Adored this one. Good job, Ken Schneyer. This seems like a step in the right direction for his fiction, at least from what I've read. It had me from beginning to end and I teared up a little as it came to a close.
I briefly wondered why people in the artist's world didn't pick up on the fact she was depicting ghosts/souls, but I talked myself through this sticking point with the idea that this story is made up of isolated excerpts. Some other academic in this setting is probably theorizing about Theresa Rosenberg Latimer's supernatural abilities, possibly an academic with a penchant for tinfoil hats and a catchphrase along the lines of, "They thought I was mad at the university...for art critics!"
Because I read this as a straightforward ghost story, I didn't see it as particularly experimental. Maybe in comparison to Conan, but on its own? I don't see it.
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I read a lot of fiction like this in book form but would usually file it under literally fiction, maybe magical realism*. In fact, I am not sure how well it fits into PodCastle's portfolio, especially right after Conan. I usually delete past episodes from my iTunes, but this one will definitely stay on my playlist. It's one of the more distinct pieces of the last months.
* i.e. fantasy for people who think that genre fiction isn't art.
I agree it's a distinct piece and certainly one I'll be brooding on for a while, but I'm going to nitpick about this definition of magical realism. For a while, I also thought it was a way for English students and professors to refer to fantasy they don't want to admit is fantasy or a label the marketing department of publishing houses threw on to get a review by The New Yorker. Instead, I've discovered "magical realism" is mainly used to refer to political fiction that uses a surreal or meta lens. Magical realism novels are usually set against a background of social upheaval, like Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Catheryne Valente's Deathless, and Toni Morrison's Beloved. Characters have problems that they're either unable to talk about openly or too traumatic to contemplate, so conflicts are written in a "coded" language. Allies and antagonists in these works become ghosts, monsters, and living folklore characters, just depicted in a "factual" or reporter-like way. There's an extra layer of metaphor wandering around.
So I do think magical realism is its own category not just a phrase slapped onto "literary" fiction. While I like Schneyer's piece, I don't think it entirely fits this category.