Before I say anything else, I'll say I liked this story. Also: excellent narration, DKT. Captured the after-college chillout-exterior-surrouding-a-heart-of-existential-dread quite well.
Now, I was
going to write that it reminded me a lot of another PodCastle tale read by DKT:
As Far As You Can Go. The similarities were evident: two friends, slightly adrift and aimless, going on a roadtrip that one of them kind of doesn't want to be going on. Substitute crumbling strip malls and cheap hotels for post-nuclear ruins and you're basically there.
But as the story kept going, the strangeness of Audra unfolding, the growing fascination and infatuation of the narrator, I started to be reminded of
another story: Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth." Maybe it's because that one was being talked about over in the
Phoenix on the Sword thread. Only where Lovecraft offers us otherworldly horror and repugnance lost beneath the waves for eons, "Sand Castles" offers us its inversion: otherworldly beauty and love. Traces of ancient races, scattered relics and maps, a tale too bizarre to be believed -- yet must be, the eyes and skin of those whose ancestry is (possibly) partially non-human, a narrator who in the end seems to want to join the other world. The parallels are totally there!
And the fact that I'm citing all these other stories and pieces of stories that "Sand Castles" reminded me of may lead you to the conclusion that its plot is formulaic and that all these similarities are the box-checking that ToooooMuchCoffeeMan mentioned. I can understand that. Yet the telling of this tale really worked for me. The characters' idle conversations, their pointless arguments, the hostilities and attractions that bubble up in the confines of an endless road trip -- they all rang true to me. Same with: questioning your whole life, living with an embarrassing family after college, desperately wanting to believe in something, anything that will give meaning to your life.
Even though I knew how this one was probably going to end, I still wanted the story to take me there.