In time for the Halloween season, Pseudopod has posted a wonderful dark fantasy audiostory. The Heart of Tu’a Halaita by Tara Kolden (read by K.J. Johnson) is the story of a missionary’s encounter with a native god-tree.
“You are a thief,” the native translator repeated. “There are two things my people say about the tree god. The first is that no one who steals from him goes unpunished.”
Heglund’s eyes narrowed. “And what is the other?”
Callala looked at the dirt floor inside the priest’s hut. His voice was quiet. “They say the taste of a man’s blood stirs the heart of Tu’a Halaita. After a single bite, he will have no satisfaction until the whole man is eaten.”
I was immediately engrossed in this story, which would have fit in well with the better stories in the classic Weird Tales pulp. Very cool! The Heart of Tu’a Halaita is available for free download here.
Or you can subscribe to the podcast (with the caveat that many stories are much more graphic than this one) using this feed:
http://feeds.pseudopod.org/Pseudopod
Posted by Dave Tackett.
Edith Nesbit’s classic fantasy novel The Enchanted Castle is a delightful children’s story, but one that is likely to have limited appeal for older listeners. Fantasy scholars, however, will find much of interest in it. Here is an author that C. S. Lewis listed as an influence and this is the story of a magic ring that, at first, seems merely an invisibility ring but turns out to be much more. Peter Eastman, the reader of this public domain audiobook, does a better than average job of handling the near impossible task of doing several different children’s voices.