Author Topic: Pseudopod 510: Falling Under, Through the Dark  (Read 4293 times)

Bdoomed

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on: September 30, 2016, 11:20:26 PM
Pseudopod 510: Falling Under, Through the Dark

by Damien Angelica Walters.

“Falling Under, Through the Dark” originally appeared in May 2015 in Black Static. This story was On Ellen Datlow’s list of Honorable Mentions for Best Horror of the Year 8.

Damien Angelica Walters’ work has appeared or is forthcoming in various anthologies and magazines, including The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2015, Year’s Best Weird Fiction: Volume One, Cassilda’s Song, The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction, Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, and Apex Magazine. She was a finalist for a Bram Stoker Award for “The Floating Girls: A Documentary,” originally published in Jamais Vu. Sing Me Your Scars, a collection of short fiction, was released in 2015 from Apex Publications. The titular story “Sing Me Your Scars” was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction. Paper Tigers, a novel, was released in 2016 from Dark House Press. Find her on Twitter @DamienAWalters or on the web at http://damienangelicawalters.com

Your narrator – Rachael K. Jones is a science fiction and fantasy author, and former editor of PodCastle.

Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Lightspeed, Accessing the Future, Strange Horizons, PodCastle, Escape Pod, Cast of Wonders, the Drabblecast, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Crossed Genres, Daily Science Fiction, and Penumbra.

She has a degree in English and is currently pursuing a second degree in Speech-Language Pathology. She lives in Athens, GA with her husband and perpetual alpha reader, Jason.

Your guest host – Associate Editor Dagny Paul



Dock at MOTHERSHIP ZETA for all your far-flung fiction and non-fiction needs!



The Eighth Day Brotherhood is a new novel by Alice M. Phillips that should be of interest to PseudoPod listeners. If you want a novel with the milieu of The Stress of Her Regard but tighter pacing, look no further. Couple this with the sensibility of Fincher’s Se7en and you have a tense and relentless thriller. Alice’s love for the tenebrous portions of the Decadent period glows through Paris while the Eiffel Tower rises on the bank of the Seine and as the city prepares of the Exposition Universelle. It manifests with an abiding love for the period supported by an incredible depth of research. Do yourself a favor and pick up this book from Black Rose Writing.

The Eighth Day Brotherhood by Alice M. Phillips — Black Rose Writing

One August morning, in Paris, 1888, the sunrise reveals the embellished corpse of a young man suspended between the columns of the Panthéon, resembling a grotesque Icarus and marking the first in a macabre series of murders linked to Paris monuments. In the Latin Quarter, occult scholar Rémy Sauvage is informed of his lover’s gruesome death and embarks upon his own investigation to avenge him by apprehending the cult known as the Eighth Day Brotherhood. At a nearby sanitarium, aspiring artist Claude Fournel becomes enamored with a mesmerist’s beautiful patient, Irish immigrant Margaret Finnegan. Resolved to steal her away from the asylum and obtain her for his muse, Claude only finds them both entwined in the Brotherhood’s apocalyptic plot combining magic, mythology, and murder.



Info on Anders Manga’s album (they do our theme music!) can be found here.



Kara’s sitting at her desk when she falls. There’s no time for panic; it happens too fast. One moment she’s working; the next, she’s in the water. Gravity and the force of the fall plunge her into the depths and everything blurs. She wants to yell but her body needs to conserve oxygen and won’t allow it. Natural buoyancy kicks in and she bobs to the surface, eyes still burning from the chlorine.

Now her heart starts to race and she breathes in huge gulps of air, her mind already fumbling for statistics. Facts. Every day an average of ten people die from drowning, and of those, two are children fourteen and younger.






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?


Tango Alpha Delta

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Reply #1 on: October 01, 2016, 02:58:35 AM
This Rachael K. Jones person is one horror story shy of a double-Full House!

(If you score appearances on three podcasts it's a Hat Trick; if you get on all four it's a Full House - if you get on with both writing AND narrating, well, you're in a special club!)

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dagny

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Reply #2 on: October 05, 2016, 09:19:32 PM
I'm guessing everybody's too depressed to comment on this one...

"Wolfman's got nards!"


Unblinking

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Reply #3 on: October 06, 2016, 01:59:54 PM
Oof, this one got me right in the feels.  No doubt in part because I have a 3 year old at home (but not a pool!)

As the story started out, and she was describing the sensations she was feeling as well as the way she pulled out of it, I recognized someone's description (was it Sarah Gailey?) of methods to try to cope with PTSD, which of course was what this poor character is going through.

I can imagine how horrible it must be to realize that you were actually the one who screwed up, and find it easier to slip into blaming your spouse.  Whoever did it, it was a screwup, it wasn't intentional, and I hope that they can both find a way to grieve and keep on living.



Not-a-Robot

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Reply #4 on: October 11, 2016, 07:50:35 AM
Yeesh, that was tough.

We had an in ground pool.

We dug it out and filled it in before we had kids. It's a choice that I've never regretted.

I couldn't imagine having to watch the kids with that thing around. God, the stress.
« Last Edit: October 11, 2016, 07:53:52 AM by Not-a-Robot »



davidthygod

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Reply #5 on: October 12, 2016, 09:00:23 PM
I just couldn't make it through this one.  Tone, style, content, narration.  Some combination of all of these made this one of the few stories I had to drop out of after about 15 minutes.  Sounds like it just got more depressing as it went.

The man is clear in his mind, but his soul is mad.


Metrophor

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Reply #6 on: October 21, 2016, 10:24:46 PM

We had an in ground pool.

We dug it out and filled it in before we had kids.

I read that as "we dug it out and filled it in with kids", and for a moment there, I was deeply confused.



Tango Alpha Delta

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Reply #7 on: October 23, 2016, 03:04:50 PM

We had an in ground pool.

We dug it out and filled it in before we had kids.

I read that as "we dug it out and filled it in with kids", and for a moment there, I was deeply confused.

As long as no one writes THAT story and submits it to the Pseudopod slush pile, you can be forgiven for your confusion! 

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I finally published my book - Tad's Happy Funtime is on Amazon!


bounceswoosh

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Reply #8 on: November 19, 2016, 04:58:55 AM
I only realized that she'd swapped the narrative in her mind about half a minute before it was made completely explicit ... did any of you figure it out earlier in the story?

I don't have kids and can't directly relate to something as terrible as this, but I do think the story perfectly captured that sense of "this didn't really happen - I can fix it - there's no way this just happened - I just have to go back" that your brain does when something irreversible just happened.



Marlboro

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Reply #9 on: December 28, 2019, 04:31:41 PM
Well written story, imo.


We had an in ground pool.

We dug it out and filled it in before we had kids.

I read that as "we dug it out and filled it in with kids", and for a moment there, I was deeply confused.



"Honey, I distinctly heard you ask for a "kiddie pool" so I don't understand what all the blubbering is about."


We need a story about a husband horrifically misunderstanding his wife's "honey-do" list.