You know, I consider myself the sort of person who can take most topics in stride. I'm a long-time listener and aside from a couple of relatively early episodes (Counting From Ten comes to mind), there haven't been many times when I actually had to stop and turn the podcast off.
This was one of those times.
This episode was very hard for me to listen to. Probably it's because the topic hits uncomfortably close to home for me- I was an Audra in high school myself. I'm thirty-one now, and I'm still feeling the aftereffects.
Mind you, what I went through wasn't to the physical extent of the character in this story, of course, and my bullies were pretty much exclusively male, but I could see enough of myself in what was happening that it made me incredibly uncomfortable.
I suppose you could say that means it was an effective horror story.
I don't know what it is about childhood, or the schoolyard in particular, that's so conductive to sociopathy, but this one was a little too real for my liking. Well-written, certainly. The narration was excellent. But I almost broke down a couple of times in the car not just from how vicious the protagonist was, but the victim blaming and how little the narrator seemed to care. (Or at least, how little she told herself she cared.) I suppose the inability to move on from that kind of trauma, for the aggressors as well as the victim, may have been some form of comeuppance, but that's small comfort.
Bravo, everyone, and I mean that sincerely.
I don't think I'll be listening to this one again.