Author Topic: Pseudopod 512: Boys  (Read 3409 times)

Bdoomed

  • Pseudopod Tiger
  • Moderator
  • *****
  • Posts: 5891
  • Mmm. Tiger.
on: October 16, 2016, 12:21:05 AM
Pseudopod 512: Boys

by Damien Laughlin.

Before being reprinted in Pseudopod, “Boys” was published in 2015 in The Cadaverine Magazine, which publishes Prose, Fiction and Nonfiction from writers under thirty. “I’ve always struggled with titles, so when submitting work to my creative writing group I had taken to giving my stories temporary headings derived from Latin terms for animals: Ursa (Bear), Haedus (Young Goat), Porcus (Pig). This eventually incurred the wrath of my peers who found it completely pretentious and overblown. Hell hath no fury like writers patronized. Out of sheer stubbornness, I was all set to continue with this practice when submitting my next story, an early draft of this story. “Bos” I was intending on titling it, from the Latin term for cow. So I put the word “Bos” at the top of the document and as soon as it was there I struggled to take my eyes off it. All my other Latin titles felt like placeholders, but this felt right – or very nearly right. It was only after an hour or staring that I finally put the vital ‘y’ between the ‘o’ and the ‘s’, giving myself “Boys”. After I got the title right, everything else with the story fell into place in subsequent drafts, thematically, narratively. In naming it I’d realized something: it wasn’t the cow, the bos, that gave the story its horror. It was the boys; the foul, abhorrent and distressingly relatable boys.”

DAMIEN LAUGHLIN is a twenty-three year old writer from Derry, Northern Ireland. He’s an incurable people-watcher, eavesdropper and notetaker, and in the last year he found an outlet for these habits while studying Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast.
He’s recently been featured in a new zine called Penny Mag, which publishes 500-word prose pieces and puts them together with a illustration. Subscribers to Penny have three illustrated stories delivered to their email inbox every week – a fine alternative to the clickbait that invades all our electronic devices.

Your narrator – Phil Lunt – Hails from the rain-sodden, North Western wastelands of England, and has dabbled in many an arcane vocation. From rock-star to conveyor-belt scraper at a bread factory, milkman to world’s worst waiter. He’s currently a freelance designer, actor and sometime writer/editor. For his sins he’s Chair of the British Fantasy Society, a role that can be more complicated than herding cats, at times. He’s still considering becoming an astronaut when he grows up. He currently throws words at gameronomy.com but also welcomes folk to check out what they do at the British Fantasy Society because it’s not all about folk trying to shout louder than their neighbour, they do try to do good stuff!

Your guest host – Associate Editor Dagny Paul



Pseudopod will be launching their own Kickstarter in the upcoming weeks. Visit our YEAR 10 page for more details.





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.



The CAST OF WONDERS Flash Fiction Contest info can be accessed at the link.



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



It was Ethan’s thirteenth birthday and he had invited me to a sleepover, along with friends from his new school. We were making our way through the forest by his home when he signaled for me to slow down. We allowed the other boys to pull ahead. That’s when he grabbed my arm and uttered a warning in my ear: I wasn’t going to like what he was taking us to see at the river bay.




Listen to this week's Pseudopod.
« Last Edit: October 16, 2016, 12:23:17 AM by Bdoomed »

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


ElectricPaladin

  • Hipparch
  • ******
  • Posts: 1005
  • Holy Robot
    • Burning Zeppelin Experience
Reply #1 on: October 18, 2016, 03:35:27 PM
Oof. This one hit me where I live. I work with middle school boys, and I can absolutely see where this story is coming from. It was a nice trick, making the main character intellectually precocious but emotionally at level, or even a little behind. And the way it flipped the narrative from bullying to self-harm was brilliant!

Captain of the Burning Zeppelin Experience.

Help my kids get the educational supplies they need at my Donor's Choose page.


TimWB

  • Palmer
  • **
  • Posts: 30
  • Author "The Flesh Sutra", 2015 Stoker Prelim Nom
    • To Smother In Orderr To Sell The Body To Science
Reply #2 on: October 20, 2016, 05:12:38 PM
I really like this story! I'd like to know how the experience changed him.



adrianh

  • Hipparch
  • ******
  • Posts: 752
    • quietstars
Reply #3 on: October 20, 2016, 07:29:23 PM
Oof. This one hit me where I live. I work with middle school boys, and I can absolutely see where this story is coming from. It was a nice trick, making the main character intellectually precocious but emotionally at level, or even a little behind. And the way it flipped the narrative from bullying to self-harm was brilliant!

^ that :-)

The pacing of the flashbacks, which can so often be a lazy way to raise tension, was lovely.

Narration was excellent too.



Kaa

  • Hipparch
  • ******
  • Posts: 620
  • Trusst in me, jusst in me.
    • WriteWright
Reply #4 on: October 21, 2016, 07:05:07 PM
Really liked this one for all the reasons already stated. The bait-and-switch was so well done that when it happened, I wasn't the least bit annoyed, but rather amazed. I said aloud, in the car, to no one, "Wow. That was NICELY done."

I invent imaginary people and make them have conversations in my head. I also write.

About writing || About Atheism and Skepticism (mostly) || About Everything Else


PodBroad

  • Lochage
  • *****
  • Posts: 457
Reply #5 on: October 24, 2016, 02:02:21 PM
Really enjoyed this - well, what I heard (~98%). I admit to speeding up a few segments, despite having a background in biology.  :-[
The subject of peer pressure, specifically, the pressure to be "the right stuff," isn't given enough discussion, IMO. Here, we get to consider what society is telling the young about how they should be. They cannot be "weak." They cannot flinch in the face of pain, suffering, evidence of death, etc. They have to be junior sociopaths, in other words.
What a horrible world it would be if everyone listened to this message!
This story said much more than a long-winded (even excellently written) essay could ever achieve.
Excellent narration brought the superb prose to life.
This is a writer to watch for, no doubt about it!



chromeratt

  • Extern
  • *
  • Posts: 8
Reply #6 on: October 27, 2016, 10:58:34 AM
I took the main character use of the word "fix" NOT to simply mean mending something that was broken.  Instead, I thought it to mean more like to fasten in place securely.  I can't explain what that means for the character, it is simply the meaning that came to mind. More like he felt he needed to be made stronger, not that he was broken.  It's a subtle difference, I know.

I also think it's very interesting that another meaning of the word "fix" is so apt in this situation:

Quote
direct one's eyes, attention, or mind steadily or unwaveringly toward.

I suppose Laughlin may have intended this meaning of word as well.  Maybe it's a bit of the local dialect, maybe it's a clever bit of writing, maybe it's simply entertaining happenstance. Regardless, it made me smile when I recognized it.

A good story, unsettling but still enjoyable and relatable.



Unblinking

  • Sir Postsalot
  • Hipparch
  • ******
  • Posts: 8729
    • Diabolical Plots
Reply #7 on: November 17, 2016, 02:43:58 PM
Not my cup of tea I'm afraid.  While I find much of it plausible, having seen the kind of peer pressure behaviors when I was that age (and certainly giving in to some though nothing on this level thank goodness), and so the story rang true on many levels, I also just found it unpleasant to listen to, and not in an enjoyable way for me.  (I also thought the bait-and-switch of the narrator's intentions were a bit of a copout where it would've been better told straight, but given that this isn't really my kind of story, what do I know?  :P)