Pseudopod Reviews

There are going to be a lot of these things, I guess.

I added the Psuedopod feed to round out the Escape Artists set, but I don't read all that much horror, so I don't know what I expect out of listening. It's been kind of up and down with the stories, though I've heard some really good performances. I also seem to have missed more episodes, and I don't know if I just failed to download them or if they simply made no impression.

• No. 73. "Blood, Gridlock and PEZ" by Kevin Anderson (read by KJ Johnson). Unlikely events occur during a dead-stop Los Angeles–San Diego traffic jam. Very well grounded in reality, so much so that I can think back to the story and recall a surprising amount of detail drawn from the listening.
  
  I went back and forth over Johnson's performance. It reminded me of the slacker characters of Brian Posehn. The performance stays deep in Slackville, which I'm a bit conflicted about. I think it's an interesting choice, but I don't know that it fully fits the timeline of the story and its telling. And Johnson does a decent job with a few lines which were clearly never written to be performed.
  
  
• No. 74. "Tumble" by Trent Jamieson (read by Cheyenne Wright). I didn't really get anything out of this story because the performance was so overwrought. Occasionally some evocative text broke free from the gravel-soaked reading, and I liked it. But overall, I had no sense of story. It kind of felt like playing through an untranslated Japanese RPG. Some strange world things that make no sense, and people being very serious about things that could be completely inconsequential.
  
  
• No. 76. "Tales of the White Street Society" by Grady Hendrix (read by Alasdair Stuart). Terrible, terrible, terrible. Why is it that the people who gleefully say that the events described in "Isn't It Ironic" aren't actually are the same people who will defend absolutely everything else as being "satire"? This story is very racist and very classist and it's very apparent that it wants everyone to know "I AM BEING IRONIC" without actually doing anything to present irony. Apparently, I'm supposed to just assume that it's satire because, you know, we're all enlightened and totally not racist 'round here, wink wink. The reading was decent, but giving a British accent to a narrator who is otherwise presumed American complicated matters since the target of the racism was the Irish in the 19th century.
  
  
• No. 78. "In a Right and Proper Place" by Holly Day (read by Christiana Ellis). The crazy old lady in a nice neighborhood sees herself as the nice lady in a crazy old neighborhood. The first thing that struck me about this story is that it sounded like it could be slipped into an episode of This American Life. It sounded conversational, with a blase tone that belied the bizarre text. Ellis did an absolutely amazing job at "throwing away" words. When we talk, we throw away words all the time, and part of making a text sound like actual speech is learning which words to throw away.
  
  With this story, Ellis threw away words with such prevision that it always sounded like I'd missed something. In fact, I started this story during a run, and I was certain I'd missed some important transitions. So I started over from the beginning, when I was stationary, to pay closer attention. Nope, I remembered every word. It was just the performance, telling me that I should already know, generally, what's going on, like it's a part of everyone's daily routine. One of only a few stories where I felt like I got much more by listening to it than I would have by
  
  
• No. 79. "Ice" by Heather Hatch (read by Elie Hirschman). The narration was a little flat, but the characters got annoying fast. The story didn't betray any hint of being interesting. I skipped it.
  
  
• Flash: "The Closet" by Barton Paul Levenson (read by Alasdair Stuart). Some guy buys a closet. There's really not much to the story itself, but Stuart teases out a quiet humor. Not as gob-smacking as "A Right and Proper Place," but this was definitely another story where the performance made a huge difference in bringing something to a story I wouldn't have given much thought to at all.
  
  
• No. 80. "Votary" by MK Hobson (read by Dani Cutler). Creepy girl is creepy. Cutler's performance is critical, maintaining the narrator's point of view that's in stark contrast to what a "normal person" would think. The contrast is what's most intriguing about the story, and it cuts to the heart of the "creepy little girl" idea, where the trappings of strict gender roles are directed at trasgressive targets. But the descriptions of Father reminded me of the Strange Horizons list of "Stories We've Seen Too Often," namely:

  Fatness is used as a signal of evil, dissolution, and/or moral decay, usually with the unspoken assumption that it's completely obvious that fat people are immoral and disgusting. . . . The story spends a lot of time describing, over and over, just how fat a character is, and how awful that is.

  There's a lot of "OMGFAT!" in this story, which perpetuates its own set of stereotypes.
  
  
• Flash: "The Little Match Girl" by Angela Slatter (read by Dani Cutler). "The Little Match Girl" is really more of ojouchan's thing, and I wondered what she would think of it. For myself, I never felt that the components of the story gelled well.
  
  
• Flash: "Scarecrow" by Michele Lee (read by Ben Phillips). Too, too emo. Yes, I know what it refers to. No, that isn't an excuse.
  
  
• No. 104. "The Book in the Earth" by Lavie Tidhar (read by Ralph Waters). Used bookstore conceals ancient magics. This story takes a little while to get going, but when it builds up steam, it's fantastic. Tidhar builds an eccentric cast and Waters does a good job bringing them to life. Unfortunately, the ending goes beyond "ambiguous" and ends up closer to "it was all a dream" along the spectrum of facing the consequences of the story before. But the story before was excellent.

TueNYTX: 4:30.