Re: All Flee The Vocab Quiz

So, let’s see. “Shoggoths in Bloom” cast an admiring eye on squamous creatures. “Dark Heaven” offered mystical squamous creatures. Well, actually, neither of them were really squamous even if they were creatures. No, for real squamous horror, you need to go back to a Podcastle miniature form last fall called “All Flee the Vocab Quiz,” […]

Re: The Grand Cheat

“The Grand Cheat,” by Hilary Moon Murphy is a charming deal with the deva story, where not only do we find a loophole, the god is forced to enforce it. If there’s a contract, that’s even better. As the narrator observes in the first line: A contract is only two people, each doing his damnedest […]

Re: Fear of Rain

While listening to a reading of “Fear of Rain,” by Robert T. Jeschoneck, I was immediately drawn in by Aphrodite, a girl raised by Mr. Flood to drown Johnstown yet again. I liked that crazy old coot, Mr. Flood. The story is told with wonderful description, vivid magic, and a building tension. And it was […]

Re: The Ant King

I seem to be a Benjamin Rosenbaum fan. I enjoyed listening to the silly, dotcom picaresque of “The Ant King: A California Fairy Tale” from the absurd beginning. Sheila split open and the air was filled with gumballs. Yellow gumballs. This was awful for Stan, just awful. He had loved Sheila for a long time, […]

Re: The Tooth Fairy

Telling us a variant on Pratchett’s multiple tooth fairies, “The Tooth Fairy,” by Jeffrey Valka sounds exactly like the absurd thing a father tells his kids just to mess with them. Like Calvin’s Dad. You might feel like you’ve heard this sort of thing before, and then the last line of the story turns the […]

Re: Pahwakhe

In an atmospheric reading that casts a spell on you, “Pahwakhe” by Gord Sellar brings you into the borderlands between magical thinking and ghost stories. The narrator is the chief of a tribe that lives on a shore rich in salmon and blackberries. He is a wealthy man, and his greatest possession, the one thing […]

Re: Giant

One thing about stories based on folk tales is you can generally count on the reader to know the original and fill in the gaps. For example, when I heard “Giant,” by Stephanie Burgis on PodCastle, I recognized the narrator as a cousin of the giant from Jack and Beanstalk or one of many wizards […]

Re: Directions

For those of you who are interested in second person fiction, there’s a curious little story available on PodCastle called “Directions,” by Caleb Wilson. It’s a flash piece that lives and dies by the ingenuity of its creation and beauty of description, as it tells you how to embark on a journey into a strange […]