EP025: The Great Old Pumpkin

[Swamp]

EP025: The Great Old Pumpkin

By John Aegard.
Read by Stephen Eley.
Music by Toby Chappell.

As you are no doubt aware, I am the issue of solid Dutch stock—the prosperous Van Pelt family of St. Paul. Mine was a comfortable and happy childhood, and I spent much of it in the devoted service of the Great Old Pumpkin. For him, I cultivated an annual pumpkin patch. I also evangelized him in the community, relating the tale of how, every year on Hallowmas Eve, the day when the spiritual most strongly encroaches on the substantial, this mightiest of gourds would rise to revel across the world with the most sincere of his adorers. My neighbors were understandably skeptical; after all, not once had this superbeing ever chosen to grace my pumpkin patch or any other place in our town. I vowed that I would coax him into my backyard, and I set out in the manner of a learned man to discover how I might do this.

Rated PG. Contains dark imagery and terrifying fruit.


Listen to this week’s Escape Pod!

[Boggled Coriander]

This was basically one long extended joke, but I liked it a lot.  And the dark and brooding music just threw the absurdity into even sharper relief.  Well done!

I think my old bedroom still has some vintage Schultz books from the glory days of the '60s.

[Unblinking]

What a fun story, to image the story-lovechild between Charles Schulz and H.P. Lovecraft!  Lots of fun images, and little in-jokes for anyone who's read any Peanuts cartoons (though if you haven't, all of that would go over the head.

I like the story better if I disregard the final section with Lucy though.  Even though it surprised me, and I got a laugh out of it, it made the rest of the story into too much of a joke.  Before that the story had been very self-consistent, and only funny if you were familiar with the Peanuts cartoons, the references to the WWI Flying Ace and the security blanket, and so on.  It made sense whether you considered it an homage or a standalone story:  you could enjoy it even if you weren't familiar with Peanuts.  But the ending wasn't really consistent with the rest.  Among other things, it seems that these characters are adults now--why would Lucy still be charging only 5 cents?  It longer makes sense as a standalone story with that in mind, and reduces the rest to nothing more than a silly joke, when before it had existed both as a silly joke and a standalone fun story.