Tag: podcasts

quick picks, recommendations

just my two cents: “vincent’s penny,” by chris barnham

ray brantley

(see what I did there? /finger guns)

Listen at Podcastle 628: Vincent’s Penny, May 26, 2020. Audio recording by Escape Artists Inc. licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The car gathers speed. The sirens fall away and another sound comes; a strengthening growl high above. I can picture the swollen metal bellies of the Heinkel bombers, stuffed with high explosives. With the motion of the car, I feel the ancient metal disc move on its chain beneath my shirt. Vincent’s penny; maybe it can bring me luck again.

“You can let me go. Who will ever know?”

“Why would we do that?”

“If you let Vincent do this, who will stop him doing worse in the future?”

The car stops, doors open and close. As they lead me away from the car a succession of explosions in the distance makes me flinch. A sound like a giant striding towards us, wading through houses and shops.

The hood is snatched away, revealing a large empty space, an abandoned warehouse. A table and three chairs in the centre of the room.

I know I will never leave this place.

famous last words

Anyway, in summary:

What’s it about?
Sebastian is a boy plucked from a life of poverty and abuse by Vincent, a mysterious and powerful stranger, and is groomed for the sort of greatness that powerful men seek to pass on to their proteges. (Greatness in this context comes in such exciting flavours as ‘murder with impunity,’ ‘body-snatching,’ and ‘immortality.’) Over the centuries, Sebastian reaps the rewards of being within Vincent’s inner circle, but cannot escape his own conscience. A confrontation as well as a reckoning is inevitable.

What’s so good about it?
You know what “they” say about bad pennies, but what is Chris Barnham saying about them? Possibly that there’s more than one, and whether or not that penny is ‘bad’ or or ‘good’ or bound to turn up again is entirely up to the reader. Sebastian is the lens through which we experience both the horror of a child’s abuse by his father, his serendipitous rescue by a stranger, and his gradual transformation into a man with more in common with his monstrous mentor than he is prepared to admit to himself.

I enjoy any story that makes me struggle to find an appropriate genre label for it. This one spans genres, being equal parts historical fiction and fantasy (hence its appearance on PodCastle), but I’d stretch it further and categorize it as a piece of horror fiction, too. The horror is slow to approach, and subtly written, but it will slam into you like a freight train if you pick the story up for a second time and re-read it from the beginning.

Where can I find it?
You can find the full text of “Vincent’s Penny” over here at PodCastle, and I would strongly recommend reading along with the story as you listen to Matt Dovey’s A+ narration. It’s well worth your time.

Happy listening!

constructive deconstruction, recommendations

along came a literary device: ‘a guest for mr. spider’ and the magnus archives, part 1

ray brantley 
Some spiders sneak when stealth is moot, 
Slipping into unsuspecting boot, 
Settling in without a care, 
Comfort found in sweaty lair

Post-it Poetry – Spider Sense — Dim But Bright Poetry

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Please be mindful that, while episode 81 of the Magnus Archives, “A Guest for Mr. Spider,” is the focus of this article, I may reference specific events or information from later episodes in passing. This is not a spoiler-free zone, apologies!

I will gamely admit that I currently view all creative works I encounter through a Magnus Archives conversion lens, as I’ve spent the last three months thoroughly marinating myself in all existing episodes and as much sweet, sweet fan-created content as I can get my greedy little hands on.[1] My obsession also means that I’m spotting connections and parallels to the show’s motifs everywhere, including innocent bystander blog posts that turn up on WordPress Reader. Which is where I spotted Dim But Bright Poetry‘s charmingly illustrated “Spider Sense,” now featured at the top of this post. Almost immediately after reading it I thought of “A Guest for Mr. Spider,” and could not stop thinking about it.

A quick note before I get started: spiders in the Magnusverse serve several specific narrative functions, and I have every intention of giving discussing these functions and plotty labyrinths in more detail at a later date–but, I’m not going to get into them in detail today. Today I just want to write about spiders, I guess.

Just a friendly drawing of a friendly arachnid who means you no harm at all, probably.
Art by lunarsmith on DeviantArt

Is there enough collective cultural knowledge behind the verse, “along came a spider,” to transform it into a literary conceit? I think there must be, otherwise spiders and their webs and the sorts of spidery characters who crouch at their centres–or find themselves tangled up within them–wouldn’t be such a mainstay of literature. Specifically children’s literature, where the spider as a character is nearly always sly and clever and unambiguously up to no good, and therefore a reliable source of dramatic tension in a story or poem. When the spider comes along in a children’s tale, its arrival signals to a young reader that someone in the story is in danger, whether that someone is Mary Howitt’s Fly or, as is probably the case in “Spider Sense,” some unknown person’s socked foot. (Or the spider itself. One small spider vs. one large foot? Odds aren’t looking good for you, little spider.)

This brings us to The Magnus Archives, an audio drama horror podcast produced by The Rusty Quill that is intended for older audiences and so lacks on its surface anything to do with children’s literature. But Episode 81 is transparently about childhood, grounded in the recollection of narrator and central protagonist Jonathan Sims’ childhood trauma as he records his statement for the Magnus Institute.[2]

The object at the centre of his trauma is a book–a children’s book, at first blush–called “A Guest for Mr. Spider.” And this book, more than any of the other nightmarish tomes in the series–which are all capable of scarring minds, ruining lives, and dispensing horror after horror upon anyone unlucky enough to stumble upon one–is the one book that feels the most fundamentally evil to me as a listener. I suspect it feels that way because it is the only one whose very design preys upon the trust of children and their engagement with stories.

Continue reading “along came a literary device: ‘a guest for mr. spider’ and the magnus archives, part 1” →
site updates

various and sundry housekeeping

ray brantley

Some updates to the site:

  • rearranged some of the navigation on the home page because it was driving me bonkers, but more importantly:
  • top-level navigation pages for horror and weird fiction podcast recommendations (“the radio”), including links to specific stories! In time the drop-down menu will be expanded to include audio drama and some other stuff that feeds the brain goblins lurking in my brain swamp

if you feel so inclined you may also check out my Ko-fi page, where I am hoping to make my words work for me enough to afford a better camera for stalking unsuspecting urban wildlife.

it is a sunny and yet bitterly cold day here in Toronto, but it is also Friday, and that is worth a bit of celebration.

constructive deconstruction

very friendly monsters: emily devenport’s “postcards from monster island”

ray brantley

“I like this one specific thing an awful lot, I just can’t figure out why.”

eveningfire
A charming photograph of my partner’s brother’s fire pit. (Taken on one of the few mild evenings bestowed upon southern Ontario this August, 2016.)

Case in point: I enjoy a bonfire, but not hot weather. Why? Bonfires are cozy. Sometimes you cook food on them. Hot weather–and humidity–make me feel as though I’m walking through hot soup. Mystery solved.

Figuring out just what it is I like about certain stories or genres, or what I don’t like, takes a little more mental calisthenics. I’ll go through some warm-up moves first.

This Thing I Like: “Postcards from Monster Island,” by Emily Devenport

I first listened to this story when it aired on the Clarkesworld Magazine Podcast back in April of 2015.[1] That’s about a year and a half ago at this point, and out of all the stories that have aired since, this is the only one I revisit at least once every couple of months. “Postcards” keeps me company on my congested morning commute to my day-job, occasionally during my lunch break, and often during the quiet hour or so I have to myself before I go to sleep at night. It’s pairs excellently with my late evening cup-of-tea-and-cuddling-with-my-cat routine, and so I can reasonably extrapolate that it would pair well with people who have similar morning routines, too. (I don’t understand Morning People, but my partner assures me that they are not a myth and do actually exist.)

Read on with caution; there will be spoilers.

Continue reading “very friendly monsters: emily devenport’s “postcards from monster island”” →