horror – Page 18

The SFFaudio Podcast #320 – READALONG: The Cosmic Puppets by Philip K. Dick

Podcast

The SFFaudio Podcast #320 – Jesse, Paul, and Marissa talk about The Cosmic Puppets by Philip K. Dick

Talked about on today’s show:
1957, 1983, early Philip K. Dick, A Glass Of Darkness, a Biblical reference, written prior to Solar Lottery, revision, refinement, rewrite, Ace Doubles, Sargasso Of Space, is this book a lot smarter than we are?, an ambitious book, Persian mythology, European publications, Virginia, Beamer’s Knob, why is this set in rural Virginia?, a Virginia novel, anywhere USA, PKD lived in D.C. as a kid, returning to your hometown, The Commuter by Philip K. Dick, collapsing the wavefront (?), a different couch, also a baby and a wife, the park and the cannon and “the Stars and Bars”, recreating the park, Ted’s superpower is a good memory, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, Men In Black, Lilo & Stitch, my mere existence is my superpower, Ted saves the universe, the harpy wife, dispelling the Ahriman’s illusion, when only the town drunk agrees with you…, less doubt than usual, a pat ending, a typical Philip K. Dick character leaving the dull wife, he’s going to see her everywhere, Upon The Dull Earth, The Odyssey, bringing a dead wife back to life, she inhabits the bodies of everyone he meets, Being John Malkovich, everybody is Malkovich, what is the wife doing in this book?, phone calls can get through the barrier, a plot device, she’s the harridan wife, Stephen Brust’s characters martial problems, a dirty and sweaty wife, a passive aggressive way to get a divorce, he’s not present in the conversations, is Mary already manipulating him?, eighteen before …. how did Mary do this?, why mommy and daddy can’t live together, sluggy pus monster, a Lovecraftian shoggoth, this is Philip K. Dick’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth with a positive spin, the Dagon movie, Stuart Gordon, not an SF novel, not a typical fantasy novel, mythological fantasy?, more Neil Gaiman, fantasy horror, like the horror world in Eye In The Sky, Katamari Damacy, Expendable (aka He Who Waits) by Philip K. Dick is a kind of joke story, insects in a war with spiders, our allies the birds, The Outer Limits episode ZZZZZ, a honeytrap!, if Dick had been more of a horror writer, reality distortion, Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field, changing the reality of the world around you with your personality, all children have the superpower of imagination … then loose them as they grow up, action figures and dolls, unless you play role playing games, a consensual participatory hallucination, The Days Of Perky Pat by Philip K. Dick, Chew-Z, in game gold (bought using real world money) to buy things for your sims, League Of Legends, “skins”, virtual goods is a billion dollar business, a kind of a trap, we are manipulated by other people’s perceptions of us, a smart book, the wanderers, The Faith Of Our Fathers, competing realities, Flow My Tears The Policeman Said, meeting a girl who is an avatar of a god, this is a completely different kind of faith, false gods, Galactic Pot-Healer, Ohrmazd, ghosts, aren’t there any wanderers where you’re from?, rotting in the walls, the drunk, Zoroastrianism, The Builder by Philip K. Dick, the ultimate review of The Cosmic Puppets by Philip K. Dick, how would this book be appreciated in Iran?, a goddess with black hair, renewal, “Mary and Peter are in fact engaged in a low-intensity supernatural proxy war”, the forces of deception and corruption vs. clarity and sunlight, Ahrimati as a soil fertility goddess, the overturned logging truck scene, stopping time and boasting about it, Mary’s first interactions with Ted Barton, a real Mary and a golem of Ahrimati, the novel is a bit undercooked, golems for the gods, golems making golems, making men out of clay and women out of men made out of clay, Prometheus, religions as by the Brothers Grimm, Prometheus and Pandora’s box, Shiva and death metal, an essay by Barb Morning Child on The Cosmic Puppets, in the age of Wikipedia, a worthwhile book, how early is it?, too dualistic and too pat, by year of composition, The Cosmic Puppets is Dick’s 5th composed novel, height of his powers, The Man In The High Castle, Galactic Pot-Healer is Dick’s best novel (according to Jesse), a British-American cold war, L. Ron Hubbard’s Fear, when the IRS went up against the Church of Scientology, all of L. Ron Hubbard’s fiction are holy texts

Satellite Science Fiction, December 1956 - A Glass Of Darkness by Philip K. Dick

Urania 280 - La Citta Sostituita A GLASS OF DARKNESS by Philip K. Dick
The Cosmic Puppets by Philip K. Dick - illustration by Ed Valigursky

Les Pantins Cosmiques by Philip K. Dick

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #312 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: Soft by F. Paul Wilson

Podcast

The SFFaudio Podcast #312 – Soft by F. Paul Wilson; read by Fred Heimbaugh. This is an unabridged reading of the story (34 minutes) followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Tamahome, and Fred.

Talked about on today’s show:
Humphrey Bogart, reading at school, Jesse’s job, Korean academy (Hagwon), enrichment, H.P. Lovecraft, writing poems about ghosts, Tiger moms, Korean Hogwarts, a period piece, the 5″ black&white TV screen, an emergency television?, a Casio LCD Walkman sized TV, body horror, tentacles, the rats are people?, a TV adaptation?, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, the ending, what’s happened to George, clinging to their immunity, two weighted drapes, repopulating the Earth, 1950s actors, Protecting Project Pulp, Sex Slaves Of The Dragon Tong, Edgar Rice Burroughs, pulp era racism, Edgar Allan Poe, black people are conspicuously absent from most of Edgar Allan Poe’s writings, Poe’s only interested in the deaths of beautiful women, is F. Paul Wilson libertarian?, what happens after the story’s end?, not many are left alive, The Walking Dead, the empty city, i09’s apocalyptic, zombie stories, World War Z, a partial zombie story, the introduction from Between Time and Terror edited by Robert Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowicz, and Martin H. Greenberg, the allegorical treatment of the AIDS epidemic, New York City, Cary Grant, what is Brad Pitt’s catchphrase, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the hidden McBain movie in The Simpsons, watching movies on TV, a rumpus room?, the dying living room, reviving the living room?, you’re all alone together, Merlin, so ’80s, the Star Wars movies, what happened?, ’70s movies are now incomprehensible, we need training to appreciate old movies, the difference between the Watchmen movie and the Watchmen comic, new RoboCop vs. old RoboCop, V For Vendetta, Hugo Weaving’s performance as V, Fred’s kids, they can never a Jedi be, Yoda is wrong about everything, Dr. Smith from Lost In Space, David Brin, the nostalgia of old movies as a way of escaping the horrible pain of reality, an uncomfortable feeling of liking apocalyptic stories, weirdly self-flattering, zmobies are the force of nature we refuse to acknowledge, Robert J. Sawyer, the medical cure for death is coming, denying death vs. embracing death, Night Of The Living Dead, a memento mori, this story is about Viagra, an episode of Senifeld, …what was left of my legs, a great first line, a newscaster still out there, they’re all Jell-O in their apartment buildings, the Libertarian streak, does he have the cure, Ray Kurzweil, the basic premise of all life so far discovered in the universe, no matter how many pills he takes, fish oil revolutionized Fred’s life, a more wide ranging curiosity, fishy burps, its a pill of course its good for me!

Still Life With A Skull

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #310 – READALONG: Eye In The Sky by Philip K. Dick

The SFFaudio Podcast #310 – Jesse, Paul, and Marissa talk about Eye In The Sky by Philip K. Dick

Talked about on today’s show:
1957, more Dick than non-Dick, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, Valis, Dick off the rails, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, a Bevatron is a thing, if you die in an unreal world does it have gravitas?, the gravitas comes with escape, puzzle solving vs. mortal peril, simulated lives, anime, Ergo Proxy, the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Inner Light“, the days of episodic TV, The Star by Arthur C. Clarke, eight worlds?, religious, Victorian world, horror world, communist world, mental beliefs, Mysterium by Robert Charles Wilson, gnostic Christianity, Bábism, Bahá’í religion, Harry Turtledove, Yazidis, the connection to languages, Hamilton’s religiosity, Ohm’s Law, a car manual as a prayer book, the whole place gets damned, angels, a cartoon of the Victorians, a horse wearing trousers, a cow did something very natural, abolishing, censorship world, the narrator, deleting things from the universe, metals!, they’ll kill the universe, the Star Trek: The Next Generation “Remember Me“, Delirious (1991), a house that eats people, the carpet licked them back, a consensual hallucination, role-playing game style, Chapter 14, the walls sweated saliva, The Twilight Zone: The Movie, It’s a Good Life by Jerome Bixby, banished to cartoon world, excrete some buttons on the back porch, a man-hater, middle-aged man dandruff, seeing miracles everywhere, seeing everyone as a predator, the cat!, Ninny Numbcat, a kind of peristaltic wave, “praying that it could be killed”, the most horrific thing ever, the Damon Knight story Four In One, gestalt, projecting on to the world, poor people, very odd, the Freudian psychology of it, a perverse pleasure, one of Dick’s themes, sexless creatures, playing records as a euphemism, wives are pretty rare, Dick’s perfect woman, being a communist, so McCarthyistic, the Red Scare, the super-patriots are the most easily manipulated, Total Recall, an errant earwig, oh heavens!, just a co-incidence, are they still trapped in the Bevatron?, how they make anime show titles, random, why do they keep looking at their food?, confusing and mysterious, René Descartes, cogito ergo sum, ergo = therefore, Django Wexler, boring and illogical, stilted conventions?, visual grammar, Yes Minister, the economy in The Fellowship Of The Ring, no anime Jesse has seen has an economy, gold pressed latinum, making the viewer at ease with thigh length boots, trapped in a universe that makes no sense, Skiffy and Fanty, Ghost In The Shell, Akira, Akira Kurosawa, Summer Wars, The Wings of Honnêamise, a weird logic, the Electronics Development Agency, phone lines to God, the visit to God, a Fall, the mundanity of Earth, the Book of Acts, inflating and deflating worlds, The Father-Thing, Invaders From Mars, The Hanging Stranger, feeling sexy, enjoying the prudish world, storks!, Santa Claus style lies, sublimating the urge for sex, the bowerbird, animal art, Shakespearean sonnets are about seduction, a playful book, a day off of work to take a cat to the pet show, a spinning-up of a world, rejecting the premises, Stranger Than Fiction (2006), Emma Thompson.

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #306 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Fall Of The House Of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe

Podcast

Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall Of The House Of Usher
The SFFaudio Podcast #306 – The Fall Of The House Of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe; read by Mike Vendetti. This is an unabridged reading of the story (49 minutes) followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Julie Davis, Bryan Alexander, and Mike Vendetti

Talked about on today’s show:
LibriVox.org, Audible.com, a Reader’s Digest version, a ponderous vocabulary, prolixity, Poe the hoaxer, the part of him that invented the mystery short story, a corpse flower, this is what Lovecraft does, “he’s done his research!”, words made by mad men, mapping the elephant’s outline, the movies, the comics, the Wikipedia entry, The Haunted Palace by H.P. Lovecraft, the Roger Corman movie, the poem is the outline for the story, the history of the house of usher, dead trees with white trunks, New Jersey, the lutes well tuned law, porphyrogene – “born to the purple”, synecdoche, a photo negative, upside down and inverted, golden banners, the fungi, The Tell Tale Heart, The Bells, a republic society in love with aristocracy and royalty, The Masque Of The Red Death is a dystopia, Hop Frog, “its beautiful … but horrible things happen”, John Buchan, broken off pieces of themselves, Thomas A. Shippey, the Vatican astronomer, no titles allowed anymore, Queen Elizabeth II, Br. Guy Consolmagno, absentee royalty, a super-mix, “evil things in robes of sorrow”, entombed, equating architecture and person, you can’t separate Roderick from his sister, “I heard it man”, why did he dare not speak?, buried alive, twins and twinning, the 1989 adaptation of The Fall Of The House Of Usher, why they can’t just tell the story in adaptations, this is hospice care, was Roderick tormented by his twin sister?, I see a skull, the house is a skull, the trees are ribs or arm bones, a ghost, dying of old age, reason, rationality, Guy de Maupassant’s Who Knows, the furniture represents the faculties, the end of The Life Of Pi, the miasma, an unhealthy atmosphere, in awe of Poe, Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor, the Usher stump, the stump of the tree of Jesse, a tottering mind, everything’s lined with copper, a Frankenstein motif, a long family line of incest, “it had put forth no enduring branch”, “so lain”, viewing it as a story about incest, set in the location of Hammer Horror, Middle Lovecraft, seeing Lovecraft through Poe, a cyclopean vocabulary, H.P. Lovecraft’s Favorite Weird Tales edited by Douglas A. Anderson, crazy complicated sentences, Walden by Henry David Thoreau, CraftLit, the prologue to The Scarlet Letter, reading Poe aloud, Supernatural Horror In Literature, oral cadence, the very summits of artistry, fictional miniaturists, Ligeia, another dead woman story, so Lovecraft, he loves his architecture, “sharing a single soul”, the crack, “the eye of a scrutinizing observer”, laughing out loud, the unnamed narrator is of the same class as Roderick, context for the story, science stories, buried alive stories, The Pit And The Pendulum, sense experience, again New Jersey, Italy, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, weird fiction out to wazoo, why do they do that?, demented messed up stories, Young Goodman Brown, Rappaccini’s Daughter, supernatural elements, sense experience, an utter depression of soul, the after dream of the reveler upon opium, the dropping of the veil, the veil of dreams, the after-dream is after the dream?, the veil is beautiful, a shout-out to Thomas de Quincey, crawling fungi, red-litten windows, “laugh but smile no more”, coffin worms, creeping into the crypt to often, The Conqueror Worm, a foreshadowing, reasons for laughter vs. reasons for smiling, the hideous throng, Usher II by Ray Bradbury, premature burial, Buried (2010), The Death of Olivier Bécaille by Emile Zola, Weird Tales, Poe is a hilarious writer, punning and japing, Mad Trist by Sir Launcelot Canning, Dead Families 101, How To Repair Your Doomed House, The Man Who Collected Poe by Robert Bloch, wacky moments, The Cask Of Amontillado, deGrave wine, The Tomb by H.P. Lovecraft, Jervas Dudley as one of the Usher descendants, a lot more Poey, there are not a lot of sisters in Lovecraft, The Moon Pool by A. Merritt, The Moon Bog by H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, comparing Poe to Lovecraft, The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym Of Nantucket, The Dreams In The Witch House, the novella (short story) vs. the novel, it starts off as a horror tale, What The Moon Brings, Ireland, a little bit ushery,

The Fall Of The House Of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe

Pocket Classics - The Fall Of The House Of Usher
House Of Usher (1960)

Mark Summers illustration for The Fall Of The House Of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #305 – AUDIOBOOK: The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson

Podcast

The SFFaudio Podcast #305 – The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson, read by Mark Nelson.

This UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOK (18 hours 40 minutes) comes to us courtesy of LibriVox.

The Night Land was first published in 1912.

For our discussion of The Night Land check out episode #288

The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson

Review of The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson from the Western Mail (Perth), June 1, 1912

Posted by Jesse Willis

Review of The Dream-quest of Unknown Kadath by H.P. Lovecraft

Thursday, December 11, 2014 Jenny

SFFaudio Review

The Dream-quest of Unknown Kadath

By H. P. Lovecraft; Performed by Jim Roberts

Publisher: Brilliance Audio
[UNABRIDGED] – 6 hours

Themes: / cats / ghouls / dark shapes that meep / a lost city / horror /

Publisher summary:

Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvelous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it.” Randolph Carter embarks on an epic quest across a world beyond the wall of sleep in search of an opulent and mysterious sunset city. When he prays to the gods of dream to reveal the whereabouts of this magical city, they do not answer, and his dreams stop altogether. Undaunted, Carter resolves to go to Kadath, where the gods live, and beseech them in person. However, no one has ever been to Kadath, and no one even knows how to get there—but that won’t stop Randolph Carter from trying.

We all love the quest story. Without some sort of a quest, the story falls into introspective navel gazing, and becomes as interesting as reading about someone’s cup of tea growing cold near a rain-soaked window overlooking a drab landscape of bent grass fading in the waning light of gloaming. Quests are good, in literature, games, and life. H.P. Lovecraft gives us a quest, and I liked it, for the most part. Those of you familiar with Lovecraft will undoubtedly nod your chin when I suggest that this story is a little weighted with those wonderfully complex names of gods, of places, of rites practiced in secret darkness. If you can overlook the name thing and concentrate on the story, it’s nice enough. While I don’t believe this is Lovecraft at his best, I do feel it’s a must for those Lovecraft enthusiasts.The audiobook is roughly four and a half hours, and I’ll admit it, I increased the speed by a factor of three, sometimes four. Jim Roberts is the narrator, and I feel this is an example of mismanaged casting. Roberts is a competent narrator, and I have enjoyed some of his readings in the past. But his voice sounds like your grandfather’s brother, which is just fine if the narrative follows such a gentlemen. But it doesn’t work well when the protagonist is for all intensive purposes, a younger man full of vigor and drive. It’s a minor grouse, but I never managed to rid myself of this incongruity between reader and main character.

Posted by Casey Hampton.