Escape Artists
PseudoPod => Episode Comments => Topic started by: Bdoomed on July 03, 2009, 06:54:21 PM
-
Pseudopod 149: Mira (http://pseudopod.org/2009/07/03/pseudopod-149-mira/)
By Michael James McFarland
Read by David Moore (http://thegamemastershow.com/)
I won’t go into the details surrounding my dismissal from a well-known East Coast brokerage firm. other than to say I inadvertently let slip some information of a rather sensitive nature and, when it came down to drawing the line, the firm was more interested in maintaining their reputation than my livelihood.
Of course they were. But I didn’t exactly walk away empty-handed. They were all very civilized. There were no black marks on my resume; hell, they even found me another job. At a much smaller firm in Seattle.
And that’s where I met Mira, who this tale is really about.
(http://pseudopod.org/wp-content/plugins/podpress/images/audio_mp3_button.png)
Listen to this week's Pseudopod. (http://media.rawvoice.com/pseudopod/media.libsyn.com/media/pseudopod/Pseudo149_Mira.mp3)
Links mentioned: Closing music by Hopeful Machines (http://www.hopefulmachines.net/), a side project of Ego Likeness (http://egolikeness.com/) Promo for Crescent (http://crescent.net/), by Phil Rossi, rushing Amazon charts on July 9, 2009
-
I enjoyed listening to this week's story. The ending was painfully obvious, and therefore didn't give me any satisfaction. Other than that, it was pretty good.
-
I agree, you could see the ending from a mile away... mainly because the author was dropping hints the size of H-bombs almost from the beginning.
Otherwise it was OK. I wish I could've found out more about Mira and what she did during the day; where she went instead of San Francisco, etc. I know I could figure it out for myself, but I just wanted a little extra creepy detail.
-
Not my style- but quite nice
-
Not bad, but not great. I actually did not guess the ending - or more accurately, I guessed the very ending, but not what led to it. The repetition of "she has look men could kill for" seemed to me like foreshadowing - I figured she would make him kill someone before moving on.
-
I ceased to care about the main character about five minutes in. It made it really hard to follow the story. Stuff happened to him; he didn't happen to stuff. That meant the stuff had to be dynamic, and it really wasn't -- okay, there's this chick, and she's cold, and the dude sort of falls in love with her, and she's totally hot, but he doesn't know anything about her. Then she disappears, and comes back, and somewhere in there he has sex with her... and then she kills him.
IMO: good concept, poor execution. Especially the part about the guy's old office finding him a new job -- that would NEVER happen these days.
-
Not my cup of tea. The potential was there but did not deliver.
Boy meets girl, who happens to have looks men would kill for.
She leaves.
She comes back.
She leaves.
She comes back.
Girl leaves boy as a withered husk.
Girl starts cycle over again.
There was very little that let me feel for the protag, and even less for the MIA antag.
A little bit more clarity as to the nature of the girl/succubus would have helped a great deal. It could have created a sense of suspense about what she might have been doing to the protag. However all we know is that he is going to end up a shell of a man, but ther was nothing to explain how or why it happened.
-
I enjoyed the voicing of this, but the story wasn't all that scary. It was a rather soothing tale, if a bit depressing. I'm not really into relationship angst as horror, so I didn't really find it all that scary. But as a dark tale of romantic woe, I think it worked. But the author totally gets bonus points for setting it in Seattle--sorry, I just roll that way. :) (Grew up in Tacoma, WA, just south of Seattle.)
-
Boy meets girl, …
She leaves.
She comes back.
She leaves.
She comes back.
Girl leaves boy as a withered husk.
Girl starts cycle over again.
Sounds like every girl I've ever known.
-
I may have been the only one who didn't see the ending coming. However, I didn't see it coming so much that I didn't even understand it when I first listened to it. I figured it out from reading forum comments. Yeah, maybe I'm slow... If I HAD understood the end I might've liked it. I was interested in the relationship, but the story was a bit too long for the content.
-
This story just did not work for me. As soon as the narrator sees the dead guy in the back row, I jumped to the conclusion that she had "black-widowed" him somehow. This guy had just too many issues that were far from interesting. And he just got worse. If you don't feel like you can ask someone their last name after 3 months of "dating" you are doing it wrong! That sort of paralyzing mental illness/depression is really not that interesting.
-
FWIW, I read this story as basically, "A vampire from White Wolf's WoD game books chooses a new ghoul." I think I've read this entire plot in the interstitial fiction in one of the Vampire: The Requiem books, actually.
-
FWIW, I read this story as basically, "A vampire from White Wolf's WoD game books chooses a new ghoul
Between this and some of the comments on "Regulars", I'm somehow left with the feeling that vampires have colonized reader's minds and manifest even where there is no specific detail to suggest such. I don't remember anything explicitly citing Mira as vampiric, just a classic femme fatale of supernatural origins (there are lots of choices) - is it just an unconscious drive to "slot" everything or am I forgetting some point (I will readily admit I don't remember much about the story)?
-
FWIW, I read this story as basically, "A vampire from White Wolf's WoD game books chooses a new ghoul
Between this and some of the comments on "Regulars", I'm somehow left with the feeling that vampires have colonized reader's minds and manifest even where there is no specific detail to suggest such. I don't remember anything explicitly citing Mira as vampiric, just a classic femme fatale of supernatural origins (there are lots of choices) - is it just an unconscious drive to "slot" everything or am I forgetting some point (I will readily admit I don't remember much about the story)?
This story isn't about a Stoker-type vampire, with the blood-draining and such, but it could be included in a wider classification of vampire which sucks your life essence out in some way more subtle than bloodletting, perhaps an empathic vampire instead of a sanguinal one. She drains the guy dry and leaves his desicated but aware body in the movie theater as she moves on to a new victim, definitely sounds vampiric for me.
-
Well, I guess - "vampiric" but not "vampire" (in the sense that I'd call our current health care system "vampiric" but not actually run by vampires, as far as I know). But you did specifically note White Wolf and vampires. Stoker didn't invent blood-feeding, of course, although I'd have to check my notes on when "psychic vampirism" was introduced as a concept - most references start with Dion Fortune but I'm fairly sure there was some short fiction preceding that that used the concept, if not actually calling it that ("The Horla" may suffice as the earliest but I'm thinking there was some novel in either the 1890's or 1910's that extrapolated on theme, arising out of the teachings of occult circles of the time).
Succubus, Lamia, femme fatale le fantastique by any other name...
-
This was a mediocre piece. Well written for sure, great noir-esq atmosphere (the rain, the night, the shadows, busted down buildings, scotch et al) - but nothing terribly original. I saw the ending coming a mile away. Might have been stronger if it was about 2/3 as long. It just dragged on after a while, and I knew what the ending would be.
Great narration, I am happy PP picked this one.
-
FWIW, I read this story as basically, "A vampire from White Wolf's WoD game books chooses a new ghoul." I think I've read this entire plot in the interstitial fiction in one of the Vampire: The Requiem books, actually.
I think a ghoul would feel envigorated by the taking of their new masters essence. I'm going with succubus rather than the WW interpretation, plus the break-up allegory.
Good writing and setting, but a more compelling protag would have improved the story.