Author Topic: Pseudopod 136: The Eyes of the Crowd  (Read 7799 times)

Bdoomed

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on: April 03, 2009, 04:30:50 AM
Pseudopod 136: The Eyes of the Crowd

By Bruce Boston

Read by Matthew Wayne Selznick

As rain began to speckle the partitioned windows of the station, an ancient engine groaned into view. Villers soon found himself squeezed into a dingy and narrow car of questionable vintage. Making his way to a window seat, he noted his fellow travelers were exclusively of the lower classes. Peasant women, shapelessly hunched within their shawls. Dark men who drank from bottles concealed in their coats and ate pieces of bread right from the loaf, breaking off the chunks with large, uneven teeth. Scampering children who seemed to belong to no one, or at least recognized no one’s authority.

In his suit and vest, Villers was uncomfortably aware of his relative affluence. He checked his watch chain to make sure it was securely fastened, shifted his billfold so that it was lodged deeply within his breast pocket. As Sophie had once warned him amidst the rumpled sheets of their conjugal bed, “Some people will steal the gold out of your teeth if you give them half a chance!”




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thomasowenm

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Reply #1 on: April 03, 2009, 09:42:44 PM
This one did not quite do it for me.  It's not to say that it was not an interesting concept (a traveler stranded in a town finds things are not what they seem) the first dozen times I came across it.  While it could have overcome the cliche' by  grabbing my attention at the first sentence, and keeping me rivited, it didn't.  The pacing dragged so much in the set-up that I soon was just hoping for vampires, zombies, or mutated albino squids. 

The ending I found left me with more questions than answers and not in a good way either.

Why did they need to follow people around to feed off of their emotions?  Couldn't they just tie them in a basement and torture them for nourishment? 

What of the albinos, did they just say, "Hey, while I'm here I might as well get a job, and help these good folks out."

What was with the cardboard?  The business card?




Listener

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Reply #2 on: April 06, 2009, 12:59:05 PM
Yeah, I felt a little empty... fearovores? Fearivores? Alien creatures that feed on emotions and are inhabiting human bodies? It just seemed too much of a left turn... like, I don't necessarily NEED a left turn lane, but a lot of people drive past a blind driveway the first couple of times.

Excellent reading, however.

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Sgarre1

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Reply #3 on: April 07, 2009, 02:06:22 AM
Excellent story - very Robert Aickman!  To answer questions above - the albinos are previous victims (he looks in the window and is blanched of all color at the end), I don't necessarily know what they were feeding on but it doesn't have to be fear (and they don't have to be aliens), the town buildings (think of the cardboard dresser) and its inhabitants could all be camouflage/puppets for a larger force that feeds on, what, alienation, ostracization?  Who knows?  Whatever it is, torturing people seems much to direct for it.

I don't need to know, as the story worked just fine with the ambiguity.

Thanks for listening

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Ben Phillips

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Reply #4 on: April 14, 2009, 05:31:12 AM
SPOILERS:  To answer the above, as I read it -- the business card he found in his room read "uxurious", and was his assigned role (everyone in the town had one) to be played once his hapless wife joined the fun.  [corrected, thanks]
« Last Edit: June 26, 2009, 09:13:38 AM by Ben Phillips »



eytanz

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Reply #5 on: April 16, 2009, 02:52:27 PM
I enjoyed the story a lot, though I felt there were a bit too many loose ends (the business card being the most extreme, as it really didn't seem to serve any purpose except add a mcguffin). I'm kind of curious what all the other people on the train - the ones who didn't get off at that station - were experiencing when they stopped there.



Loz

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Reply #6 on: April 22, 2009, 10:31:13 AM
Yeah, I have to agree with the other people who said that the story didn't quite work for them, none of the different horror story staples was fully realised (the protagonist having the worst day of their lives that just keeps getting worse, the strange town full of people who aren't exactly human, the oppressive psychogeography etc etc) and didn't come together in an entirely satisfactory manner. At the end I wasn't entirely sure what was going on, but not in a 'leaving things unsaid so your imagination can make it worse' way, rather a 'leaving things unsaid because I'm not explaining myself properly'.

Despite that, I really liked Matthew Wayne Selznick's reading. I can sometimes like a good story poorly narrated, I think this is the only or one of the very few times I've liked a poor story that was very well read.



csrster

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Reply #7 on: June 16, 2009, 07:21:47 AM
The card read "uxorious" not "obsequious", which makes a lot more sense in context. I thought this was a good slow-burner. I was especially impressed with the way Viller's relationship with his absent wife was gradually sketched in until it eventually became central to the story.



Ben Phillips

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Reply #8 on: June 26, 2009, 09:14:54 AM
The card read "uxorious" not "obsequious", which makes a lot more sense in context. I thought this was a good slow-burner. I was especially impressed with the way Viller's relationship with his absent wife was gradually sketched in until it eventually became central to the story.

Thanks -- I corrected my post.  Sometimes I impress myself -- this isn't one of those times!



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Reply #9 on: August 28, 2009, 06:45:33 PM
I liked this one.  Though it was a little slow at the beginning the moods and the oddities of the albino guys kept me interested.  It did leave me a little confused in that I'd thought the "feeding" people were just more of the drained, but that didn't explain why they weren't albino.  Reading others' comments, the majority of the townspeople are not at all human, while the albinos are the drained folk, so that makes more sense.

This definitely had a Stephen King feel to it, with the sleepy town and its dark secrets.  At least the protagonist in this case wasn't a fiction writer...



Fenrix

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Reply #10 on: July 06, 2010, 09:06:23 PM
I found this one to be favorable to Lovecraft with its unusual townsfolk and slowly growing dread. The reference to the inbred look of the townsfolk felt stylistically and structurally in line with the fishy folk of Shadow over Innsmouth or the monkey lovers of Appalachia (Lurking Fear?). This story really grew on me as the story progressed and I was able to absorb the style.

The role card from the hotel would be better received in text rather than audio. In text, the reader could pause, flip to the dictionary, be puzzled, and then receive the effect of the reveal. In audio, it loses all its punch and gets glossed over as an oddity. Additional exposition of a sentence or two on the card would have improved the audio version of the story.

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Millenium_King

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Reply #11 on: July 06, 2010, 10:50:28 PM
Yeah, this was actually one of the few I could not get through.  The beginning was so sloooooow that I eventually tuned out and gave up on it.  I've mentioned this before, but stories in which the first 50-75% is just character development with little hint of plot usually bore me.  These sort of "Lovecraftian" stories would do well to examine just how the master keeps the tension high, even as he starts with a slow boil.

"The Shadow Over Innsmouth" may be a fair comparison to this one, but contrast exactly how each story opens.  This one: a man is on a train, waxes about his dull job and misses his connection.  Innsmouth: the insinuation that the events of the story resulted in a massive government cover-up and the deployment of super-advanced submarines to destroy what, heretofore had been, a rather unremarkable reef.  Which one grabs your attention more?

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Sgarre1

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Reply #12 on: July 07, 2010, 02:48:45 AM
As with "The Leviathan", I think it's a mistake to fault this story for not measuring up to Lovecraft when it doesn't seem to be trying to emulate that style.  "Stranger arrives in town of oddballs" is a fairly venerable start to many a horror story in many different styles (Blackwood's "Ancient Sorceries", etc.).  This story's Robert Aickman touches felt very much like his "The House of the Russians" to me, and Aickman's style is slow psychological boil, not pulp front-loading.  There are many ways to skin a cat.

Thanks for listening.

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Fenrix

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Reply #13 on: July 07, 2010, 01:56:52 PM
I'm not familiar with Aickman's work. What would you recommend to someone considering sampling his oeuvre?

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Millenium_King

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Reply #14 on: July 07, 2010, 06:43:45 PM
As with "The Leviathan", I think it's a mistake to fault this story for not measuring up to Lovecraft when it doesn't seem to be trying to emulate that style.  "Stranger arrives in town of oddballs" is a fairly venerable start to many a horror story in many different styles (Blackwood's "Ancient Sorceries", etc.).  This story's Robert Aickman touches felt very much like his "The House of the Russians" to me, and Aickman's style is slow psychological boil, not pulp front-loading.  There are many ways to skin a cat.

I am not implying that this story (or "The Leviathan") is deliberately trying to emulate Lovecraft (although the argument could be made).  I am implying that this story deals with similar subject matter to another story (in this case "Shadow Over Innsmouth").  However, "Innsmouth" succeeds whereas I thought this one failed.  I was simply pointing out how one of the classical greats overcame the problems that caused this one to stumble.  Had it been similar to something by someone else, I would have pointed that out as well.

The problem with the "slow boil" story is that when the water is cold, it's not interesting.  Retaining the reader's interest during that time is difficult.  I don't think this story accomplished it.  If I was familiar with Aikman, I might have pointed out how he succeeded at reataining a reader's interest during the "slow boil" as well.

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Sgarre1

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Reply #15 on: July 16, 2010, 02:00:18 AM
Quote
I'm not familiar with Aickman's work. What would you recommend to someone considering sampling his oeuvre?

Any collection (COLD HAND IN MINE or PAINTED DEVILS, just to name two) will do - he's a very dense writer, something like a genre Henry James, but very rewarding.