Pseudopod 060: The Heart of Tu’a Halaita

[Bdoomed]

Pseudopod 060: The Heart of Tu’a Halaita

By Tara Kolden

Read by K.J. Johnson

“You are a thief,” the native translator repeated. “There are two things my people say about the tree god. The first is that no one who steals from him goes unpunished.”

Heglund’s eyes narrowed. “And what is the other?”

Callala looked at the dirt floor inside the priest’s hut. His voice was quiet. “They say the taste of a man’s blood stirs the heart of Tu’a Halaita. After a single bite, he will have no satisfaction until the whole man is eaten.”
Wikipedia has a nice picture of a baobab tree you can gaze upon to enhance your listening experience, if only to give you an idea of the size of the thing. (At least it’s there at the time of this writing — with Wikipedia, you never know.)

Listen to this week's Pseudopod.

[lowky]

I really enjoyed the story this week.  I did notice some production flaws.  Especially the first part of the story seemed choppy like it was maybe either read in parts and edited together, or something had to be edited out.  Still an excellent story.  I can really picture that tree, and how disgusting it must have been to climb inside of it.  The miasma surrounding it and inside of it must have been awful.  I empathized with the missionary as he was in the grips of terror especially when he found the skeleton grasping his leg.  very creepy and enjoyable.  More Please.

[eytanz]

Good story - the kind of story that builds up a momentum and carries you with it, making it much more effective than it otherwise would be. I did find it a bit difficult early on to emphasize with the missionary, because he was really not very likable at all. But after a while, I got more and more into it.

[goatkeeper]

GREAT GREAT story.  Pseudopod is getting better and better.  PP has officially reached my "most anticipated download" podcast :-) (well, aside from my own beloved flash fiction podcast drabblecast)
The editors do a great job or selecting very diverse types of scary entertainment.  Big congrats guys- well done!

[Listener]

The author of this story used way too many 50-cent words and spent too much time with a thesaurus, in my opinion.  I think the story would've been better served had she not tried to show off her vocabulary quite so much.  But then, maybe that's something I only notice in audio stories.

Otherwise, no real problems with the story -- believable, suitably scary when it needed to be, and a nice dilemma ending -- do you die by human hands, or by the monster?  Which is the less painful -- or at least less scary -- choice?

As for the reading, I liked the voice of the translator, but the voice of the missionary seemed to change a few times, a la Peter Stormare in Prison Break (also the un-pimp your auto guy from VW, which makes me LOL).  The exposition was read very well, though, and the scene of the missionary trying to get out of the tree had the right amount of suspense.

Overall, a good story.  I enjoyed it, even if I could kind of predict the ending.

[DKT]

Dammit.  I've always wanted to write a missionary horror story. 

I really enjoyed listening to this one.  I also liked the translator's voice more than the missionary's.  But the story was solid and had a very creepy tone to it.

[DDog]

The voice for the translator was great. This one was good and left me pleasantly disturbed instead of anticipating violent sickness.

[goatkeeper]

Does anyone listen to variant frequencies?
How's this compare to the missionaryhorror piece sacrifice they did you think?

[TimWhite]

The voice for the translator was great.

I agree...I loved the interpretation of the voice of the native translator...it really brought home the "you don't know so much Mr. missionary..." message.

I also liked how there were slight supernatural elements to the story, but in the end, there could've been nothing special at all about the tree, and it was simply the priest's cultural retardation that got him killed...

I have to say I'd love to have more stories like this...'monster' stories if you will...

[Myrealana]

The voice for the translator was great.

That voice reminded me of Oded Fehr.

[DKT]

Does anyone listen to variant frequencies?
How's this compare to the missionaryhorror piece sacrifice they did you think?

I listened to the VF story recently and just saw your post again.  I liked Sacrifice, but I think this story was much tighter than it.  I liked the lead character in Sacrifice -- he seemed less of a conniving priest than the one in this story, which is nice, but the older priest being a pedophile was a big cliche.  And the whole cannibal ambush thing seemed pretty rushed.  I'd be up for listening to more stories featuring the character from Sacrifice, though.  Both of them were good listens, but I'd probably listen to the Heart of Tu'a Halaita again before listening to Sacrifice.

[JoeFitz]

Good story - the kind of story that builds up a momentum and carries you with it, making it much more effective than it otherwise would be. I did find it a bit difficult early on to emphasize with the missionary, because he was really not very likable at all. But after a while, I got more and more into it.

This story had very strong echoes of so much post-colonial writing. Now I'm going to have to find my copy of Things Fall Apart. Thanks Pseudopod!

[CammoBlammo]

The author of this story used way too many 50-cent words and spent too much time with a thesaurus, in my opinion.  I think the story would've been better served had she not tried to show off her vocabulary quite so much.  But then, maybe that's something I only notice in audio stories.

Realising you're actually an author who does more than talk about writing, I respectfully disagree. I noticed the author liked a good phrase, and she even seemed to know how to use them correctly (for example, she got 'myriad' right! I never thought I'd see the day...)

I agree that the words weren't necessary for the meaning of the story, but I found they artificially slowed the story down to a nice rhythm that allowed the plot to unfold at the right speed. The excess verbiage acted as a sort of brake on a story that could have been finished way too early. My counselling lecturer at College would say this contributed to the 'lag time' --- the time you have to think between ideas.

[Planish]

After about 10 minutes, I bailed out and listened to some early Escape Pod episodes instead.
There was absolutely nothing to hold my attention in this story.

[Unblinking]

I couldn't finish this one.  I really did give it a try, but the story gave me no reason to care about the outcome.  The only stakes driving the action of the protagonist are his conversion attempts.  I don't care in the slightest if he converts them.

I pulled into my driveway just as he was having trouble getting back out of the tree, and even though the stakes were finally rising, even the presence of something inside the tree was predictable, and I just didn't care enough to listen any longer.

On the bright side, this is only the 4th Pseudopod story I haven't finished, out of 100.  Most of the best magazines only managed about a 1:5 stoppage ratio for me, so a 1:25 is really quite impressive, meaning that Pseudopod's editorial tastes are very well suited to me.  Thanks, Pseudopod! 

[Millenium_King]

Iä! Iä! Shub-Niggurath!  Black Goat of the woods with a thousand young!

I actually rather liked this one.  I'm glad it didn't go for the obvious ending of the tree swallowing him up or grasping him with its branches.  At times, the story delved into being over-written (too many adverbs, sentences which repeated the action when it was clear what had happened).  It seemed to wobble between "modern-lit" and attempting to create a Lovecraftian mantra "horrid, putrescent etc."  Caught in the middle, it only at times achieved either.

But, I did like it and it was a decent little story about the horrors of the jungle - told without getting too cliche.