Escape Artists
PseudoPod => Episode Comments => Topic started by: Bdoomed on November 16, 2010, 04:05:32 AM
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Pseudopod 212: The Poisoner (http://pseudopod.org/2010/11/15/pseudopod-212-the-poisoner/)
By Holly Day
Read by Eve
The poisoner moved into the village soon after the doctor had died. For weeks, she had been dropping crushed narcissus bulbs into the doctors’ drinking well in the dead of night, not so much that it’d kill him right away, but enough that he wouldn’t have to wait too long to die. The doctor’s wife followed soon after, her unborn child spilling out on the stone pavers, brought out too early by contractions caused by the poison.
The poisoner came down into the village the very next day, dressed in a white nurse outfit, her clothes paradoxically spotless considering that no one had anything spotless to wear, not anymore. The war had made everyone a dirty wreck, and the impossibly white clothes of the poisoner made her seem a legitimate miracle, some sort of savior coming down from the hills. They would soon find that no matter how bloody she got, her uniform would always be clean and white.
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Listen to this week's Pseudopod. (http://media.libsyn.com/media/pseudopod/Pseudo212_ThePoisoner.mp3)
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Hmm. I wasn't such a fan of this. The character of The Poisoner was really interesting and I loved how the war was used to illustrate the vulnerability of the desperate. That being said however I don't scare easily, so a horror story has to have a little more than a scary situation to interest me. For me the main problem was that very little actually happened in the story. It lacked an interesting plot with any real conflict, so it got slightly boring after a while. It felt a bit like the first act of a story - the main character was set up, as was the setting. I was waiting for some kind of turning point to set in motion some kind of conflict, but in never did.
so much unfulfilled potential...
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I normally like stories that just have a character and a premise, but this one really did feel like it was building to something, some sort of twist or climax that never came. I've got spec-fic blueballs now.
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I normally like stories that just have a character and a premise, but this one really did feel like it was building to something, some sort of twist or climax that never came. I've got spec-fic blueballs now.
Great. That's exactly how I felt.
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For me, the creepiest thing about this story was the character of the poisoner. I loved the way she described her own terrible, deranged experience of life. The growing need to do something about the horrible, crawling feeling in her skin. How she needed to kill to re-establish her own equilibrium. She was a very interesting horror villain, and the deep third person narration made it very disturbing.
Particularly interesting for me is that the protagonist's experience is similar to the way real life sociopaths work. Apparently (my shrink wife tells me), sociopaths have a hard time comprehending that other people are real, which somehow connects to a failure to understand their own limitations. Because others aren't real, they - the only real thing in the world - should be omnipotent. But, of course, they aren't. The thousand tiny frustrations and indignities, the dissonance between their perceived omnipotence and actual mortality, add up until the sociopath needs to assert his will over the unreal world and its mocking abstractions of himself in order to restore his personal balance. For "functional" sociopaths, this usually means being a dick to someone. For the really crazy ones, though, nothing but murder - the ultimate domination - will do.
I agree with Scattercat that this story was one of missed opportunities. The story really didn't build towards anything, except for a sudden embarrassment of riches in the victim department. For myself, I was expecting it to turn out that the townspeople had figured it out long ago, but that they agreed with the Poisoner that the cost was worth the benefit. Horror in the heartlessness of the community. It would have been neat.
I was particularly annoyed by the fact that the real life story of the Angel Makers of Unpronounceable and Unspellable Hungarian Town was much more compelling. In real life, the murders were masterminded by the midwife, but they were committed by many young wives who chafed at the restrictions placed on them by their older, socially conservative husbands. The situation as exacerbated by the fact that many of the husbands had left for war (WWI) shortly after marriage and that many of the wives had enjoyed themselves (and the Allied P.O.W.s imprisoned in their village, if you understand what I mean) immensely in their absence. The poisoners - led by the genuinely sociopathic midwife - killed their husbands with arsenic so they could return to their independent lifestyles. I can see a truly creepy story about the descent of these women into monstrosity, spurred on by their trusted "doctor." That, alas, was also not what this story was about.
That said, it wasn't bad. My narrative balls are in much less blue than Scattercat's and Listener's. I finished the story, shrugged and said "that was ok," and then went back to Murder at Avadon Hill. I wish The Poisoner had been better, but I was able to enjoy it for what it was.
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My impression was much like those above - the story was fine, but there seemed to be a lot of potential evils slithering around just under the surface that never quite materialised. I felt that this was the kind of story that captures some people due to their predisposition to certain kinds of horror[1], but without a predisposition it doesn't have a lot of bite. Another way to look at it would be that it required a lot of thought/imagination for a casual listener/reader to feel the horror of the story.
I wonder if the story might have a little more bite if the method of murder was less blunt. With the title and reference always being to poison, there is never any doubt about what to expect. If the protagonist was simply a killer or murderer, the method may catch people a little more - "How will she do it this time?", "Would I rather poison or smothering?", "Is she going to escalate to something worse than poison?"
Overall a reasonable piece, I didn't love it, but I certainly didn't hate it. Looking forward to seeing what comes next...
1 - For example if you already had a fear of doctors this might be really creepy.
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It was a creepy and well-done sociopathic character study, but I really wanted a plot arc. Stranger enters town with an ambition, and succeeds in that ambition without obstacle, and never failing in any attempt. Since stories like this often end with a twist of the nasty person getting comeuppance, I suppose you could call it a twist that the poisoner did not... But, yeah, well written, good idea, but I wish it had gone somewhere.
The creepiest part of the whole story was when she looks at her journal and feels pride in herself for not killing so many people. In a way, this made me think of a recovering alcoholic getting their 5-year coin of sobriety from AA, except that in this case she's not trying to get better, she's just trying to hide it until she can do it without getting caught.
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Hmmm. I was less than sold by the psychological 'inner voice' of the character, though I'll admit no expertise of my own. I spent some time in my freshman year in college hanging out with a couple of -I'm not sure quite how to put it- serial killer fans? That sounds wrong, but guys who read books on the subject and watched a few movies and owned "Natural Born Killers" on tape (you probably know a few like this) because they thought the whole thing was kind of cool, I guess.
Whatever the case, I ended up reading a few books and coming to understand that most "serial killers" that we know about are men with psychosexual issues. Women are rare, or at least our understanding is limited because either 1) there are fewer, or 2) they don't get caught. Most women who make it into the books on the subject are
1) partner to another killer and use the killing as relationship fulfillment (think Bonnie and Clyde gone even more wrong) or
2) Have a delusional worldview in which they are righting wrongs only they can see, or
3) Have dissassociated themselves so much from other people that when people present problems they feel no compunction about removing the problem in the most direct way possible (like the Texas mother who killed a rival cheerleader so her daughter could get top position on the squad, Black Widows can also fall into this category)
4) Are engaged in Munchausen's by proxy, this sometimes happens with medical personnel, who threaten the life of someone in order to save it.
Now, I know that these are not the only possibilities, but the sort of 'needful itch' the main character had didn't really jive with my research (such as it is) on the subject. All of which is by way of saying, the story didn't really grab me.
I suppose it doesn't help that I've watched "The Young Poisoner's Handbook" which might be the best done and creepiest portrayal of a poisoner ever made, if you haven't seen, it brings the horror, really.
Plus, this is pure language choice:but if your story is called "The Poisoner" and your protagonist is called, 'the poisoner' you really will probably have a hard time building tension about that person, you know, poisoning people
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As an addendum to the post above, just so I wasn't totally talking out my @$$, I Wikipedia'd their list of serial killers, by country:
What the hell is it about English speaking nations and serial killers? The two largest countries were US (by a mile) and the UK, trailed by South Africa. The US list of killers, idenified and unidentified, is bigger than the rest of the world's lists altogether, I don't know whether to be depressed or look for the possible story ideas.
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Munchausen's by proxy
What does this phrase mean? I ask because it "Munchausen by Proxy" is the name of Zooey Deschanel's fictional band in the movie "Yes Man". I always thought it was a cool name, but didn't realize it referred to an actual something.
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Munchausen's by proxy
What does this phrase mean? I ask because it "Munchausen by Proxy" is the name of Zooey Deschanel's fictional band in the movie "Yes Man". I always thought it was a cool name, but didn't realize it referred to an actual something.
Prepare to by astonished by my amazing googling skills!
http://kidshealth.org/parent/general/sick/munchausen.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchausen_syndrome_by_proxy
(the wikipedia article is more detailed but seems to be badly edited, so it's not that easy to read)
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I actually enjoyed this story. It wasn't subtle and stories where the evil goes unpunished can sometimes irritate me, but I liked this. I'm not sure though whether I would have liked the story to go on, to make the Poisoner's dealings with the prisoners a direct part of the story, how she would contrast them to the villagers, whether she would find (presumably) killing them off would stop her from having to kill a villager instead, or whether they would be too different. Nice work, and the narration was pitch perfect for this.
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I've got spec-fic blueballs now.
You've what the who now? Not familiar with that phrase.
(spec-fic I recognise ;-)
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Blue balls
. I'm mildly surprised that I didn't have to resort to Urban Dictionary for this one, actually.
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Blue balls
. I'm mildly surprised that I didn't have to resort to Urban Dictionary for this one, actually.
That's an actual condition? I thought it was made up for the purpose of guilt-tripping.
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Blue balls
. I'm mildly surprised that I didn't have to resort to Urban Dictionary for this one, actually.
That's an actual condition? I thought it was made up for the purpose of guilt-tripping.
Oh, it definitely happens, and is emphatically not fun. It does, however, get exaggerated for the purposes of guilt-tripping. (It's also not something that happens immediately; you basically have to fool around for quite a long time before you run into trouble.)
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Blue balls
. I'm mildly surprised that I didn't have to resort to Urban Dictionary for this one, actually.
That's an actual condition? I thought it was made up for the purpose of guilt-tripping.
Oh, it definitely happens, and is emphatically not fun. It does, however, get exaggerated for the purposes of guilt-tripping. (It's also not something that happens immediately; you basically have to fool around for quite a long time before you run into trouble.)
I got really mad in middle school when I found out that the girl's sex ed instructor had told them that blue balls don't exist. I mean, it's all well and good to make sure that the girls know that it's not such a big deal, but teachers, lying? Horror!
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This thread seems to have gone all sorts of interesting places. Bringing it back in to the story -
I thought it was a well constructed character piece, but I agree with those above who felt it was lacking something. For me it was not so much the lack of plot, but a feeling of a missed thematic opportunity. There is something about this situation - of the poisoner, who has entirely malicious motivations, but ends up doing a lot of good in order to achieve her evil, in the middle of a war. I feel something could have been done to highlight the tension - is it better for the village to have her there or not? - than just show the tale of how things all fall into place for her, as long as she pays the price of having to heal 99% of the villagers.
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This thread seems to have gone all sorts of interesting places. Bringing it back in to the story -
A nicely understated piece of moderation there ;-)
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This thread seems to have gone all sorts of interesting places. Bringing it back in to the story -
I thought it was a well constructed character piece, but I agree with those above who felt it was lacking something. For me it was not so much the lack of plot, but a feeling of a missed thematic opportunity. There is something about this situation - of the poisoner, who has entirely malicious motivations, but ends up doing a lot of good in order to achieve her evil, in the middle of a war. I feel something could have been done to highlight the tension - is it better for the village to have her there or not? - than just show the tale of how things all fall into place for her, as long as she pays the price of having to heal 99% of the villagers.
The character reminded me more than a bit of Semirhage from Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series--she was a renowned healer who could cure ailments that no one else could touch, but she extracted a price of unnecessary and excruciating pain during the healing. Her patients tended not to complain because they'd just survived the unsurvivable.
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Or the Devotrix from Pathologic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathologic).
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I liked this one a lot. Subtle, measured, and... was the Poisoner really so bad? She did as much good as any real doctor, so in effect, she was a real doctor. So a few patients who would have died without her died with her instead... small price for a community to pay for a skilled physician. And now she gets to fulfill her needs with enemies of the state.
I fail to see the problem here.
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I liked this one a lot. Subtle, measured, and... was the Poisoner really so bad? She did as much good as any real doctor, so in effect, she was a real doctor. So a few patients who would have died without her died with her instead... small price for a community to pay for a skilled physician. And now she gets to fulfill her needs with enemies of the state.
I fail to see the problem here.
Except she killed the real doctor and his wife in order to take their place in the community.
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Except she killed the real doctor and his wife in order to take their place in the community.
Er.. yes, well. If you want to be picky about it. But it was the only way HER needs were going to get met. Let's not be selfish here, after all.