Tales to Terrify Show #56: William Markley O’Neal

Introduction:
A few words about the film, “Surveillance” 0:01:25
Tour of the Abattoir, “Let the Right One In” and “Let Me In,” Mike Allen and Shalon Hurlburt
Love, Luck, and Lollipops, Aunt Sal 0:30:33
Sensory Desolation: by William Markly O’Neal 0:33:50 X/X
Summary:

Listen to the episode at TalestoTerrify.com

Sensory Desolation

Short Story by William Markly O’Neal
Read for Tales to Terrify #56 by Mike Boris

Tales to Terrify Show #55: Jasper Bark Andy Remic

Introduction:

Taking the Piss by Jasper Bark: X/X

Horror Show by Andy Remic: Story X/X

Summary:

Listen to the episode at TalestoTerrify.com

Horror Show

Short Story by Andy Remic 0:19:04
Read for Tales to Terrify #55 by Ashley Storrie

Taking the Piss

Short Story by Jasper Bark
Read for Tales to Terrify #55 by Alasdair Stuart

Tales to Terrify Show #54: Kaaron Warren

A Tour of the Abattoir: Mike Allen's column has been a lot more hit-or-miss for me
The Gaze Dogs of Nine Waterfall by Kaaron Warren
: X/X

A short discussion of The Natural History of Man and bit more about Kaaron Warren

Summary:

Listen to the episode at TalestoTerrify.com

The Gaze Dogs of Nine Waterfall

Short Story by Kaaron Warren
Read for Tales to Terrify #54 by Kim Lakin-Smith

Tales To Terrify #53: Harry Shannon

Introduction: A few more minutes advertising the book and Spider Robinson's workshop.  Entirely skippable, but short enough.

Horror 101:  The House and the Brain by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Haunted House Story by Charles Dickens, "The Alchemist" by H. P. Lovecraft, and Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.

Haunted House Story is an anthology edited by Dickens, Lucia more-or-less pans the collection with the exception Dickens' own contributions, looking at the contents I can't say I'm surprised, I don't know any of these people.  Would have liked to see more discussion about the other stories.

Lucia does give us quite a bit of discussion about The House and the Brain, and while I've never read Bulwer-Lytton more than an over-wrought sentence or two, he makes it sound interesting enough that I might come around to it some day.  Lucia talks about this novel as an early example of the supernatural-detective subgenre.  The idea that you have a rationalist who refuses to believe in ghosts, but finds magic spells a more rational explanation for a haunting amuses me, seems somehow less rational than Carnacki the Ghostfinder.

The Lovecraft story is pretty trivial, as is the treatment of it here.  A plot summary, nothing more.  The Bronte discussion isn't much more detailed, although I'm glad to see it included in a discussion of these sort of possibly-possibly not supernatural haunted house stories.

Violent Delights by Harry Shannon:  A realistic horror story about a horror writer dying by being hit with a car.  The driver won't save him lest she get in trouble.  The obnoxious voice the narrator gives for the girl is great, but overall I wasn't all that entertained with the story.  It has a nice moment or two, but mostly empty calories.  2.5/5

What do you think?: A discussion of the ideal length of the podcast.  One of the reasons I love Tales to Terrify more than Starship Sofa is the can-actually-listen-to-this-in-one-sitting length.  I'm glad to hear they aren't changing that here, and I'm excited by the prospect of multi-episode serials, however they choose to make that work.  I'd much rather a multi-part story than a 3-hour episode.

Summary:  Horror 101 is the most enjoyable recurring column in Tales to Terrify and I am always glad to see an instalment.  This one is pretty minor aside from the Bulwer-Lytton discussion and even then I don't feel like I learned much about the history of the genre or thought as much about classic books as is sometimes the case.  This was a mediocre episode of Horror 101 and a mediocre episode of Tales to Terrify.  Nothing was objectionable, but I'm not terribly impressed with this one.

Listen to the episode at TalestoTerrify.com

Violent Delights

Short Story by Harry Shannon
Read for Tales to Terrify #53 by Joe Sammarco

Shakespeare-based titles are done-to-death in Science Fiction and Fantasy but I haven't seen that many in Horror.  Horror seems more the genre for Samuel Taylor Coleridge or assorted fairy tale references, but I'm surprised we haven't seen more focus on the dark aspects of The Bard.  Sadly, we don't get any of that here either, just a flurry of Shakespeare references toward the end that is fairly clever, if not particularly interesting.

For the most part, this is just a story of  a man dying and being annoyed by the girl who hit him with her car and refuses to save him, preferring to cover up her crime by disposing of the body instead.  It drags on a bit, I keep expecting the protagonist to die and he just keeps dragging on.  The very last lines were good, but would have been nice if we'd gotten to them faster.  And if the Shakespeare connection had seemed less trivial.

I'm also not sure why the protagonist has to be a horror writer, it comes across as a bit of cliché without adding anything to the story.  It gives a lot of time for the protagonist to focus on his regrets about dying and his overly-disgraced career, but almost nothing about the absurdity of committing murder to avoid a DUI arrest.

2.5 Shakespeare quotes out of 5.

Tales to Terrify #52: Damir Salkovic

Introduction:  A brief bio of Tales to Terrify cover-artist Skeet Scienski, a sales pitch for the Tales to Terrify book and Spider Robinson's workshop.  Both these pitches get a little old with the repetition but they aren't too long and they help keep the podcast afloat, so whatever.

A brief update on the mirror-universe adventures of Larry's cat lightens the mood before the one and only feature in this episode:

Triumph by Damir Salkovic: Neufeld is an amazing narrator for this story, so much so that I'm tempted to seek out his Librivox recordings.  The story itself is fun fluff.  If you like the sound of Nazi occultism with a Lovecraftian bent, you'll enjoy it.  If not, this won't convince you.  3/5

Summary:  A short, decent episode. Ten minutes of dull fluff before getting to the good stuff is not too much for me (particularly from Larry Santoro), but if it is, there's always the fast-forward button.


Listen to the episode at TalestoTerrify.com

Triumph

Short Story by Damir Salkovic
Read for Tales to Terrify #52 by Bob Neufeld

Alternate history in which the Nazis summon Lovecraftian entities to help them win WWII.

A touch predictable; the general direction of the bad end the Nazis are coming to is visible a long way off, but the specifics are interesting.  More interesting than that is the fun pulpy section detailing the discovery of ancient texts man-was-not-meant-to-read.  I've always had a soft-spot for Nazi occultism stories, and making them Lovecraftian is not a bad direction.  Fun Nazi junk food.

3 Reichsführer chips out of 5.

Tales to Terrify #51: Thomas Smith

I've been a fan of Tales To Terrify, Starship Sofa's creepy little sister podcast, since episode #1.  I hope to actually write a review for that some time, but they wrapped up their first year recently and I'm catching up.  Let's review a whole bunch of episodes in a row.  First up, Episode #51, December 28, 2012.

Auld Lang Syne: Larry reads a classic holiday song as poetry, this is "Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot" for those who don't know.  It makes surprisingly good poetry in the dulcet voice of Larry Santoro, no real horror connection, but it's a nice way to set the mood, and a nice opening to the episode.

The Heart Is a Determined Hunter by Thomas Smith: An okay-but-not-great story about a man who returns to the site of his wife's death.  2.5/5

Mahler Faces Trans-Dimensional Terror: Cute little anecdote about Larry's cat defending his family from mirror-universe incursions.  Maybe it's just that I like cats, but I can't help smiling at this, and the horror spin Larry puts on it.

The Fence at Yard’s End: Another creepy little poem from Larry.  Not bad.

Summary: I can't say I'm as down on New Year's as Larry is, but he gives us something to think about and a break from the generic cheerful sentiment is always nice this time of year (I originally did listen to this on New Year's Eve.)  The story wasn't bad but I won't go pushing it as the story to get people into ghost stories, I feel the same about the poem.  The real draws to this episode are Larry's opening song reading and the talk about his cat.  So like the story, I wouldn't recommend this episode to get someone into the show, but I hardly feel my time has been wasted, thanks to the skills of an excellent host.

Listen to the episode at TalestoTerrify.com

The Heart Is a Determined Hunter

Short Story by Thomas Smith
Read for Tales to Terrify #51 by Drake Vaughn

A man returns to the resort where his wife died in a terrible fire.  This is basically a classic ghost story with creepy hotel and a ghost-wife who wants her husband to stay with her forever.

It's a bit predictable and dull overall but eventually comes around to the theme of being hung up on the past that is central to most ghost stories, but done in a more interesting way.  Then it over-explains everything.  There is an interesting take on ghost stories here, hidden among a story I swear I've read 20 times before, but it's explained to death in a way that robs the story of much of its mystery.

Quite a bit like a much a less-poetic, less unusual version of Ramsey Campbell's "Above the World".

2.5 Ghost Wives out of 5.

起狮，行礼 (Rising Lion — The Lion Bows)

Short Story by Zen Cho
Read for Podcastle by Tracey Yuen
Original text published at Strange Horizons, March 2011

A British Lion Dance troupe use their performances as a cover for secret ghostbusting missions. This is a warm, humorous ghost story, with lots of Chinese and Malaysian culture and some good comedic musings on why exactly magical lions enjoy cabbage so much. The ending is sweet, not really surprising, but nice. The value of this story is not in suspense, but in happy feelings and wry humor.

3.5 cabbages out of 5.

The Blood Garden

Short Story by Jesse Livingston
Read for Pseudopod by Chris Reynaga

Fed up with his college friends' pedantic semantic arguments about about symbolism, Matthew wanders away from an analysis of a fictional poem, and as he wanders the streets at night, he wanders into the poem itself.

I've had many frustrating conversations of this sort myself, where argument over a definition prevents us from ever getting to the substance of the debate. The discussion and the frustration with other people's pedantry rings particularly true, but it's nice that the story flashes to Matthew's friends after he leaves, and shows us that they aren't complete tools.

Matthew feels isolated, fed up with his friends and left alone to deal with the death of his mother. He's jealous of his friends and their presumably cushier lives, he's angry, sad, and isolated. The magical, poetic garden in which he finds comfort is dark and violent and the images will haunt me.

I've felt what Matthew feels, the isolation and powerlessness, frustration with your friends and loneliness and rage. Livingston evokes these emotions so well, and I'm in love with the image of the garden. I only wish the poem he referenced were real. It's compared to Kubla Khan and the poetic description contains a long section from the end of Coleridge's poem, with "She was alone when she died" presumably interjected by Matthew to make the poem more fitting, and more sinister.

4 animals in the trees out of 5.

Kubla Khan or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment.

Poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Free online and in the public domain.

I like to play the amateur critic, especially with new stories that tend to receive few, if any, reviews. Kubla Khan has a Wikipedia page over 11,000 words long, with 162 citations. That's longer than many novelettes I review. I don't want to write a doctoral dissertation on this poem, and so I'm unwilling to engage in debate with nearly 200 years of critics, including T. S. Eliot. Read the Wikipedia page for in depth analysis. Or don't. But I do urge you to read this classic poem, and read it again if it has been a while. It's worth your time.

I'm blogging about it because I did reread it recently, inspired by Jesse Livingston's "The Blood Garden" over on Pseudopod. And I quite enjoy this poem, although it isn't my favorite. The imagery is my favorite in all of Coleridge's work that I've read (admittedly not as much as I'd like, but after the Big Three of Kubla Khan, Ancient Mariner, and Christabel I've never really been enthralled enough by his writing to keep reading much of it.) It's not just my weakness for the gothic, I like the rhythm of these poems better as well.

And that's really what my love of Kubla Khan comes down to. It opens all Romantic and green but the second and third sections achieve this breathless, frantic quality. The rhymes and rhythm are exciting. They get your heart beating. In a lot of ways, "Kubla Khan" reminds me of Poe's "The Raven" (I don't read everything in publishing order).

For what it's worth, I'm in the camp that counts "Kubla Khan" as a complete poem. Screw authorial intent, the poem climaxes and then gives us a haunting two-line ending, better than the endings of countless other complete poems. Coleridge is dead, it's no longer a work-in-progress, and he gave us a brilliant ending. I'm not convinced another 400 lines would have done anything but dilute it. Do yourself a favor and read or reread this today. It doesn't take long. And if you're alone, or don't mind looking like a crazy person, read it aloud.

4 pleasure domes out of 5.

Best New Horror

Short Story by Joe Hill

An anthologist growing tired of reading the same old crap finally finds a story that excites him. It's a welcome break from his downward spiraling life, and his quest to find the author and obtain the reprint rights becomes its own kind of horrific odyssey. The conclusion is left open, but I'm convinced he has found some new happiness in the horror, if only in the escape from depression and tedium.

A straight-up scary story, rather than a tale of childhood or sad ghosts, and one I immensely enjoyed. This story plays a lot off common horror tropes, but in a very knowing, metafictional way that I appreciate. I was actually a bit scared by the story-within-the-story, although that isn't the focus, and I don't think I'd like it as much as the narrator did.

4.5 out of 5 of everything is shit. This story is in Sturgeon's last 10%.

The Klepsydra: A Chapter from A Faunary of Recondite Beings

Short Story by Michaela Roessner

Lois Tilton points out some extremely valid problems with the linguistics in her review, and although not knowing what a clepsydra is seems odd for a professor interested in ancient greek, neither thing ruins the story for me. Mainly because it is still weird how the word breaks down, and it still breaks into the right roots (I think), the etymological mystery at the heart of the story is still intact, and I wanted to find the answer.

Roessner creates a new imaginary species, and manages to justify it both linguistically and biologically. It turns out to be a specialized species of Solifugid, if you're curious. The bits toward the end regarding the Pharos lighthouse seem silly at first, but they are justified later with the fate of the Alexandria Gardens caretakers. It still seems fantastic and maybe a bit silly, but by the end this conceit seems a lot more necessary and a lot less uselessly silly.

I am a fan of the academic tone of the whole piece, and the footnotes. I'm not sure I can deal with a minor character being named "Nepenthe Threnody" but for the most part I enjoyed this diversion into a land of academics much more fantastic and at least as fascinating as real life archeology.

3.5 Recondite Beings out of 5.

The Buddy System

Short Story by Don D'Ammassa

A cautionary tale of computer systems destroying the world because we put too much faith in them. The idea of how they do this is a bit different, and good, but the explanation of what the computers do is complete gibberish and comes down to Magical Computers. And yet, there is a technobabble explanation anyway. Better to just admit it's practical magic.

I'm also not a fan of the fact that D'Ammassa names the character "Buddy" just so he can have a cutesy title/name for something. The titular computer system has no connection or thematic resonance in the buddy system we all had forced upon us for elementary school field trips. I don't mind cute names for things, but I like them to be relevant to the story or its themes. This story is called "The Buddy System" simply because it contains a System created by computer programer named Buddy.

And predicting elections with only 2 errors out of 1000 elections is absurd. The data doesn't exist for that quality of model. Maybe it only bugs me because I know a bit too much about polling data and election modeling, but it's one of far too many examples where the computers "extrapolate" data to a level of precision which simply can't exist. It's like he has never heard of Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions.

My big conceptual problem is two-fold:

1. You can't predict the future so accurately because unavoidable measurement error is often more than enough to decide between radically different results.
2. You can't "Interpolate" entirely new, precise information from data that wouldn't be part of the same equation. You physically cannot calculate someone's face from an image of the back of their head.

I've picked more than enough nits here, but the point is, something annoys me about this story every few paragraphs, making it very hard to enjoy.

The author (or, even more improbably the computer programming narrator) is also biased against nerds and our ability to communicate or know things about the real world. Given the readership of Analog, this seems like a mistake. It also stinks of bad 80's movie cliche.

All told, this is an obnoxious computer-induced-end-of-world story which exists purely to say that carpenters are smarter than scientists and policy wonks. Thankfully, the carpenter-wisdom doesn't save the day, but it does wrap up the story with an over-obvious moral. The only redeeming factor is that the last couple pages are oddly gripping despite my annoyances.

2 magical computer algorithms out of 5.

Boxed In

Short Story by Marc-Anthony Taylor
Read for Escape Pod by Barry Haworth

A young boy makes money by letting rich kids "ride" in his brain. They get a thrill out of experiencing the unclean world outside the dome, breathing polluted air, even suffering from illnesses. The kid's sister acts as his pimp.

One day, a very rich girl offers to pay him an enormous sum of money for a ride with unspecified special conditions. She gives him a nice big infodump explaining history and what she wants, then he does it, with life-changing implications, and the story immediately ends.

The first time I listened to the podcast, I had to rewind. It's a sudden ending, not so much open as lacking in story. A long, flashback-filled history of the character and the world leads to a not very exciting adventure in which he has no agency, he's told to do something, does it, END. We never got to see any change in the character. He never made any difficult decisions, what he did can only improve his life, although that can't be said for others, but neither the character nor the reader is given time to think about any of the implications before the story is over.

Most of the action is caused by the two female characters, his sister, and client, both of whom are static and only appear through dialogue, although they are very much the puppetmasters, he is the unquestioning, unthinking puppet. The world is interesting, but nothing new, and the changes it is about to go through go entirely unexplored, as do the changes that led to the current state of affairs.

No character development, no adventure, no real plot. An overused setting where the rich are sealed into domes and the rest of the world is lawless post-apocalypse. Themes of rich versus poor and grass-is-always-greener-on-the-other-side are brought up, but nothing terribly interesting or new is said. The first 2/3 of the story are entirely character study of a boring, puppet-like main character, nothing interesting happening until the last 1/3 or so. Needless to say, I didn't like it.

I think what strikes me most is how much detail and time were spent on the character's largely-irrelevant childhood, only to wrap up the interesting non-flashback adventure/plot in one sentence.

1.5 domed delinquents out of 5.