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The SFFaudio Podcast #779 – READALONG: The Colorado Kid by Stephen King

Jesse, Evan Lampe, Cora Buhlert, and Terence Blake talk about The Colorado Kid by Stephen King

Talked about on today’s show:
Terence without a story, no story here, short novel from Hard Case Crime, pretty slight, the narrator, this fake Maine accent, a little hard to understand things here and there, you get used to it, the name of the owner of the restaurant, some of the beginning, Jack Ruby vs. Jack Moody, JFK is in here, a theme, a throughline between the stealing of the money and the keeping of the article, it’s our story, it’s not for the people from away, including the US government, everybody does it, not nationalistic, localistic, a political point, what these islanders are like, such places, lonely and weird, late 1990s, drive up from Boston to the Canadian border, Acadia national park, a rental car, an ice cream parlour, a cinema, and a gas station, we don’t like strangers here, local teenagers were hanging out, staring at us, talking German, the two strange women, priceless looks, an old A-Team episode, when you read Stephen King, exaggerates this aspect of it, condensed, a love letter to Maine, Pet Semetary, Derry, know the town’s secrets, talking to each other and playing cards, in the Lovecraftian sense, you gotta remember it, the illustrated version came out in 2019, the disc break, when it first came out, a really big deal, used to sell Hard Case Crime, no. 13, the biggest living author up to that point, when Stephen King hit, drew attention, Cora retweeted an article, a paid advertisement, affiliate links, Holly, whatever that means, in terms of sales, Charles Ardai, Joyland, Crichton ones, crossover appeal, Later, a thematic sequel to The Body, on a publicity tour, host of a TV show, NPR, hardboiled, noir, crime encrusted filthy books, Ardai bent the rules, an introduction to the 2019 publication, The Birth And Rebirth Of The Colorado Kid by Charles Ardai, revive pulp fiction, gorgeous dames in torn negligee, grab you by the throat, someone lay bleeding in the gutter, about the same as a movie ticket, bookstore, drugstore, a quixotic plan, half a century earlier, there was drinking involved, David Dodge, Day Keene, Wade Miller, maybe there’s a well known writer out there, write us a blurb, gone on record, John D. MacDonald, Lawrence Block, Richard Stark, the great Donald E. Westlake, I understand completely, I tried to sound cool, it would contain a mystery, a boxing story, a western, it presents a hard case, the mystery of the unanswerable, the classical mystery tradition, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, Flitcraft, vanished like a fist when you open your hand, if that’s not a noir story…, a pretty weirdest book, an experiment, a thought experiment, a philosophical parable, metafiction, trynna make some points, teased, this is a fantasy book, continue their legacy, if she doesn’t go on to the New York Times, I’d like this to be true, small towns have newspapers, county paper, the Tri-Cities, the last issue of the last newspaper went online, its owned by a corporation, required by law ads, not doing news anymore, before the internet killed off these smaller newspapers, The Province (newspaper), The Vancouver Sun, a corporation asking for donations, this is a fantasy world, he has a fantasy setup about how things will work, there’s no Walmart here, wherever Mooselick is now, King Soopers, things have changed, corporate control, corporate extraction, the earlier setting in the 80s, he’s almost a regional writer, he’s been to California, what percentage are outside of Maine?, he’s not a city guy either, Deer Isle, Maine, other island stories, Dolores Claibourne, a zombie apocalypse, strangers experience, the island on the show called Wings [Nantucket], you’re gonna make it Stephie, passing the torch, making a story out of nothing, the story is there’s no story here, to make it a story, story construction, a central mystery, one of the two interchangeable, more than a single gunner, that’s Stephen King for you, can’t even separate them from each other or King, the girl is pretty well done, a fantasy, she’s from Away, write about hayrides, we’re gonna last years, a little fastforward, the really old one, skip to 2023, she sold the paper to a corporation has kids and lives in Ohio, is Jesse being too cynical here?, school is in, not supposed to be solvable by the reader, Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea, waves don’t form a story, a thing without a story, an event without a story, a philosophical education, resistant to paradigms you bring to bear, even if you fail all the time, all the stories published in the newspaper are lies, a beginning a middle and an end, the meta-level, an inversion of values, the insular mentality, closed minds, they don’t like strangers, big city people, Heidegger used to say, even if he was a Nazi, in closer contact with Being, the real people in touch with what life is, inculcating existential philosophy, independently constructed a theory of story, the school of problems, is this deliberate?, what Evan said, what makes a book memorable, this story about story, mysterious lights, a story about how stories are told, real life events are turned into a story (or not), the other cases, weird lights, UFOs, church picnic poisoning, dead boat, a likely story, some kind of weird crime that was never solved, an unsolved murder, 22 years, Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975), the art in the book, the last image of the story, Stephie looking out of the view, there needs to be a sexy lady, a newspaper folded over the rail, Vinceteague, Chincoteague, wild horses, the story goes, a Spanish shipwreck, annual capture of the herd, sold to rich people, Cora’s experience, intruding on their local haunts, a defensive look, you’re a tourist, curiosity, you’ve just walked into their living room, boxes full of board games, a community center, we can’t blame them for the weird feelings, take your money and monetize, a generous tip, need two old guys who know the score, like they see it go round like it’s in a dryer, he’s gonna give em a book, bringing a book to our lowly new publication, Lawrence Block is a really great writer, nobody cares, everybody knows the name, everybody can act like him, that’s the fantasy, supporting local causes all over Maine, patriotism on a local level, Walter Gibson, he didn’t move away, he’s made it a virtue too, this is how one ought to be, 31,000 people, a Lovecraft idea, you can write from anywhere, I don’t fit in New York, August Derleth, those regional things your writing about Wisconsin, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Cross Plains, [City Of The Singing Flame], set on a hike, it’s for you, you’re local now, that’s the story, why didn’t they give him a story, they just take his money, right Evan?, I guess, it’s a response to the idea that stories must progress to a point, to critics, why is that there?, why is IT 1,000 pages long, meditating on that, letting the story breathe and be what it is, that’s the change, bring everyone to the parlour, why they kept it secret, Nero Wolfe isn’t going to show up, Jesse’s week theory: it was suicide, why would he do it in Maine?, the geographical solution, people running away, the physical limit of the border of the country, maybe his wallet was stolen, just like the food out of his hand, insure you choke to death and have a brain hemorrhage, old guy detectives, the money gets to the right hands, Stephen King likes moms, trying to help moms out, a less important gender for child raising, like an old gay couple, help out as best they can, published in all the papers in Colorado, desperate old men all over the United States, Hancock Lumber, a pay paper?, free weekly, no longer, two on Sunday, newspapers called out, New York Times, Boston Globe, Bangor Daily News, if done in realtime, restaurant to the seaside newspaper department, giant printing machine, go get a muffin, a pee, some coke, pee break, retro flashback to the future, he died six months later, obituary for the really old guy, 1915-2005?, she’s still there, smelling the seaweed and the fish, front page obituary, small town newspapers, editorial content, usually on the front page, local journalists running around, small arts events, festivals, local sport, shooting competition, report about Hugo winners, desperate for content, dine out on your story, a young woman, a man in his forties, the Russian coin, the red herring, a Russian sleeper agent, The Americans, told to come to Maine, a commercial flight, a very good theory, why do you carry evidence you’re a Russian around?, 10 ruble coins, a plot point or not, a sleeper agent from an alternate earth, he’s from another dimension, supernatural elements, he can’t help it, why not?, the lights, the author said it was extraterrestrials, Rendezvous With Rama sequels, Mary Celeste, the Doctor Who version: The Horror At Fang Rock, aliens landed in the ocean, Telefon (1977), the Soviet Union objected to the movie, the premise is that there’s been a purge going on in Soviet Russia, hardliners, trying to start WWIII, a detente, a Robert Frost poem, fugue state, suicide mission, Charles Bronson is a KGB agent with a perfect memory, when they die, this guy died in 1922, these are fake people, the birth certificate of a dead kid, the suicide theory, how to fit all the pieces together, the gun in the hand pointing at the head, assassinated, a calling card, maybe he found it on the beach, perfectly constructed, because it’s a fiction story, some newspaper stories are completely fiction anyway, without having the tweet thread, a bad idea of what actually happened, Sherlock Holmes, getting the quotes wrong, a well constructed meta-story, characterization is immaculate, backstories of various people, the widow eating her meal and looking great, this island and its people, a mystery that can’t be solved, no obvious solution, the church picnic, The Shining, Stephen King’s explanation, telepathic powers, ghosts come to life, the story is terrific, his way of solving, psychic powers, so good at telling the story, a problem of madness, a psychic command to go to Maine, much more elaborate, a central character who ends up dead, goes to quite a length to justify a death to alleviate a problem, drinking himself, fucking around with his boss, hurting his kid, trying to do right, go live with the magical blackman in Florida, Murder She Wrote, Jessica Fletcher, Cabot Cove at Universal Studios, giving school, the coziness of the town, the judge, another graduate student, a CSI guy, local time colour, CSI being a good show, grounding it in the period of time, peak of its popularity, so many spinoffs, it’s realistic, super unrealistic, weird tiny clue, the reality is Mark Furman plants the glove at OJ’s house, the theory of the case, fuck it he’s guilty, told not to look in the bag, the underlying theme: it’s okay to cheat, that’s just a Stephen King move, desperately wants to be Stephen King, a descent attempt, one aspect, kids, boyscouts, body horror, The Troop, Dreamcatcher, a central ideology, lensing all his writing through, this is what I believe, the NPR series: This I Believe, Heinlein’s, we all cheat a little bit, it’s good to like our locals, the definitive Terence thing, when you’re an old many running a newspaper in Nice, fuck off and sell your paper, a smaller town, an island off the coast of Spain, Glory Road, nude island off the coast of France, nude island, the whole island is news, Île du Levant, naturist resort, gonna have to get into nudism, inside on an offset typewriter, wear big hats, prove that you’re not wearing a wire, East German nudism, lingering nudism, Wreck Beach, sunbathing garden, close to exhausting this very slim book, 3.5 hours, padded out reprint, 2005 afterword not in the audiobook, a real case of a woman in Maine who died and was never identified, unsolved and unsolvable, the phenomenon, people hate mysteries, the reason the police are there to solve crime, a collective will, find somebody to blame, who the victim is, teenage drug dealers, not a story, cold cases, years after, calls after all these years, crimes no one really cares about, some kind of theory, one of the big fictions, it’s the drug cartel, they’re so horrible, court cases, drug dealers are so bloody stupid, they’re amateurs, that’s not their business, unsolved without a story, two boys [Sebastian Burns and Atif Rafay], murder, awaiting extradition, France off the coast, upper peninsula of Michigan, the Point Roberts anomaly, [turns out Jesse is conflating two cases from the same period, the Sebastian Burns Atif Rafay case and Frederick Gilliland (who was tricked into Point Roberts), Jack The Ripper, still trying to solve, supernatural solutions, time travel, space alien from Star Trek, 150 year old, the Zodiac Killer, annoying people, the police were not fully corrupted, lazy bastards, pressuring people into confessing, Homicide: Life On The Streets, a bunch of people to kidnap the governor of Michigan, money, retarded, lonely, not reporting on stuff, unsolved cases in Germany, equivalent of a state governor, Switzerland, a famous hotel where other people have died, a famous press photograph, late 1980s, dressed in the bathtub, someone important, Mossad, the Iranians, a shitty terrible person, the official verdict was suicide, Seth Rich murder, no story here, perpetrator unknown, no one would do that, Salvador Dali would have killed himself like that, constantly screaming, this is of course locked, July 10, 2016, 4:20 am, a victim of attempted robbery, with lots of citations, leaked DNC emails in 2016, hacking the email accounts, quotation marks around that, Hillary Clinton had broken the rules, Donna Brazile, thumb drive, how fast can u download?, no good evidence, it’s always Russia, Mossad is pretty fucking active, if you talk about Seth Rich on youtube, we’re nit going to have this be a story, shot in the back, some political reason, die on a beach, the thing that’s being addressed here, making a connection between or fear of random seeming deaths and how being unsettled by death is, The Body, the point of that story, hit by a train, dead crow on the sidewalk, who did this?!, it only matters when it’s people, maybe it died of old age, I don’t need a story to make me feel better about it, hit by a car, our response to the fear of death, what he’s going for, the the dead kid on the beach is Stephen King, he’s 42, hit by a van, 1999, mentioned at the end of the audiobook, a little biography, making a story out of the story, now I feel satisfied, satisfied there was no explanation, not knowing the others, always broken up, bathroom or muffin, we can’t experience it as a framed story, jump back in time, circle back to the table, a TV show, Haven, an FBI agent, relationships, she has a relationship in this book, somewhere in Ohio, leaning up against a garbage can, a little essay by Brian Aldiss, what sticks in your memory from science fiction stories, inspire you later, the example of a mad robot on the Moon firing into the void, not a powerful enough image, he’s a blank slate, emotion, empathy, whatever, before they knew the story from the widow, in 20 years, a vague impression, sounds familiar, short, bought the book at an airport, these old guys, a young woman, sitting on the beach looking out at sea, the new cover has that, looking at the corpse, a girl with the tape recorder, Glen Orbik, nothing to do with the book, really, Holly, simply written, for the Hollywood Reporter, a familiar King protagonist, September 9, 2023, Stephen Colbert, latest book, quickly shot to number one, 2014’s Mr. Mercedes, If It Bleeds, Finders Keepers, $30, just $19 right now, on audiobook, narrated by King, The Gunslinger, online for free!, lit window, silhouetted windows, by today’s standards, an improvement over that, in the 1990s, 80s are great, Scribener’s reissuing, The Institute, Rolling Stone, I like her so much, go on with, what she was up to, supposed to be a walk on character, stole my heart, the supernatural realm, dealing with covid, covid-denier mom, eventually succumbing to the disease, wear a mask, get your vaccination that doesn’t work, mom, a time capsule, devour, emdash, all the familiar trappings, covid books, I’m not going to read that, unimaginably deprived, the book’s description, summon all her formidable, professors, the shopping section, to bookmark it, crime fiction roundup, I’m reading a Stephen King now, of course he’s up to this, very well written, King likes Gibney, 15 hours, Evan is looking forward to it, Fairy Tale was illustrated throughout, Gabriel Ba, yeah, yelling at Evan, how can you stand this shitlib?!, build up a whole narrative, fully embrace how awesome, as a thinker, his essays, his fiction writing, not extraordinary, Lester Del Rey hits the buttons, build a robot lady in their basement, what happens if humans uplift dogs and monkeys, character constructor, limited ideas, stepping on his dick, the lone gunman theory, he’s a good boy, he has to, the sex scenes for Cora, Vaush is gonna misinterpret, free publicity by denouncing it, why does Cora read The Guardian so much?, triggered, the news is so fuckin shitty, translate them, nothing Jesse needs to know about, a few episodes, didn’t need to think about it at all, license Stephen King something, like Foundation, getting sued by King, how many ongoing TV series, Castle Rock, the good one, not the quality, the sheer number, Netflix tv shows and Netflix movies never have sex scenes, foreign language, an American company, Jessica Jones had sex scenes, boobs?, Oppenheimer, HBO, Cinemax, in the 1990s, slightly less than pornography, sex in them just to have sex in it, titillation while watching a murder mystery, random sex scenes rammed in, Outlander, Foundation sex scene, dirty limericks, well shot, unAsimovian, how would Asimov take it?, Janet Asimov, Terminus is destroyed, ruined it for her, a symbol of the whole series, we’re destroying Asimov, taking Asimov back from Asimov, the format, interesting idea, you don’t have to watch it, Cora has made herself into a fan writer of this sort of shit, Terence is a glutton, Terence hates himself, Wheel Of Time is better, lowest common denominator, bad crime dramas, some SFF stuff, Star Trek, The X-Files, 30th anniversary, nothing to watch, interestingly quaint, corrupt but not in the way it really is, aliens, skeptical of the government, the official policy is aliens exist now, when are you gonna release the videos, space force, Time For My Stories (Chapo Trap House), peak of the American Empire, anxiety of decline, The Sopranos, plagued, watch old movies, watch Mission: Impossible original TV series, CIA competence niceness, overthrow their elections, not actual agents, very good competent, actor, strongman, electronics experts, model, patriotism, out to help people, works, well made, the music, the editing, cliffhanger stuff, they don’t get what Mission Impossible is, Miracle Mile (1988), Trombone nerd, WWIII, Los Angeles, Tangerine Dream cinematic universe, westerns, Jesse gives Terence too much homework, The Last Run (1971), car chase, working class detective, weird today, still really good, dutch without subtitles, Tangerine Dream, striking, online somewhere, William Friedkin died, in with the news, The Exorcist (1973), Sorcerer (1977), The Wages Of Fear (1953), bluesky invite, Sopranos memes, no use for it yet, good meme, 1977, releasing his movie against Star Wars, we’re gonna wipe the floor with that shit, I was still right, The Mandalorian, trapped in South America, stuck in the jungle with no money, the dynamite has gone by, very very slowly, fuckin Amazing, almost wordless, the name of the truck, don’t the French love Friedkin?, a French film star, a huge hit in Cannes?, be your boyfriend from highschool, jungle vs. desert, very international, Steve McQueen, Roy Scheider Ally McGraw, Dominican Republic, popular holiday destination, not very American at all, Austrian actor, really really good, science fiction, fantasy, not a wink of fantasy, we’re done, put the book in the mail, Ill Met In Lankhmar, Evan is going to send the audio, in the original French, Arabic through Greek, own private language, what we all do, whatever language we are tweeting about, good discussion.

The Colorado Kid - ILLUSTRATED by Glen Orbik

The Colorado Kid by Stephen King

The Colorado Kid - ILLUSTRATED

The Colorado Kid - ILLUSTRATED edition

The Colorado Kid - ILLUSTRATED

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The SFFaudio Podcast #769 – READALONG: Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub

Jesse, Evan Lampe, and Terence Blake talk about Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub

Talked about on today’s show:
blake house, a Dickens novel, 2001 novel, September 15, 625 pages, 810 pages, every cover is garbage, Gorg, the thunder five, a big sprawling novel, a horde of bees, a mysterious bee winking at us, put the bee on the crow, only revealed later, the point of view from the crow, the bee was hitching a ride until Gorg was killed, what!?, here’s our book, we’re gonna see him later, the realtime of Jack’s life, the time between the two publications, The Talisman, a co-authored book, mailed them off, 100 manuscript pages, more by email, some interview, more intertwined, King’s stories are always set when he writes them, it has to be that way, so Dark Tower connected, after the accident, there’s a lot of King in here, other than setting, Mr. Clubb And Mr. Cuff, Koko, seeing the parts that I was missing, Everything’s Eventual, another one with dinky dinky dinky, he’s penis obsessed, not only obsessed, anything low and base and childish, word magic, the magic words, the phrases from the DJ, zip up your fly, the repetition of it, a big sprawling novel, owes a lot of debts to a lot of other people, a breaker in that, a breaker in this, the breakers are defined, the first time they’re identified, that plot line, a bigness, how much repetition there was, having room to breathe, you took all of H.P. Lovecraft’s writings you could probably fit it all into this book and still have a little bit of room, this 3 file MP3 audiobook, too unweildly, go into a room soak up the furniture, a whole different kind of thing, how much this is character and setting, there’s a plot, an investigation going on, True Detective, the Crimson King, a Dreamlands place: the territories, the United States, a connection between, a shoutout to Talisman readers, a tragic death, right here and now, the catchphrase thing, keeping track of them, hit three or four times in a chapter, how magic works, words get inside your head and control your thoughts, a song, you can’t stop humming it or singing it, the Wikipedia entry, dark fantasy, horror, things that should be horrific, a chapter told from the point of view of The Raven by Poe, Cool Air, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, black dripping goo, wonderfully heroic, horrific but not horror, gross out, the horror version of the hero’s journey, not noir fiction, the end of True Detective is hopeful, Rust, every word stolen, a vision of his daughter and love, maybe things are not so bad, the whole show itself is about horror, children being kidnapped, molested, and killed, thinking of themselves as royal, a queen, what makes her a queen, you call your daughter a princess, the skygod, the last living person in the entourage, adjacency, they have monarchy in the territories, the guy’s name is Stephen King, Kingsland Ale, strawberry fest, Strawberry Spring, Fish, the plot is very similar, a historical serial killer being called out, an amateur investigation, hiding the truth, press conference, Nic Pizzolatto, cop stuff, go visit an insane asylum, a prison, a weird house in the , we lie at the press confrence, we lie to our bosses, hides in the closet, why is this happening?, because it’s cool, that’s why, opopanax, New York Times crossword, a summoning word, really interesting, very Lovecraftian, the creation of the secondary world, cannibal, The Silver Key connection, Lovecraft is against memory, you need to start remembering, closer thematically, Through The Gates Of The Silver Key, objecting to the form, short stories are tight, sprawl out and enjoy himself, he’s mortal he has to do the work, Evan enjoys every minute, Jesse doesn’t, Terence enjoyed it a lot, despite the fact that the form is very funny, like a funnel, wide and slow and fast and tight at the end, deus ex machina after deus ex machina, the detective story is resolved by the cosmic background, stop suppressing, Evan always says: “it goes down smooth”, Thunder Five quote Hegel and Derrida, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, he’s also in love with the landscape there, out of the country, London, King is obsessed with Maine, Straub liked Wisconsin, writers think about the landscape, when walking to get the mail, the lore of the landscape, TV shows, exotic location, anywhere other than New York or Los Angeles, Breaking Bad, Tulsa King, that sense of place, lovingly rendered, a good sense of the landscape, the other thing: character, Frank Muller, before his motorcycle accident, 22 years old, he goes down smooth, solid narrator, a conspiratorial sort of reading, is our DJ character supposed to be black?, cool, nice suits, how did he get his sense of style, interview with the agent, his own voice back to him about what the weather’s like, the magical blackman, at the old folks home, the n word is involved, wigger, Stephen King would revise that now, really?, the Bill Hodges trilogy, Mr. Mercedes, also a tv show, they’re all tv shows, the Duffer Bros., Netflix ripoff show, Dungeons & Dragons show, entertaining book, the psychology is off, the king and the queen, the cop psychology, our hero cop from California, he’s the kid, he grew up, forgot everything, fate moves him back to Wisconsin to be magical again, the astonishing thing, all the child coveting, coveting body parts, I’m going to eat your ass, it’s going to be delicious, he is a demon, so weird, a cartoonish type demon, there’s a level of humour or comforting cuteness, pseudo Germanic accent, fake British accent at the end, It just eats children, molesting?, raping?, likes killing children, a pedophile child murderer, I could have raped her, Albert Fish was a real dude, it was political, the governor and a senator, connected to church affiliated schools, funneling, Katrina comes and washes away stuff, if this could be adapted the tone would be really weird, a lot of coziness, the bikers are fun, the visit to the madhouse, comforting, getting the team together, kid gets abducted, the black feathers, the guts in the box, those Reardon Metal movies, Ayn Rand devotees, this can’t be adapted can it?, it is The King In Yellow, you’re in Carcosa now, take off your mask, time to unmask, a very very loose adaptation, as a part of a series?, Mike Flanagan, novel only, not everything has to be adapted, overlook hotel book: The Shining, internal, visuals happening in the book, cozy feeling based stuff that only comes through the minds of characters, The Raven scene, quoting while the assault is happening, Cool Air on the couch, black stuff coming out of every pore, [Mesmeric Revelation], Roland’s world, wherever they took Tyler, in another world, the multiverse before it was cool, bronze age marvel comics, William James, it was not cool then ever, latest Flash movie, different Batmans, move on, copisman, one of these phrases that infects the brain, policeman copisman makes perfect sense, personal identity magic, a baby word, very baby like book, lady sticks her tongue into a cup to drink, licking her tea, that’s super creepy, like the Dalai Lama, a policeman who uses his childhood innocence to understand, a childish book, capiche, Plato’s Republic, the silver are the cops, we’ve got a queen, there’s not a lot of contempt for everyone else, weirdos or good, the biker gang, they look rough, but they hold degrees in philosophy and one of them is a surgeon, Derry had slippage, French Landing is not as corrupted, Wendell Green, some fairly nasty characters, cynical not particularly evil, how Stephen King’s mind works, reading his stuff, lying to himself or blinding himself, something going on with twitter, an old magazine called Pirate Writings, going to find Stephen King, his small town in Maine, between the airport and the army base, a dark glass, press the button and state your name, is this Stephen King’s office, is he here?, I’m one of three secretaries he has, this is what you have to deal with when you have weirdos who want to meet you, meet your hero, Dean Koontz level, just these two, what Straub contributed, Jesse doesn’t have a good reading on this book, deeper, a bad reading of The Raven by Poe, it’s a vulture, shorn or shaven, turkey vulture, the Raven is what we’re supposed to take away from it, people memorize it and then don’t listen to the words that they’ve memorized, the house, the lights, the explanation, the talisman to assault the house, it may fit into a different puzzle piece, worst, the house is on fire, fire imagery, the room is filling with smoke, an amazing poem, people read it superficially, Roger Zelazny’s A Night In Lonesome October, sometimes an artist will crop the top so you can’t see the bird’s head, a heroes journey, not the ideal reader, least favourite Stephen King book, how many books he writes, doing it for 50 years, first 3 of the Dark Tower, The Gunslinger, The Drawing Of The Three, The Wastelands, The Stand, Cycle Of The Werewolf, The Dark Half, Blaze, Revival, the least interesting, more of a cozy, supposed to be horrific, Twin Peaks, demon from another dimension, the Black Lodge and the White Lodge, very robust (even though it is flimsy), what differentiates him from David Lynch, King gets ordinary people, Frost, what Stephen King prides himself on, a lot of dinky stuff, penis and poo poo, two modes, adult prude mode, how much poo poo pee pee stuff, Salem’s Lot, scummy and bad, cop judgement, I gotta keep this people in control otherwise…, groups or societies, family, groups that are made, The Mist, Fred, Alice, Dale, pee and poo people, a mischaracterization, the people trapped in the supermarket, a mass hysteria, sacrifice a child, a normal common thing to do, contrasted with the father, cheating on his wife, at the end he lucks in to not killing his kid, the hard Darabont ending, the implied ending, uncharitable, he thinks the people are base, only and always base, the journalist Wendel Green, a Heinleinian style strawman, seeks consolation with Sophie, more juicy, we as writers are sensationalistic, you’re prurient (as readers), we want a lot of poo poo pee pee stuff, Dirty Sperm, if you get in somebody’s car and they put on Dirty Sperm, regular dirty sperm, that could be Straub, must be King, bad to separate, split brains and personality, a work of fiction, presented as if it was by one guy, one guy with two heads comes into the bar and punches you in the face, they’re both getting charged with a crime, they’re both being charged with assault, they’re both being arrested, even though only one of the heads controlled that arm, a good joke, the double headed parrot, they’ve built it into the story, back to the Dirty Sperm, the Wisconsin Rat, George Rathman, gives into the blackmail, now I’m getting the psychology, interested in audio, a good book by itself, this is a big sprawling chunky book, can’t forget Beezer, Doc, Jack, Dale, Henry, Bernie, that’s a lot, not that bad for a Stephen King, actively dislike, Finders Keepers, a production machine, From A Buick 8, a little bit of cellphone stuff, Cell, the kids at the 7-11, a scene out of The Simpsons, buying Magic [the Gathering] Cards, he needs to show he’s relevant and hip to the immediate moment, the racism is the wrong period, early 80s racism, Stephen King always brings his own childhood, the magic of this book, it’s not integrated, baseball cards, collecting baseball cards, baseball cards are out, Gulf War cards, 1991, kids from an earlier period of time transported to the modern period, riding their bikes around, small town Wisconsin, border of somewhere else, French Creek?, fictionalized of Trempealeau, Wisconsin, Becky Thatcher country, set on the Mississippi, partially the same timer period, 2002, the 1990s, 2012, the landscape, a sense of the land is cursed and sick, ill, or mentally ill, or crippled, idyllic, small town, drug epidemic, suicides, the strange part is the children going missing, a much more optimistic view of child murder and abduction, an amazing novel for television, a good book, arguing about Blaze, looking for the political stuff, it’s not in here, Terence wonders, not directly, things are exploding in France right now, pillaging main street shops, clothes shops, lots of burning, six years, things are burning all the time, riots, forest fires, neoliberalism, the shock doctrine, to exploit, more and more advantages for the richest, more and more authoritarian surveillance for the poor, a good reason to begin with, mass discontent, the burning just likes burning, burning is good, tendency in the human psyche and the social world, King’s baseline politics, watch out for the mob, neoliberals provoke burnings, shitliberal not a neoliberal, a shitliberal will support neoliberal policies, using the children’s energy, really really sublimated politics, very sublimated, a straw of hope, put him on the wrong path, a tragedy, subject to I need a bad guy, eating children’s asses, studied up on Fish, absolute evil character, a callback, the villain of absolute evil, not in Bachman, the supernatural, supernatural villains, should I be happy about France being on fire?, people shouldn’t take shit, including good things, schools can be burned, libraries should be preserved, Under The dome, The Long Walk, societies rules, The Running Man, the best of the Bachmans, somebody’s going to pay, the mob is just society driven insane, the community of friends, a common purpose, both good and bad, sometimes people get hurt, in the long run, do people in France yearn for the days of King Louis?, Macron, get over the reality, nobody is calling for the tsar to return, a needed and necessary thing, pulling a bandage off, short term vs. long term, the French are supposed to be Cartesian and bureaucratic, they just do that when they want to piss people off, they have in their hearts the revolution, “don’t obey the rules”, people are not obeying the rules, he claims to be disruptive, the textual example, the lynching that was avoided, the magic lilies, nice and Jesus like, that’s his position, upshot, rewatch True Detective, Amazing when it was happening, The King In Yellow, the stories themselves are sort of a collage, that’s just an artist, a time travel story, an artist, the magic can be explained wholly by having drug flashbacks, the lore of Robert W. Chambers, Carcosa, California, wherever that could be, forgotten parts of Louisiana, cover-ups, corruption, the cost is real to the characters, addiction, pain, HBO shows that were big since The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Dark Tower stuff, how would Straub have felt about that?, to learn about the Dark Tower and the Crimson King, the breakers and stuff, figuring it out?, realizing, I’ve made something here, H.P. Lovecraft, he’s right, August Derleth, Carrie, and other books with The Shining stuff, fans doing that more than he did, Deep Ones, servants of Cthulhu, no, he likes those things, so good, so smart, how big the villain is, the corruption of the whole state, the school system, everything seems involved, a little underwhelming, a sewer, a fort, an offshoot of the family, a big tough guy, fucking his half-sister, eventually dispatched, one of the news reports, magic baseball bat, archaeology to dig up corpses, reports have been discredited, the police captain they threaten to murder, he’s complicit, he just didn’t question his boss and he got a promotion, literally a Lawnmower Man, the worst thing for the kids, a lot of cool themes, societal themes, the washing away by whatever storms it is, wrecking birth records, all these homes, a strange series of shots where we visits all the scenes, how we’re feeling, the corruption is still there, [Port Coquitlam], Robert Pickton, this was going on for decades, they don’t do anything, unless there’s political pressure, they will respond to specific incidents, they’re not the smartest or wisest or best people, they’re just the guys with guns and authority, sees a baby in a microwave, the cops in here are all doing their best, I’m a good guy, it covers ignorance, he uses the magic, it’s not a police procedural, the solution is handed to him on a platter, it’s cosmic, man, we did this book pretty good, 26 hours, one of his best, very character, good character things, reading for character, the narrative style, floating around, flying over the landscape, I’m going to show you the dead kid now, hesitating, we, us, the shitty cover of the book, we this and us this, us the reader?, us the narrator?, it’s everything, deconstructed, pleasantly surprised, more horror, more utilitarian, the prose is good, not a girl book, hard to describe, so well written, not really earned, intelligent as well, The Talisman, standalones, The Troop, a guy who is trying to be like Stephen King, a gross-out horror body horror book, eat each other, kill a turtle, zombies, Canadian government is going to nuke them, imitation Stephen King, the writing is more authentic, detective reading has been deconstructed, Fairy Tale by Stephen King, the hardcover is full of illustrations, the paperback, demand good interior illustrations, The Colorado Kid, Hard Case Crime, talking with old-timers, an old case, the mystery of who the person is, the revised version has interior illustrations, an investigative journalist, was it a mob killing from Boston?, physical evidence, leaving only impossibilities, Charles Ardai introduction, not part of the Dark Tower series, maybe Jesse doesn’t like magic, a little bit like Heinlein, Heinlein if the guy offends you, strawmanning, libertarian vigilante, Heinlein would be good with making out with a mental patients, competent ladies, wish they were born men, how much time it took, 1.3 x speed, taken up by it, rolls along, Progeny will be relaxing, Connor is back on twitter, bitcoin shillers, twitter is still broken, Evan must read like a reading machine, another flu, sense of taste changing, a wasted week, retired for the summer, except for the classes on psychology, Pirates Of Venus, A Meeting With Medusa, No Man’s Land, Zero Cool, God Save The Mark, Huston, Houston, Do You Read?, Skull Face, good writer, bad person, shitlib, not the end of the world, how many Stephen King books don’t get audiobooks?, when he does Hard Case Crime, they’re so stupid, TV and movies have the visual thing locked down, Paramount production?, the first Heinlein juvie, Red Planet?, Saturday Evening Post stories, Rocket Ship Galileo is the worst, Space Cadet, about nukes and what to do about them, Farmer In The Sky, some doofus on twitter called it a blah book, how dare you, they’re all pretty good, The Shining, more of a novel, all of Stephen King now, a lot of reading, reading Heinlein back to back is a mistake, The Star Beast, Starman Jones, Time For The Stars, Podkayne Of Mars, a lot of downloads, most people don’t read Heinlein they read a couple of titles, Black Mirror, emphasizing The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, line marriage, physical fleshy bodies, sounds fun, a bunch of hippies, destroy the robot, Pinkman from Breaking Bad, jealousy has to get involved, very American for a British guy, he likes art, he reads, more of an actual human being, prep her for the line-marriage, sometimes good, burned out by one episode, simulation being a lifeform, sixy times, Charlie Brooker, Hang The DJ, authors have their themes, can I do a new spin on this old idea?, yes I can, some classic episodes, robot with a knife, dogs, 15 Million Merits, Striking Vipers, the prime minister of the UK has to fuck a pig, White Bear, 2011, Joan Was Awful, Bandersnatch, we should probably download these before they’re removed from Netflix, we couldn’t afford to keep the servers running, PirateBay is still unkillable, 1337x, ettv.

Black House painting

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Reading, Short And Deep #292 – The Clock That Went Backward by Edward Page Mitchell

Reading, Short And Deep #292

Eric S. Rabkin and Jesse Willis discuss The Clock That Went Backward by Edward Page Mitchell

Here’s a link to a PDF of the story.

The Clock That Went Backwards was first published in The Sun (New York), September 18, 1881

Posted by Scott D. Danielson Become a Patron!

The SFFaudio Podcast #598 – READALONG: The Mist by Stephen King

Podcast

The SFFaudio Podcast #598 -Jesse, Scott Danielson, Paul Weimer, Marissa VU, Evan Lampe, Mr Jim Moon, and Alec Nevala-Lee talk about The Mist by Stephen King

Talked about on today’s show:
Dark Forces, 1980, Skeleton Crew, 1984 audio drama, Meatball Fulton, the 2007 movie adaptation, the terrible TV adaptation, a German audio drama?, who doesn’t like Stephen King?, America’s greatest popular novelist, people don’t like Stephen King’s endings, his narration tool, awesome endings, eucatastrophe, everything published until he turned 14, same, similar, Insomnia, changing style, the best time to read Stephen King is when it’s too young to be appropriate, Marissa’s eyes were opened, the scales were lifted from your eyes, mimetic fiction, a bridge novelist, a weird continuity, Mr Jim Moon’s bookshelves, the book cover of Carrie, New English Library, what the hell is the shining?, the psychic power, Salem’s Lot, Christmas and birthdays, a binge, a glut, a fear of big books, reading on Kindle, Terry Pratchett, highlighting observations, a heat map, your Dean Koontzs and James Herberts, very well put, tied up in audio, superior audiobooks, the most popular adaptation among fans, The Stand, Frank Muller, the different seasons, The Dark Tower, the Frank Muller narrated version of The Mist, the artist is mentioned, Hieronymus Bosch, Paul’s Stephen King’s experience, Firestarter in Omni Magazine, the Stephen King lake (there’s always something in that lake), Jesse is averse to popular, Cujo, The Running Man, Jesse is worried that his thesis is right, wise or wry observations of human behavior, King is telling us, a Hitchcock ending, a found document, The House On The Borderlands, the framing device, Lovecraft gets a shout-out, meta-mentioned, aliens, why Stranger Things was so popular, all those things that people are highlighting in Stephen King books, instinctually, amp up the drama, three sips of his beer, drinking beer all the whole day, out of alcoholism, cheating on his wife, he shoots his whole family, its transferred, making the main character less of an asshole, its okay that he cheats on his wife, hardscrabble, movie posters, The Dark Tower and The Thing, a more appealing protagonist, the sexual politics of this, moralistic about monogamy, the centerpiece of the drama, in his thoughts a little bit, the mom is missed more than the wife, replacement moms, replacement wife, the four bullets, we’re left to decide, seeing the book in relief, Darabont’s a hack, The Green Mile, Weird Tales, 1937, an error in the film, so faithful to the book in dialogue, the extra soldier, the neighbour is black, The Shawshank Redemption, a definitive ending, a noir ending makes it all the better, concretely solid as a story, A Quiet Place, the hear you instead of sniffing you, all these zombie stories, at least three actors from The Walking Dead, a distillation of so much, The Mist is a ground level version of The Night Wire by H.F. Arnold, the most popular story in Weird Tales ever, an internal monologue, reporting what it’s like to die, the foibles of all the people in the grocery store, “Food House”, a very choice decision, this is all happening out there, the emotional drama, why Stephen King translates so well to film, a skull-face, it amps up your eeuughs, the people dont trust each other, Mrs. Carmady, we see ourselves in her, a difference between the text and the movie, Christianity and folk stuff, psychic, frustrating, crazy fundamentalism, insidious in the book, recent events, people are that stupid here and now, unacknowledged psychics, The Dead Zone, nobodies who rise to political power, Under The Dome, fear of political zealots and cults, a great Covid story, we’re leaving, King read this stuff, *I AM INSPIRED BY THIS*, H.P. Lovecraft and Sonia Greene’s The Horror At Martin’s Beach, what’s identical is us viewing, it’s not about upper class and lower class, out-of-towners vs. locals, the boundary dispute starts off the story, what’s so cool, his psychology is all over the page, Philip K. Dick, very instinctually, my magic spell words, I drink too much, one for the road, drink more beer, some people know they have drinking problems, at the end of Skeleton Crew there’s a note on how it was written, taking this event from your own life, a very methodical way, great details, observant touches, the class tensions, John Updike, built on this interesting fusion, he isn’t an occult researcher, he’s just a dude, a painter, he paints his picture for us, wherever their faithful, the name of the car is the same kind of car, International Harvester Scout vs. Toyota Landcruiser, a very specific region and mental state, a pseudo-explanation for why all this stuff is happening, the secret military base, we need this scenario, lined up for toilet paper, who’s not wearing a mask, follow the rules, how all of this works, what was the right thing for me to do, going to the drugstore, what was the best thing anyone could have done in this scenario, drink beer, play pinochle, a metaphor for the Vietnam War, these experiences, the atmosphere of 1980s, ultimately they’re fighting the Soviets, he’s actually speaking to a particular set of events for people who are not responsible directly, a nostalgia hit, there’s much more to it than the politics, he writes about where he knows, a temperature map, bad political takes on twitter, he’s a boomer, the Vietnam War and John F. Kennedy, 11-22-63, they’ve held up so well, Danse Macabre, the Patty Hearst case, a global pandemic, a very specific moment, 1990, a late 70s story, he didn’t revise it enough, the Symbionese Liberation Army, copy and replace, written right after The Stand, Bird Box, an invasion from outside, usually after the events, the explanation for why the monsters are the way they are, Project Arrowhead, overheard at the library, what you hear is going on, no one is responsible, we’re all responsible, “nobody knew”, “no one could have foreseen this”, why the TV show is terrible, scattering the people, the monsters in the mist, an alternative ecosystem in which we are made irrelevant, The Men In The Walls by William Tenn, a cool idea, are the evils in the grocery store are manifested by the monsters in the mist (in the TV show adaptation), King has them completely separated, they’re not here to eat us, that’s how they are, Mrs. Carmody isn’t right, cosmic indifference causes beer drinking, its all for nothing, why King is better at this, he understands this on the cellular level, a reflection on his own psychological experience with it, the family dog didn’t want to be that way, down the same path, Dark Tower 6 or 7, move between these worlds, a retcon, a mistake, Dark Tower 3, these institutions, North Central Positronics, how institutions appear in King’s early fiction, the storm is what caused it, The Men Who Stare At Goats, if you look at their CV, [Prof. Courtney Brown] working on remote viewing, failing upward, now I teach kids, The Window by H.P. Lovecraft, in Fungi From Yuggoth,

The house was old, with tangled wings outthrown,
Of which no one could ever half keep track,
And in a small room somewhat near the back
Was an odd window sealed with ancient stone.
There, in a dream-plagued childhood, quite alone
I used to go, where night reigned vague and black;
Parting the cobwebs with a curious lack
Of fear, and with a wonder each time grown.

One later day I brought the masons there
To find what view my dim forbears had shunned,
But as they pierced the stone, a rush of air
Burst from the alien voids that yawned beyond.
They fled – but I peered through and found unrolled
All the wild worlds of which my dreams had told.

that piercing, this curious monkey thing, roll our tanks into Moscow behind their lines, if he could have waited a few minutes he this whole story made no sense, his school shooting book [Rage by Stephen King], he’s thinking about killing his family, the army comes in and fixes things, undermining the cynicism, that he didn’t kill himself, he shot his son after abandoning his wife, he went there, that Chinatown (1974) ending, compare this to The Shawshank Redemption‘s ending, the mist just goes away, I think those tentacles came out of that beer can, the trucks, the woman who left right away, locals who had made better decisions, the politics of it are quite interesting, the military guys are wearing masks, its a gas causing hallucinations, an extra, faceless government guys, the Iraq quagmire, the surge will work, the military was cleaning up, burning cocoons off the trees, they’re saving the people, pretty powerful, Scott was not pleased by the ending in the theater, “we went straight to the bookstore from the theatre”, Stephen King’s hopeful ending, something drastic, the psychic part, a dire situation, it might not be real, he thought he heard the word “Hartford”, there’s no narrator in the audio drama, we’re just being show the sound, like a microphone in the pocket of one of the characters, eliminating his own hope, saving them from the horror, pro-hope, I would rather sit here for a minute, I guess we gotta do it, they were safe for a minute, the whole point of this exercise is doomed, not consistent with King’s character as a writer, Pet Semetary, evil is defeated provisionally, they’re so faithful up to the tone of the book up to that point, the ending of Salem’s Lot is the beginning, he doesn’t want to go to that very bleak ending, collecting graffiti from the bathroom stalls of truck-stops, the maid will find it, his notebook saves this guy’s life, an optimistic happy ending, a real phenomenon, all these gun deaths, assault style rifles, avoid breaking down the gun deaths, most US gun deaths are suicides, if you have drugs in your house, we have these states where we change, things will look better in the morning, son, “I was as honest as I could be”, not wiser (they just have more experience), here have a hug, a confection, Castle Rock, exploiting or adapting, wasn’t that part cool, it has the shining music, a kid like in Stand By Me, E.T., straight from his unconscious, he’s not constructing it using a plot generator, a car really obsessed, a superhuman level of attention to detail, a kid crying in the sandlot, the boathouse, wonderfully modeled, a Parliament cigarette, Pepsi, Purina, what it was like to be a middle class American in 1980s, this is not how the world is now, Castle Rock does a better job of getting King (like Darabont does), characters, memorable characters, It, the most accurate depiction of 12 year olds, still accurate at 38, people do that and there isn’t always consequences, every transgression is punished, punished for an act of mercy, Mrs. Carmody would have been right, movies for adults, The Big Chill, suburban adultery, closely observed modernist fiction, lets go on vacation, these dark thoughts on the road, the best depictions of being a writer, why you need that axe, if I can just change stuff up I can finish the book, I’m outlining a new writing project and four months of peace and quiet are what I need, from the very first scene, this Jack Torrence is absolutely crazy, vs. a descent into madness, moral corruption, Kubrick’s film is great, ghosts are allowed to be in novels, the New York Times review of Dark Forces, cinematic writing, is there a story he’s produced that hasn’t been adapted at least once, Revival is going to be adapted, is it because his writing is so cinematic?, the King name, pacing and people, so much happens in the last hour, the audio drama skips the first two chapters, the 1984 text adventure computer game, missing the foundation, an excellent artifact, many many audio dramas available, the 1980s was dry as hell, Fred Greenhalgh and Radio Drama Revival, so innovative, don’t short shrift the audio drama, that 3-D effect, this is really scary, you’re in that grocery store with those people, ‘there’s something in the mist and it looks like this’, Maissa Bessada, its definitely scary, in a film, all those eggs inside that guy, some great effects, a little bit of Aliens (1986) in there, the spiders are on our side, an alien ecology, what is their vegetation, the vegetation doesn’t spill in, The War Of The Worlds, triffids, he’s about the psychology, psychic plants, From A Buick 8, the architecture of the car is all wrong, Thomas Jane, one of the monsters is a D&D one, if Stephen King had been born Stephina King, that’s a guy thing, facts about the cars, being that he’s a dude, old cars from the 50s, an AMC AMX, it looks so cool, it would be different if he was a woman, if he had a female brain, what would those obsessions be, obsession with duck breeds, “what’s with the doilies, ladies?”, video games have really changed people’s brains, game clothes, their obsessions are going to be different, he tends to be very contemporary, Cell, a cellphone used as a flashlight, now nobody has flashlights, the mist knocked out the signal, the radio, “the internet’s out, what can we do!?”, Jesse’s favourite scene, I’m going to get you a Spider-Man, a Spider-Man and an Incredible Hulk too!, sitting on the dock for a few hour with a comic book, totally absorbed, something for the dentist to work on later.

The Mist by Stephen King - read by Frank Muller

The Mist In 3D Sound

The Mist by Stephen KingThe Mist by Stephen King

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The SFFaudio Podcast #396 – READALONG: The Thing On The Doorstep by H.P. Lovecraft

Podcast

The Thing On The Doorstep

The SFFaudio Podcast #396 – Jesse, Paul Weimer, Marissa, and Wayne June talk about The Thing On The Doorstep by H.P. Lovecraft

Talked about on today’s show:
Weird Tales, January 1937, the Dark Adventure Radio Theatre adaptation, the movie, all thingy, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, racism, the sexism isn’t sexism, I’m not fully human, I need a man’s brain, partially intentional?, a mishmash of transmigrations, the opinion of Ephraim as expressed through Asenath, congress with certain supernatural horrors (Deep Ones), hybrid, what Edward hears, Man can be capitalized, at what point in the story does Asenath speak for herself?, man vs. woman, poison, the prequel, when she leaves Innsmouth?, trapped in the corpse of her own father, amazing resonances, 0% sexist, sympathy, being locked up in the Crowninshield House, down the 6,000 steps, in a Darkest Dungeon in Maine, mindblasted by shoggoths, on and on and on,

It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to shew by this statement that I am not his murderer.

a horrible “survival”, gills and spawning, Ephraim is desperate for immortality because he’s fully human, aging while your descendants get to live forever, not the immortal we’re looking for, this technology, burn the Necronomicon, gender swapping, finding a body on craigslist, social networking and social media, Bodybook, Strange Aeons: The Thing On The Doorstep (2005), the Providence adaptation, honeymoon in Innsmouth, especially creepy, a rival to her father, he’s having sex with the father-in-law, a thought you never want to have, a character focused story, reacting badly, body-hopping through time, a story of Daniel’s insanity, the framing story, Julie Hoverson’s adaptation, Dan is so far from the events, below the surface, other filmed adaptations, with budget vision and understanding, Guillermo del Toro, the 3 and 2 knock, glub glub glub bubble bubble, the scariest use of glub glub ever, Daniel is a skeptic, a recurring motif: “tirelessly mediocre”, he doesn’t have hypnotic ability (susceptibility), Ephraim needs a weak willed person with a lot of brains, get a taxi, strong willed, he’s gone through some shit, the survival continues, rationalizing the magic, it’s all math, Charlie Stross’ Laundry books, A Colder War, Shoggoths In Bloom by Elizabeth Bear, Dreams In The Witch House, science of magic, quantum stuff, Lovecraft at bottom is a Science Fiction writer, candlestick, the Rider-Waite tarot deck, a cult leader in New York, The Order Of The Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, the infinity symbol above “the Magician” and “Strength”, the cups the swords the wands and the pentacles, the esoteric order in reality, The Dunwich Horror, Robert M. Price, an ouroboros belt, biblical names, Ephraim and Asenath, a circle, is this an earlier survival (from a biblical era?), The Shadow Out Of Time by H.P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick has his themes, reality replaced with post-it notes, parallels in Lovecraft, The Tomb by H.P. Lovecraft, in a dream Jervas Dudley finds the key, just so natural, beginning and ending in a sanitarium, the great race of Yith, born in the wrong time, a 17th century gentleman, what’s wrong with sleeping in a graveyard, Lego model of THE TOMB, an affinity for the tomb, now is the time we discuss the Providence adaption, a 12 issue series, Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows, Avatar Press, racism, sexism, and hidden sexuality, physically turning the pages is traumatic, reading that third paragraph, incredibly difficult to read, the subtext becomes text (and graphic), the more you think about it the more horrifying it gets, Edwards’ weird experiences, that lost time, Robert Black, the final panel, she’s standing on the doorstep, the rape scene, he sees himself entering town, another callback, the call from woodland Maine, the local Marshall, a pivotal scene, communing with the shoggoths, wordlessly insisting he’s going to drive the rest of the way, power over the weather, uncanny predictions, Lovecraft the wannabe architect, another kind of horror, the hidden, the crushed in skull of Asenath is the beginning of the story, out of all of the horrible teenage experiences waking up in a decomposed body is a cool idea, there’s a lot more too it than that, the seeds are all there, it is deep, An Exchange Of Souls by Barry Pain, H.B. Drake’s The Remedy, The Parasite by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, great minds think alike, a devotee of subterranean magic, a hypnotist with the power to transfer her consciousness, out of body experience, Trinidad, a psychic vampire story, bank robbery, a phial of acid, the Asenath analogue, without the final transference, a popular trope at that time, spritualism and seances, mesmerism, animal magnetism, The Facts In The Case of M. Valdemar by Edgar Allan Poe, he totally glub glubbed, Cool Air, ammonia baths, staying alive for love, he’s been dead for years, if you read a lot of Lovecraft you’ll love Providence, she’s raping her own body with the body of a gay man, so inverted through a mirror, the father is a monster, a lot of trans people would be really happy with Ephraim’s tech, suffering, “monsters in human form”, one of the monsters: lich, an evil wizard that uses magic to keep alive, classic high level undead D&D monsters, ancient Scottish for corpse, soul magic, Gary Gygax, Clark Ashton Smith, a phylactery, Edward says to Dan, an object brought back from the underground Maine shoggoth pit, John Dee, the magical objects, opening gateways with quantum physics, this story has it all, a keystone has it all, fetishes?, if this was a bayou story, we dig it, would a great high budget version, Lovecraft is word magic, the definitive adaptation, amazing to hear the voice invoke pages from the Necronomicon, a minimalist palate, brings the images to life, that’s why Lovecraft doesn’t work as well on film, At The Mountains Of Madness, The Thing (1982), Lovecraft thought of himself as a failure because he thought he couldn’t live up to the dreams his stories describe, Lovecraft never wavered from the idea that the only thing interesting is interesting things, who cares about that Henry James sitting room drama when you can pick up a gun and shoot your freind in the head six-times through, it cannot be described, alien sounding vocabulary, don’t think of elephants, so genius, the name of the house that Asenath house, the Derby mansion, a real family in a fake town, she bought the crownishield to shield her crown, on the way back from Maine, they switch,

I do not recall just what my own part of the conversation was, for the baffling alienage of my seatmate filled all my consciousness.

an emotional response,

There was talk of an investigation, but this was dispelled one day when Asenath appeared in the streets and chatted in a sprightly way with a large number of acquaintances

dusting a turning the furnace on once a week, he will need a place to go, on those days, this guy is genius, what makes the spell so great, that’s insane, polished, so many meanings, it’s like he’s occupied by a 17th century genius.

PROVIDENCE, issue 6, by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows

Asenath waits - from PROVIDENCE by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows

PROVIDENCE by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows

The Thing On The Doorstep by H.P. Lovecraft - illustrated by Jesse

THE THING ON THE DOORSTEP

H.P. Lovecraft's The Thing On The Doorstep

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #088

Podcast

The SFFaudio Podcast #088 – Scott and Jesse talk about audiobooks, the recent arrivals and the new releases.

Talked about on today’s show:
Why was Scott gone?, Scott fought off a zombie apocalypse, an angry letter to Santa, Last Call by Tim Powers, Subterranean Press, On Stranger Tides, Bronson Pinchot, “gritty magic realism”, Scott likes lists, top 10 best horror novels, Ghost Story, The Stand, divinationary tarot cards, The Fisher King, “blended weirdness”, StarStruck, The Audio Comics Company, Starstruck’s Wikipedia entry, William Dufris, Simon Vance, Portland (Maine), Simon Vance’s YouTube, Infinivox, Starship Vectors, Stephen Baxter, Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette, Charles Coleman Findlay, Gwenyth Jones, Nancy Kress, Robert Reed, “spacey Science Fiction is very refreshing”, BoingBoing’s “The Beginning Of The End Of A Trend” post – is the death of Paranormal Romance approaching?, Brilliance Audio, The God Engines by John Scalzi, The Geek’s Guide To The Galaxy podcast, The Android’s Dream (as read by Wil Wheaton), Audible.com, Debt Of Bones by Terry Goodkind, the Legends anthology, Frank Muller, The Hedge Knight by George R.R. Martin, The Hedge Knight II, Legends II, Dreamsongs, Pump Six And Other Stories by Paulo Bacigalupi, The Fluted Girl, biopunk, Lord Of The Changing Winds: The Griffin Mage Book One by Rachel Neumeier, epic fantasy, Griffins, hard-boiled YA?, noir YA?, The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You by Harry Harrison, Gregg Margarite, the Stainless Steel rat is wry and slick and rascally, well written candy, West Of Eden, prehistorical Science Fiction, alternate history, Catalyst by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, barking cats?, Scott is a cat person, Parasite Rex by Carl Zimmer, “Mood-altering cat parasites make women friendly and men into jerks”, fantasy, The Runelords: Book Four: The Lair Of Bones by David Farland, Shadowheart by Tad Williams, Dick Hill, The Habitation Of The Blessed by Catherynne M. Valente, Prester John, immortality, She: Who Must Be Obeyed by H. Rider Haggard, “the literal tree of knowledge”, A Dirge For Prester John, Patient Zero by Jonathan Maberry, “the fate of the world is always hanging in the balance” ,The Walking Dead TV vs. The Walking Dead comic, “a zombie movie that never ends”, Robert Kirkman‘s plan, reading contest, Robert Kirkman’s Invincible, upcoming readalongs: Gulliver’s Travels and Oath Of Fealty, Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank, On The Beach by Nevil Shute, Wil Patton, Neon Rain by James Lee Burke, Heart Of Darkness, Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack The Ripper, Time For The Stars, Will Patton, Richard Matheson, Somewhere In Time, Ross Macdonald, The New Adventures Of Mike Hammer, Stacey Keach, Max Allan Collins, SS-GB by Len Deighton, Fatherland, Eric S. Rabkin, “I don’t want to say I like Nazis”.

Posted by Jesse Willis