This was, I believe, my favorite Pseudopod yet. And not just because it was a very well written and performed story, but because of the way I heard it. Lemme 'splain....
I generally listen to podcasts during my commute. I listen to them in order by release date. This one started just as I was getting to work. So I heard Alasdair's intro and the first few sentences of Minx's reading, then had to turn off the iPod and go inside the building. So I rewound back to the beginning of the story.
Some 8 hours later when I came back to the car to drive home, I had forgotten whether this was PodCastle, PseudoPod, or Escape Pod. I knew it was
one of those, but not
which one.
So I had the unusual experience of trying to figure out which way the story was going to go without the cue of which 'cast it was from.
Had it been Escape Pod, I'm sure that root cellar would have had an alien ship in it. But when it didn't, I thought, "This kind of sounds like a fantasy," and thought maybe they'd find the
real Harold and Mr. Sloan down in that root cellar, free them, and then vanquish the shape-shifting demonic entities that had taken over their lives.
When that didn't happen, either, I was left with it being PseudoPod, and I figured that Mrs. Sloan's missing two fingers had been sacrificed to ensnare the
last two girls Harold had brought home. Whoops, no. So...maybe Mrs. Sloan is the real monster, here, and...well, no. Oooh, or maybe it was all some sort of sick initiation and Judith was about to lose one of
her fingers, and...no. Hmm.
The ending totally surprised me, and not just because I wasn't sure which podcast I was listening to. In my estimation, that's one of the signs of a good story.
Maybe Steve should make a feed of
just the stories from all three podcasts without the intros and outros so we don't have the cue of knowing it's sci-fi, fantasy, or horror to begin with, and therefore color our expectations of where the story's headed.