*Note – I listen to PseudoPod on YouTube because my household pays for YouTube Red in order to not have ads. My reviews do not consider advertisement breaks, if they exist.
940: “Controlling Your Weeds” by Rachael K. Jones, narrated by Alex Hofelich
This was a slow burn that made me feel gross inside. It was like being inside the skin of the worst kind of person, but on so many levels. Not only is the narrator a nosy neighbor, he’s also a bigot, also a murderer, also a cultist. It’s a story that will have you wondering if it’s just an overextended metaphor for a little too long. In fact, I almost turned it off twice, but the little pushes to keep listening, the tiny nuggets of information that say maybe this is a horror story were well-timed. It helps, too, that there’s a “deep-seeded” lore, the reveal of which leaves half-questioning realizations on the tongue.
939: “Cheating Death” by Henry Herz, narrated by Tanja Milojevic
First, I want to say that the choice of narrator for this story was perfect. Milojevic brings this story to life, really embodying protagonist Marya’s internal (and external) voice and handling the voices of other speakers quite nimbly. The cruelty of schoolboys and naiveté of the protagonist cleverly flips the script on necromantic stories, making the necromancer a genuinely sympathetic character, her minions heroes, and her victims are the real monsters whose vanquishing I cheered. It’s also so well narrated, I kind of want to listen to it again.
938: “Sea Curse” by Robert E. Howard, narrated by Tad Callin
As I am prone to telling my students . . man, I don’t know about this one. It’s a 1928 seaside village narrative that borders on having a plot and borders on having developed characters. The writing is okay, but hasn’t really stood the test of time for me. If anything, it’s remarkable for its rather frank reprimand of what would now be called toxic masculinity . . . something Nathaniel Hawthorne was tackling a hundred years earlier and Ben Jonson was tackling two hundred years before him, and so forth, so it’s not like addressing it is a revolution in literature.
937: “The Yearning of the All-Devouring Earth” by Marianne Kirby, narrated by Sevatividam
Like “Cheating Death,” this piece had a really strong narrator who made this story more than what it would have been merely read on the page, especially when she moves in and out of dialects. It felt like Kirby wanted to write cosmic horror without the cosmic. It’s an interesting take, although I don’t know that the jabs at cosmic horror were really beneficial…if anything, it pulled me out of the narrative and made me feel like we were in a discussion about the value of cosmic horror. I like the narrative, and the protagonist is uniquely written and grounded in realism.
936: Flash on the Borderlands LXXI: A Gibbet of Flesh
*Note – Flash on the Borderlands is PseudoPod’s flash fiction podcast , which contains multiple short pieces. As such, I review each individually rather than the whole episode.
936-A: “Every Part of You” by Lyndsey Croal, narrated by Lindz McLeod
An elegant piece that tackles grief and the human rejection of death. Croal deftly converts the disgusting into the beautiful: spider legs in the eye socket become long lashes, for example. I would even say this threatens to cross the thin boundary between prose and poetry. It didn’t make me rock back on my heels, but it did make me feel the narrator’s grief deeply and for long after I finished listening. When you listen to this one, pause it after and let it sit with you for a little while before you continue the episode.
936-B: “To Be Human” by Hannah Greer, narrated by Kitty Sarkozy
The reading of this is tinny and a little robotic; this is intentional, but I did find it harder to listen to as a result. The story looks to a future Earth barely compatible with human life, one still wracked by greed, and asks what humanity is for a sack of organs. It’s sweet. A little glimmer of hope.
936-C: “Taproot” by S. L. Harris, narrated by Elie Hirschman
“Taproot” is a fun little story, but it has a couple of problems. The biggest issue is being published right before “Controlling Your Weeds,” which totally overshadows this. It’s also a bit on the nose, a bit predictable. Once it becomes clear that the taproot is some sort of problem from a failed relationship, when he finds the finger the whole plot is a given.
Cthulhuville 