Author Topic: Pseudopod 477: ARTEMIS RISING Women In Horror Showcase: Bug House  (Read 4348 times)

Bdoomed

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Pseudopod 477: ARTEMIS RISING Women In Horror Showcase: Bug House

by Lisa Tuttle.

Bug House was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1980. It won second place for best short story category in the 1981 Locus Awards.

Lisa Tuttle began her career as a published writer in the early 1970s, and won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Writer of the year in 1974. She’s the author of seven novels and more than a hundred short stories. Born and raised in Texas, she has lived in a remote, rural part of Scotland for the past twenty-five years. Her first novel, Windhaven, was a collaboration with George R. R. Martin published in 1981. This was followed by a horror novel, Familiar Spirit, in 1983. Unable to stick to one well-defined genre, although most of her work features elements of horror and/or dark fantasy, she went on to write novels of psychological suspense, science fiction, and fantasy as well as books for children and young adults, and non-fiction (including the Encyclopedia of Feminism and Heroines).

Short stories were her first love, and remain important. Her first short story collection, A Nest of Nightmares was published in the U.K. in 1986, and two years later featured in Horror: 100 Best Books edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman. A number of her short stories have appeared in “best of the year” anthologies and been nominated for awards; “Closet Dreams” won the 2007 International Horror Guild Award. She edited an influential anthology of horror stories by women writers, Skin of the Soul, first published in 1990.

She has just finished a new novel, to be published in early 2016: THE CURIOUS AFFAIR OF THE SOMNAMBULIST AND THE PSYCHIC THIEF — this is the start of a new detective series set in London in the 1890s. If you want a taste of what is to come, check out her stories in both the Rogues and Down These Strange Streets anthologies and follow her author page on Facebook.

Your narrator – Heather Welliver is an Emmy Award nominated narrator and voice actress. She has been part of the Escape Artists family of narrators since 2007. She is slated for new episodes for Cast of Wonders, Escape Pod, and more in the coming year.

Your guest audio producer – Chelsea Davis is a scholar of Gothic fiction. She’s currently at work on a dissertation about supernatural war literature. In her spare time, she produces radio, & gets a huge kick out of reading killer Pseudopod submissions as an Associate Editor.

Your guest hosts – Tackling all things horror with a slash of analysis and research, horror journalists and occasional academics Andrea Subissati and Alexandra West are your hosts for brain plumping discussions on all things that go bump in the night. Produced independently in Toronto, Ontario The Faculty of Horror is your best source for classic and contemporary horror film discussions that will haunt the libraries of your mind! Follow them on Twitter at @FacultyofHorror.



The house was a wreck, resting like some storm-shattered ship on a weedy headland overlooking the ocean. Ellen felt her heart sink at the sight of it.

‘This it?’ asked the taxi-driver dubiously, squinting through his windscreen and slowing the car.

‘It must be,’ Ellen said without conviction. She couldn’t believe her aunt — or anyone else — lived in this house.

The house had been built, after the local custom, out of wood, and then set upon cement blocks that raised it three or four feet off the ground. But floods seemed far less dangerous to the house now than the winds, or simply time. The house was crumbling on its blocks. The boards were weatherbeaten and scabbed with flecks of ancient grey paint. Uncurtained windows glared blankly, and one shutter hung at a crazy angle. Between the boards of the sagging, second-storey balcony, Ellen could see daylight.





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?


BoojumsRCool

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Reply #1 on: February 15, 2016, 07:03:22 PM
I great story from the beginning to the end. There are so many things going on here and they have all been woven together in perfect balance, then you get smacked in the face in the last five minutes. Bravo to Ms Tuttle, so many feeling with so few words.

Boojums ARE cool!


Unblinking

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Reply #2 on: February 16, 2016, 01:43:02 PM
I thought it was fine.  Rape is always an element that makes a story a hard sell, I think it did okay here.   

I felt, though, like the way things were presented I was supposed to be surprised by the supernatural rape at the end.  I'm assuming I wasn't the only one who knew where it was going once the spider-wasp fight happened?       

I think the story would've done better if there had been a male victim to take it a little more out of the standard man-rapes-and-kills-woman that is a huge rut of horror.  I mean, if the point is to inject monster eggs into a human body to eat it from the inside out, it doesn't seem like a uterus actually has to be involved for the process to work.  (And yes, I realize the monster was probably not technically male, but since it was occupying a male-appearing body and playing out the stereotypically male role of rapist-murderer-in-horror story I don't think it's unreasonable to basically treat it as a male in the context)



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Reply #3 on: February 16, 2016, 02:13:54 PM
I thought it was fine.  Rape is always an element that makes a story a hard sell, I think it did okay here.   

I felt, though, like the way things were presented I was supposed to be surprised by the supernatural rape at the end.  I'm assuming I wasn't the only one who knew where it was going once the spider-wasp fight happened?       

I think the story would've done better if there had been a male victim to take it a little more out of the standard man-rapes-and-kills-woman that is a huge rut of horror.

You have to keep in mind that the original publication date for this one is 1980.  I don't think that the man-rapes-and-kills-woman rut was driven so deeply then.

I thought that the writing had a few too many filters in it that drew me out of this one a bit.  But I know that this is an old story, so the criticism is worthless. 

Overall, it was a very interesting dynamic and I thought that the Faculty of Horror hosts did a good job with analysis.  I just wanted to make one quick point.

The type of relationship that the Spider-wasp and the spider have is a symbiosis.  The spider-wasp is a necrotropic parasite, meaning that it lives with and then kills another species as a part of its life cycle. The type of symbiosis that most people mean when they say symbiosis is actually mutualism.  A relationship where both species benefit.  Nevertheless, parasitism is a symbiosis, and even if the parasite "cares" for its victim to keep it alive, it only does so because it benefits the parasite. The victim never benefits. Lisa Tuttle did her research into parasitism before she wrote this story, and I think that is what give the story its strength.

Now to analyze the part where the penis symbolizes a stinger...

...no...

...I think I'll leave that alone for now...



Unblinking

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Reply #4 on: February 16, 2016, 02:40:21 PM
I thought it was fine.  Rape is always an element that makes a story a hard sell, I think it did okay here.   

I felt, though, like the way things were presented I was supposed to be surprised by the supernatural rape at the end.  I'm assuming I wasn't the only one who knew where it was going once the spider-wasp fight happened?       

I think the story would've done better if there had been a male victim to take it a little more out of the standard man-rapes-and-kills-woman that is a huge rut of horror.

You have to keep in mind that the original publication date for this one is 1980.  I don't think that the man-rapes-and-kills-woman rut was driven so deeply then.

Sure.

But the thing is, I have only heard this story for the first time now.  Being aware of it being written in a previous decade is one thing, but it doesn't really change my reaction.



Metalsludge

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Reply #5 on: February 16, 2016, 05:48:32 PM
I can't help but think it's something other than coincidence that the film "Alien", with its own bug-like infestation into a human host story was a big hit in 1979, and we then proceeded to get various award winning stories during the early 1980's that repeated the theme, from this story to Octavia Butler's famous Bloodchild story. I get the impression this was a bit of a thing in genre writing for a while at the time. Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that.

Of course, the Alien film is full of sexual imagery and themes to go along with the story of a human being infested with an alien life that make for obvious parallels with real life sexual reproduction and its creepy side, (Women were said to have an especially visceral reaction to the infamous alien chest bursting scene during the theater run, and Giger's designs for the film include pretty blatant references to human anatomy.) but both Butler's story and this story make the parallels even more obvious and direct.

As Ublinking points out, it all feels a bit TOO obvious and predictable now, so long after the time period. In fact, my biggest surprise was that the story turned out to be as straightforward as it was, as I was not expecting it to go there so readily. Butler's story had a lot of social deconstructions, power relationships and other things to take the story beyond the concept (Including the male victim idea that Unblinking suggested.), but this story mainly has just the concept to rely on for both impact and the provoking of thought, to a greater degree anyway.

That said, I'll examine some of the potential themes. At first, the story seems to be about fears of normal aging and death, as so many macabre stories are. But then we get the bug infestation angle and the fact that her aunt is only supposed to be a mere three years older than when she last saw her. It seems noticeable that the protagonist keeps thinking back to male figures who she can potentially find comfort in, or who could set things right. Even her estranged husband would be a welcome presence, and her father could take charge of the situation.

Meanwhile, both her and her aunt seem helplessly doomed without such intervention. If some creepy insect guy wants to fill them with bugs, it's just gonna happen, though at least the protagonist resists. Both of them hang onto men in their lives for support of some kind, even if the relationship has a sour side, to put it lightly. On the other hand, the "male" (we think?) bug person in this story is careful to point out that the wasp they observe infesting a spider is actually a female. The fact that he is well aware of the difference between bugs and people, that being that people know what is happening to them when they get infested, and seems to be gleefully contemplative about it, is particularly ugly in light of what he does later.



TimWB

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Reply #6 on: February 17, 2016, 02:56:22 AM
Did "Peter" and "Aunt May" make anyone's Spider Sense tingle?

The narrator did a great job!
For me, the characters seemed a bit too doomed. Aunt May didn't sicken until after her husband died, and presumably was seduced by Peter. That noted, wouldn't she be aware of what has happened to her, realize she had been duped, and fight? Also, wouldn't Dad or Cheating Husband be a potential threat?



Unblinking

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Reply #7 on: February 17, 2016, 02:49:02 PM
Did "Peter" and "Aunt May" make anyone's Spider Sense tingle?

The narrator did a great job!
For me, the characters seemed a bit too doomed. Aunt May didn't sicken until after her husband died, and presumably was seduced by Peter. That noted, wouldn't she be aware of what has happened to her, realize she had been duped, and fight? Also, wouldn't Dad or Cheating Husband be a potential threat?


OH!  The Aunt May name did make me think of Spiderman, but I TOTALLY DID NOT MAKE THE FULL CONNECTION.  That can't be a coincidence.  (Even though Peter ended up being a hornet and Aunt May the spider, and he kills her by having sex with her.)



Dwango

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Reply #8 on: February 17, 2016, 09:37:32 PM
I'm thinking that the dependency on a man is a kind of trap that couldn't easily be gotten out of.  Aunt May depends on this stranger, and we aren't sure about the uncle, maybe he didn't just die normally.  What is interesting is how the narrator was a much more proactive character, and yet ends up with the same fate.  She fights the attacker, she does not call the spouse, she questions everything.  I'm almost surprised she accepts her fate so easily, unless she no longer had personal control.  I think this may be a kind of statement on women at the time, where she feels that they have to depend on men, that even if a woman is working at equality.  It's doesn't matter what she does, the situation is rigged against her and she can't really escape.

The horror of the man actually being a monster is still lessor to the horror of a man using rape to create power over a strong woman.  It's a horror of how such an act can damage self esteem and confidence, making her simply a shell waiting for her life to end.  But, I wonder what would happen next, would she just roll over and die.  I'd like to think her next step would be to find a way to kill the monster and not just accept she is a parasite's victim.

And the Peter and Aunt May, I only noticed the Aunt at the end.  Creepy Peter and Aunt May.



archaevist

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Reply #9 on: February 28, 2016, 09:35:58 PM
Quote from: Charles Darwin
I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.
I love and am unnerved by  the additional dimension that quote gives the story.

Eerie, eerie story. Based in the uncomfortably real. I loved the sense of isolation which the setting provided. I'm glad that the story didn't focus on the ocean, but rather the thin band of life at the ocean's edge. The descriptions of the house, of something moving in the house, aunt may's words to the narrator in the dark were so eerie.

additionally, anyone else listen to the Nosleep podcast? I have some real problems with it's near constant near misogyny, and they had a story with a wasp thingie in a house, but the genders were inverted and there was [as ever]  not as much meaning in the story, even though they had some similar images. I'm glad that I heard this one first.



Vincezen

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Reply #10 on: February 29, 2016, 06:46:09 PM
This one hit me right in the "Musty old house on the desolate North Atlantic" sweet spot. I realize it's a pretty specific sub-genre to fall in love with and I'll blame Howard Phillips for instilling it in me, but I never get tired of it. Loved the story!



maspower

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I have to say I'm rather torn on this episode.

On the one hand, it's a really well produced episode, with excellent narration, and the in-depth, more academic analysis by the guest hosts was a real treat.

On the other, I was ultimately really put off by the story. As previous commenters have pointed out, violent rape is a difficult element to work with, but I think other episodes (#453, "The Toyol" comes to mind) have handled the issue with a lot more nuance. As much as the rape itself put me off (and, again as others have pointed out, the apparent inevitability and predictability of the story), I think it could have gone some interesting places if the story had continued further and dealt with the main character's reactions.

The implication that Ellen's fate would be the same as Aunt May's was particularly upsetting to me, since she obviously reacted to "Peter" very differently, and didn't have the apparent elements of consent or at least resignation that May did--the onset of numbness during the rape itself that the hosts pointed out didn't seem like evidence of this to me, since Peter had pointed out the wasp's ability to paralyze its prey earlier in the story, and that part of the narrative seemed to be suggesting his ability to overpower more than anything else.

I was also hoping that the story would address dynamics of abuse, since that really seemed evident in Peter's persona, and it would have gone a long way towards reconciling the apparent symbiosis between him and May and the violence he inflicts on Ellen.

Valid points from all the people who enjoyed the story more than I did, but I'll be happy to forget about this one.



cwthree

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Reply #12 on: May 02, 2016, 03:53:25 AM
I read this story in Fantasy & Science Fiction years ago. It was creepy and disturbing then, and it's still creepy as hell. I couldn't finish listening, despite the excellent reading.