Author Topic: Pseudopod 170: The Sultan of Meat  (Read 12600 times)

Bdoomed

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on: November 28, 2009, 07:41:48 AM
Pseudopod 170: The Sultan of Meat


By James B. Pepe
Read by Kris Johnson

I shrugged my shoulders and leveled the .44 cap-and-ball at its plaintive face. The squirrel thanked me, got up on its hind paws, put the metal in its mouth, and suckled on the long barrel like a caged guinea pig taking water from a bottle.

I cocked the hammer. The annihilating thunderclap, the blue smoke, the oddly gentle kick, the spray of blood, bone, and fur on my boots — all one blur, one true moment, a thing of terrible clarity. Deafened, ears ringing, I tucked my head into the crook of my arm, dropped to my knees, and wept. The buzzing in my head, the buzzing in the forest, dopplering off the sugar maples, oaks, and corpses of long-dead Dutch Rotted elms. The buzzing was everywhere. Beneath my palms, the dead leaves on the forest floor vibrated in time to that all-pervasive power station hum. The buzzing was everywhere, and I wept.

We are meat, mad meat. Nothing more.



Listen to this week's Pseudopod.

I'd like to hear my options, so I could weigh them, what do you say?
Five pounds?  Six pounds? Seven pounds?


MacArthurBug

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Reply #1 on: November 28, 2009, 10:42:02 AM
The use of language, while brutal and often course was both disturbing and effective.  A bit metaphysical-y on the horror spectrum- the imagry grotesque and too real to be surreal. Over all, not a re-listen FAR too "gross" to be a re-listen but a tight and solid story.

On a side note: was I the only one who kept hearing Fight Club-esque wordage "We are the all seeing.." etcetc?

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kibitzer

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Reply #2 on: November 29, 2009, 12:15:13 AM
That was really disturbing. Does it make sense to say, I didn't like it, but it was good?


speck

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Reply #3 on: November 30, 2009, 04:38:34 PM
I couldn't keep pace with this one. The imagery and language, while visceral to boot, felt too crammed in. Half the time I had no idea what was going on. And, it felt like it ended too soon.

I just felt like it needed a little more background in order to keep the foreground in some sort of context. Maybe I'll re-listen to this one later. See if I can sort it out.



Unblinking

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Reply #4 on: November 30, 2009, 05:35:29 PM
The surreal parts had some really vivid, compelling imagery.  That being said, I didn't finish it because the imagery took up too much of the stage and left me wondering what the hell was going on.  The vivid surreal world was offset by the real world which I didn't find particularly compelling.  The surrealness of the other world was interesting at first, but after getting pounded with it minute after minute, it started to grate after a while and eventually I just shut it off to stop my head from exploding. 



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Reply #5 on: November 30, 2009, 05:54:55 PM
Fascinating use of language.  I enjoyed the way food and eating-related metaphors (almost typed "meatphors") found their way into the narration.  Very Lovecraftian.  I think it went on just a titch too long for what it was - there was almost no plot, after all - but it was entertaining and made me chuckle appreciatively a few times.  (Yes, I know it's not meant as a humor piece, and no, I wasn't laughing AT it.  I just have a... well, a really weird sense of humor.  Let's leave it at that.)

Highly enjoyable in limited doses.  If the stories were always like this, I'd lose interest fast, but every now and then something really outre can be a nice change of pace.



Mouldy Squid

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Reply #6 on: November 30, 2009, 10:49:24 PM
Fantastic story. This kind of fiction is rare and I am glad that Pseudopod got its tentacles on it.



Dr_Know453

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Reply #7 on: December 01, 2009, 10:18:41 AM
Unfortunately, this didn't really work as a horror story for me; it's more like a long prose poem with some vividly unpleasant imagery. I actually thought the writing was good, but the narrative thread was all over the place...maybe a second listen would make things clearer, but probably not in the near future.

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cdugger

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Reply #8 on: December 02, 2009, 12:38:50 AM
My first response is simply...

Um, what?

Now that that is out of the way, this would be a really great and disturbing story if it was twice the length.

The author didn't do the story justice by writing it so short. The fascination with the girl should have been more deeply explained, and the vengeance aspect should have been revealed earlier.

I read, therefore I am...happy.


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Reply #9 on: December 03, 2009, 06:50:46 PM
This is my first time posting, and I want to say I adored the imagery in this story.  I like how it feels you had to earn understanding, bits and pieces at a time, anchor-less in a sea of compelling stream-of-consciousness description.  So much is left unanswered that the story benefits from it.  We don't need to know more about who the girl was, or what her parents did, or how our protagonist got from that meeting under the tree to George Washington park.  Resolving those scenes into linear understanding aren't the point.  The point is the utter confusion and crushing hopelessness he feels, and that despite all that he acts, he forces himself to take what limited understanding he has and transform it into pyrrhic action.

And the HPL mythos inference is an interesting touch; it made me feel like I finally grasped a bit of deeper meaning, the "whys" and "hows", but said meaning was all the more horrific for it because of it's small part in a much larger, scarier world.

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wildlifeanalysis

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Reply #10 on: December 04, 2009, 02:58:12 AM
Love the imagery but I also felt lost at times listening to the story. Might this one be better read and not heard?



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Reply #11 on: December 04, 2009, 03:39:39 PM
Downloading this one again.  Listening the other night, I was five minutes in when I suddenly heard bits of Trans-Siberian Orchestra breaking in, and realized this was one of the files that suffered from the situation that my hard drive is fucked like a prison bitch, and some files have bits of other files stuck in them somehow.

I was into it for those five minutes though.

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That Hirschman Guy

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Reply #12 on: December 07, 2009, 03:30:13 AM
My first response is simply...

Um, what?

Now that that is out of the way, this would be a really great and disturbing story if it was twice the length.

The author didn't do the story justice by writing it so short. The fascination with the girl should have been more deeply explained, and the vengeance aspect should have been revealed earlier.
My review exactly. Thanks for saving me having to post it.



Kaa

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Reply #13 on: December 10, 2009, 03:41:02 PM
This is the only story on all three of the escape artists podcasts that I have not been able to finish. I just couldn't take any more. I'm sure some people liked it, but....Well, luckily, there's a new one every week. :)

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Loz

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Reply #14 on: December 16, 2009, 12:40:07 PM
Listened to it while packing my stuff up for a move, so possibly I was a little distracted but it just didn't grab me enough, there just didn't seem a strong enough story to pull me through what was occasionally fascinating imagery.



gelee

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Reply #15 on: December 16, 2009, 07:20:30 PM
This was probably one of the most challenging stories I've heard on an EA podcast.  It certainly asks much of it's audience, but I think it gives back quite a lot in return.
I really enjoyed the language of this story, lush but never florid.  In a piece like this, it's tough to walk the line between surreal and nonsense, but I think Mr. Pepe succeeded.  Fine reading by Kris Johnson, by the way.  Captured the tone very well.
And yeah, I think it makes perfect sense to recognize that something's well done without necessarily finding it to your tastes. 



eytanz

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Reply #16 on: December 23, 2009, 07:08:55 PM
I did not understand this story - in fact, I think I was very lost by the ending. I can't even figure out if this is a case where the language was used to obfuscate a series of events that would otherwise be accessible, or whether this was just a surreal nightmarish scenario. But I was captivated by the storytelling, for all that I was also lost.



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Reply #17 on: February 02, 2010, 10:33:57 AM
Deeply Disturbed, some what grossed out, left with more questions than answers.  I think that to me is what horror is.  Fantasy is learning about the dragon's 57th cousin, and 300 pages of what the girls are wearing (damn you Robert Jordan), horror is about two people entering, a series of screams, and one person crawling out, only to be snatched back up just as he or she thinks there is hope.  You don't know why, or how, or really what.

I honestly have no idea about what was really going on here. Was it the end of the world? Was this some kind of deamon unleashed to turn living things (horny elk, suicidial chipmunks, dead hunters) mad?  Was this just some kind of crazy inner delerium that the author had??  Good story, but i don't think i will be listening to it again any time soon.  It already did its job.



Millenium_King

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Reply #18 on: June 02, 2010, 09:40:18 PM
WTF was this story even about?

Boring.  Confusing.  Meandering.  Flowery.  Not scary.  No plot.  Epic fail.

And was I the only one who was turned off by the Robert f**king Frost allusions?  The Lovecraft stuff also seemed shoehorned in.

I absolutely despise these "cosmic revelation" stories (anyone who's read my review of "The Blessed Days" should already know this).  The big payoff to this is that we're all just flesh and the universe is a cruel place?  Ummmm... DUH?  (Warning, editorializing ahead: Except that's not even correct: cruelty requires the concept of kindness to exist.  The universe simply IS.  It's uncaring - neither cruel nor kind, it simply IS.  If it turns on an axis, that axis is force - not cruelty.)

I appreciate stories where the characters have powerful, personal revelations - not where some "cosmic truth" is thrust on the reader.  That never works.  Either the reader already knows it, or their worldview has already rejected it.  Let's have less evangelizing in our fiction, okay?

Apologies for the cruelty of this post (and yes, I get the irony).  I just have nothing positive to say - except one thing: excellent narration.  PP has great narrators.

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alpert

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Reply #19 on: June 03, 2010, 02:30:51 PM
WTF was this story even about?

I agree, but it still creeped me out.



Nitequill

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Reply #20 on: June 04, 2010, 07:53:02 AM
A super lot of similes there and not much narrative. Some people like it like that though I guess.
« Last Edit: June 04, 2010, 03:39:11 PM by Nitequill »



ThinlyVeiledAlias

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Reply #21 on: June 09, 2010, 01:49:27 AM
I like dreadful, disturbing imagery as much as anyone.  But I'm a big fan of story.   A horror story with nothing dreadful or disturbing in it, to me, is a hollow experience.  The images without a story to hang them on is just as unsatisfying.



Ben Phillips

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Reply #22 on: June 09, 2010, 05:14:50 PM
WTF was this story even about?

I would say "The Sultan of Meat" is about the messiah ("sultan") of a maltheistic deity, whose arrival is preceded by strange phenomena including a sort of contagious insanity, and the ritual abuse and gruesome, supernatural death of a young girl.  In case that helps anyone.

See separate thread about the more general topics.




Millenium_King

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Reply #23 on: June 09, 2010, 08:09:45 PM
WTF was this story even about?

I would say "The Sultan of Meat" is about the messiah ("sultan") of a maltheistic deity, whose arrival is preceded by strange phenomena including a sort of contagious insanity, and the ritual abuse and gruesome, supernatural death of a young girl.  In case that helps anyone.

See separate thread about the more general topics.

Really?  With all the Lovecraft references, I assumed it was just Azathoth.

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Reply #24 on: December 16, 2011, 10:41:45 AM
After having listened to this many times - at least ten, probably more - i feel like I'm finally getting a vague idea of it's meaning. The most predominant theme seems to be the main character's frustration with the fact that he is only meat, as everything else is. The world is driven by the need to feed and thus to kill, and everything that we humans have built around us to give the world meaning is an extended illusion. The need for vengeance over Kylie Avon's death is the narrator refusing to accept his own frailty and insignificance. I think the part where he explained to her why he doesn't believe in God is meant to further emphasize the fact that we are insignificant and that we are not created by any higher being but simply are until we die. In the forest bits the narrator is almost 100% instinct-driven animal, eating and killing because nature tells him to. Even his shooting at the sultan is bestial in the sense that he feels threatened/frightened by the sultan and wants to eliminate it, when in fact he is driven by the same type of instincts as the sultan is (at the end he gets down on the ground and slithers along with the sultan).

That was a little disorganized, but just my thoughts about the story at the moment. I really love the way this piece is so open to interpretation. Most of pseudopod's stuff is really good, but it's nice not to be hand-fed everything just once in a while.