Author Topic: Pseudopod 454: Eastern Promise  (Read 3130 times)

Bdoomed

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on: September 07, 2015, 01:26:44 AM
Pseudopod 454: Eastern Promise

by Stewart Horn

Eastern Promise” originally appeared in Crowded Magazine issue 2, 2013.

STEWART HORN is a professional musician and amateur writer and poet based on the West Coast of Scotland. His work has appeared in the Horrorzine website and two Horrorzine anthologies, Screaming Dreams Press’s magazine Estronomicon, Crowded Magazine, the Lovecraft Ezine and the British Fantasy Society Journal, as well as a few small local things. He blogs occasionally at Stewartguitar, writes reviews for the BFS and is a member of the Glasgow Science Fiction Writers’ Circle.

Your narrators are Ian Stuart (introductions) and Hugo Jackson. Hugo is a fantasy author and cosplayer from Chichester, England with a passion for acting, anime, and movie soundtracks, currently living in Raleigh, North Carolina. The first of his four book young adult fantasy series, The Resonance Tetralogy, is available on amazon.com and can be found on facebook under the series name Resonance Tetralogy or on Writesaber. His publisher is Inspired Quill. He can be found amongst his cosplay projects on facebook at BritFang Cosplay



“‘In more western parts of Europe, incorrupt corpses were apt to induce almost the opposite response. A lack of decay was taken to be evidence that the individual had died in a state of perfect grace, immaculate and sinless. There are reputed to be whole, perfect bodies secreted among the other saintly relics in churches all over France, Spain, Italy and Prussia, and all those that remain intact have since been canonized. Many such corpses were said to emanate an ‘odour of sanctity’ for some time after death, described as akin to the smell of fresh flowers; it may be principally this olfactory phenomenon, coupled with geographical and religious incidence, that determined which corpses were worshipped as saints, and which destroyed as demons or vampires.’

M. Rhodes, Demonology and Vampirism in Europe, 1897”




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Listen to this week's Pseudopod.

I'd like to hear my options, so I could weigh them, what do you say?
Five pounds?  Six pounds? Seven pounds?


Uncanny Valley

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Reply #1 on: September 08, 2015, 01:54:14 PM
I really enjoyed this one.  The narration took a minute or two to get into the 'rhythm' but then he was easy to follow.  I loved the transition of the main character over the course of the story.  It was handled really well.  Dug it a lot.



adrianh

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Reply #2 on: September 09, 2015, 02:10:42 PM
I too thoroughly enjoyed this. The idea of entities exploiting cognitive blindspots and what we laughing call free will is a deeply scary one.



Jeffrey_Bunting

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Reply #3 on: September 13, 2015, 05:02:27 PM
This story made me wonder, as I return to the work of teaching this month and rely on rote routine to get so much done, what could be creeping in during those unthinking moments.  Nice story!



Unblinking

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Reply #4 on: September 21, 2015, 04:53:41 PM
Mixed feelings on this one.  I was put off by the hints at the impending murder committed by the protagonist--not that there's anything wrong with that being part of a story, per se, but a really disproportionate amount of slush stories I've read have been about a person carrying out a murder with either no motivation for the murder or just a slight one.  It was clear early on that he was going to commit murder and throw the body into the wall space and it felt like it took too long for something else to be revealed that I didn't already know.

In the end I thought the flower-smelling wall monster brought it around to something more to my tastes.  And this was one of those cases where i LOVE to hear the origins of the story--a string of seemingly unrelated things tie together in an author's mind and BAM, a weird and interesting new story.