker from Arkansas who kills a strikebreaker and flees to Chicago to find a new life for himself, tracing the steps of millions of Black Americans who migrated from the rural South to the urban North in the mid-20th century.
Jimmy makes his way to Bronzeville, the legendary Black neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, where he falls in with the Copeland family, the operators of a policy racket—an underground lottery—that functioned like a bank when white-owned banks wouldn't lend to Black people. Everett Copeland (Wood Harris) is doing a spell in federal prison for tax evasion, so he asks his old lieutenant Curtis "Eyeball" Randolph (Laurence Fishburne) to get back into the game.
(Yeah for real this is a star-studded episode! I can scarcely believe it myself.)
We play episode 1 of Bronzeville, and then I talk to two of the producers, LaRon and Lahmard Tate, about the show's origins, productions that are too Black for TV, and the Tate family's Chicago history.


CW: violence, racist language


HEY ALSO we have a PayPal button that I forgot about? Give us dollars, please.
Credits inspired by Zev Chevat.

We're celebrating AUDIO DRAMA DAY by featuring some works from 11th Hour Productions, the once-a-year marathon audio drama production festival where dramatists from all the world over come together to create magnificently creepy fiction.


We're featuring two pieces this year: Shadows of Halloween, written by Neil Gustin and created by 11th Hour US East, and Ivory Towers, written by Richard Brooks and created by 11th Hour UK.


Stick around for the credits for the thrilling conclusion of Radio Drama Revival and the Ham of Mallorca.

New York playwright and audio dramatist Mac Rogers joins me for a discussion about craft, aliens, and influences as we excerpt some of his new thriller, Steal The Stars, a co-production between Tor Books and his own production company, Gideon Media.


Steal the Stars is the story of Dakota "Dak" Prentiss, the security chief at Quill Marine, a secretive private military contractor. Quill Marine is built around the biggest secret of all time, and new recruits have to be taken down to see the secret—to see if they can handle it. But a new recruit, Matt Salem, turns out to be more than Dak herself can handle. In the sexy love-type way, I mean.


This is a story of forbidden love, aliens, and a big old friggin' heist, baby.


#SPOOPTOBER continues!

It wouldn't be a monster episode without MONSTERS, would it?! Awww yeah it's zombie time!


American podcast legend KC Wayland joins me for a chat about craft, zombies, and Force Multipliers of Art.


We're gonna play an episode of We're Alive: Lockdown, the miniseries that combines a jailbreak with horror-survival adventure. SPOOPTOBER CONTINUES, as we bring you yet another episode to thrill and perturb!

A double-feature this week as we begin our October horror series!
First, from Paragon Collective and the makers of Darkest Night, it's Deadly Manners, a new murder mystery show narrated by LeVar Burton (Star Trek, Reading Rainbow) and starring Kristen Bell (Frozen, Veronica Mars) and Anna Chlumsky (Veep).
CW: racism, misogyny, and murder!
Then, it's a chilling tale of family business in Rites of Autumn, a spooky little tale of tradition, pumpkins, and more murder. That comes to us from John Ballantine of Campfire Radio Theater.
CW: more murder, gruesome descriptions