I passed the sign that read Warning: Shark Zone. The sun was setting,
lighting up the tops of the condos sticking out of the water. They had been
swallowed by the swollen ocean, when it spilled over, like everything else:
the skyscrapers, the cars, the fast food joints, the schools and
supermarkets and liquor stores…
Episode Sponsor: You Shall Never Know Security by J.R. Hamantaschen
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I take time-lapse photographs of an orange. The result is always the same.
First I remove the previous orange from the spike in front of the black
velvet backdrop and replace it with a new orange. I set an incandescent
spotlight out of frame as a light source…
Episode Sponsor: You Shall Never Know Security by J.R. Hamantaschen
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This episode of the Drabblecast presents “Followed” by Will McIntosh.
Norm also starts to ponder the nature of the undead. We conclude In Search of the Brain-Eating Nandi Bear serial featuring cryptozoologist Connor Choadsworth.
Following that is our feature story by Will McIntosh, author of Soft Apocalypse and the upcoming Hitchers.
She came wandering down the sidewalk like any other corpse, her herky-jerky walk unmistakable among the fluid strides of the living. She was six or seven, Southeast Asian, maybe Indian, her ragged clothes caked in dried mud. Pedestrians cut a wide berth around her without noticing her at all…
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Cover for Drabblecast episode 216, The Book of Eternity, by Jan Dennison
Is eternal life real worth it? A demonic tale from Mike Resnick explores the question in the final week of Lovecraft months Story features In Search of the Brain-Eating Nandi Bear Part V.
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Okay, no one expects eldritch horror in LA. Not that I know what eldritch horror really is. My old boyfriend (about fifteen boyfriends back) called anything that inspired dread “eldritch horror.” I guess that would describe my entire job, really…
Another story from Lovecraft month – elder horror in LA. Dread Unlocks is on the job!
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Achtromagk shuddered, lost in nightmare images: crimson lightning dotting a wasteland, twilight despair and feeble railings, isolation in a mewling throng. It thrashed and twisted but could not escape, could not stop the unwanted vistas in its mind.
It was silent. And soft. And dark…
Next up in Lovecraft month, a heart-warming tale of an extra-dimensional Lovecraftian horror (an ‘oh so huggable’ one) by Drabblecast favorite Eugie Foster.
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My earliest fear, the one I remember anyways, was of great pulp magazine robots with hot water heater bodies and vacuum tube eyes. My brother forbade me to touch his precious magazines, so I wouldn’t. I’d stare and stare at the covers through; hourglassed damsels in diaphanous gowns draped over thick slab altars, and the robots, always the robots with their cylindrical torsos and pincer claws for hands….
In Search of the Brain-Eating Nandi Bear Part III
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Cynthia couldn’t explain what she’d just seen in the vegetable patch.
She didn’t want to look again. She considered going back into the house, crawling back into bed with Mikey, and putting it down as a beer-inspired dream.
But that pinkish dome with the fuzzy down had felt soft under her fingers, and there had been the smell of manufactured newness, like a dusting of talcum powder wafting up to her nostrils, as she had pulled the coarse outer leaves of the cabbage apart…
Tales of parental love gone awry in this week’s unsettling Drabblecast.
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The sound of running water came from ahead. The trail emerged from the woods and he looked up at the side of a rocky hill. A narrow waterfall trickled down the side of the rock, splashing into a pool of water.
His father claimed the water here was the most amazing color he’d ever seen – a vivid blue-green he’d dubbed Hokkaido green…
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And so came Creature out of the wasteland and into the city, bouncing from hilltop to hilltop like a bulbous ballerina skipping across the knuckles of a great hand. He was big as the moon and black as the night, and he came crashing into the city like a silent meteor. The cityfolk watched his approach with wide eyes and open mouths, and then scattered like leaves…
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The first sign was the chief engineers frowning and going into huddles at odd moments. And then Black Alice began to feel it herself, the way Vinnie was… she didn’t have a word for it because she’d never felt anything like it before. She
would have said balky, but that couldn’t be right. It couldn’t. But she was more and more sure that Vinnie was less responsive somehow, that when she obeyed the captain’s orders, it was with a delay…
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The ship had no name of her own, so her human crew called her the Lavinia Whateley. As far as anyone could tell, she didn’t mind. At least, her long grasping vanes curled—affectionately? — when the chief engineers patted her bulkheads and called her “Vinnie,” and she ceremoniously tracked the footsteps of each crew member with her internal bioluminescence, giving them light to walk and work and live by…
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“Are these fiddlebacks ferns mommy?” Cindy asked. Fiddlehead honey. Margery said absently. “Fiddlebacks are nasty spiders.” It was only later that she would realize Cindy, for once in her vacuous, Barbie obsessed life, was right.”
The first episode of Women and Alien’s month 2011 featuring three stories, each exploring nasty, insectile alien menaces. Fiddleback Ferns, a space infestation sends a mother to her breaking point. Killipedes, a dark, humorous tale where a doctor breaks down a patient’s nasty parasitical infection. In The Difficulties of Evolution, a mournful parent contemplates her child’s anthropomorphic metamorphosis.
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The book opens in New York where hedge-fund manager Tony Wolfe- completely convinced that his success proves him a superman straight out of an Ayn Rand novel- wakes up groggy and realizes his new hair transplant appears to have fallen out. If only.
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