Horror – Page 3 – The Drabblecast

Drabblecast 420 – Comfort and Joy

On January 16, 2020

This year’s Drabblecast Christmas Special brings you another original commissioned holiday story from the master of Christmas weirdness himself: Tim Pratt.

Happy Holidays Weirdo’s!

I was in a grubby little bar down in Florida, sitting on a stool beside a plastic palm tree decorated with Christmas lights, when I heard a cough, and smelled cold ashes. I folded up my list and tucked it into my pocket. Without looking around, I said, “Ruprecht. Long time.” A very long time, actually, but I’ve always been good with names…

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Drabblecast 419 – Trifecta: Halloween Special

By Drabblecast

On December 8, 2019

In Drabblecast, Holiday, Horror, Trifecta

Special Guest Host Cryptkeeper Norm hosts this year’s Drabblecast Halloween special.

The Drabblecast brings you a special 3 original stories from Editors past and present, all centered around the history of a lonesome Texas Graveyard.

We present to you,The Lich Gate Trifecta:

They Went Into the Graveyard, One by One by Matthew Bey
The Armadillo Man by Norm Sherman
Macadam by Samantha Henderson

Enjoy!

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Drabblecast 416 – Necessary Cuts

By Drabblecast

On October 1, 2019

In Drabblecast, Horror, Lovecraft Month

Closing out this year’s H.P. Lovecraft month, we bring you another Drabblecast original, this time from author by Bryan Milller, about editing a manuscript as if the whole world depended on it…

The manuscripts I read are haunted. Commas vanish forever into the void. Subjects and verbs struggle in bloody disagreement. Infinitives are cleaved with a dull axe. Sentence fragments ablated at one ragged end lay strewn between the margins.

I take an exorcist’s solemn pride in banishing these warped creatures from the village, sending slapdash monstrosities back to the murky dark from whence they came. The pages come in and the pages go out; my reward is the warm tingle of equilibrium, having restored order to some tiny corner of the world…

Episode Trailer can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WC-qJxNuA6s

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Drabblecast 415 – The Best Scarlet Ceremony Ever!

By Drabblecast

On September 3, 2019

In Comedy, Drabblecast, Horror, Lovecraft Month

Sweet Valley High and the Babysitters Club meet cult life and H.P. Lovecraft mythos, as we continue our special Lovecraft anthology month this week, bringing you an original story by Shaenon K. Garrity.

The Wakefields were the worst family in Oakes Isle. Even the grown-ups knew it. Whenever a chicken was stolen or the air was let out of a bike tire or a starving hex was chalked on a barn wall to sicken the sheep, there was a Wakefield behind it…

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Drabblecast B-Sides 77 – Looking for Jake

By Drabblecast

On August 24, 2019

In Drabblecast B-Sides, Horror, Lovecraft Month, Romance

Drabblecast Premium Content. Sign up here to support the Drabblecast and listen!

I don’t know how I lost you. I remember there was that long time of searching for you, frantic and sick-making … I was almost ecstatic with anxiety. And then I found you, so that was alright. Only I lost you again. And I can’t make out how it happened.

I’m sitting out here on the flat roof you must remember, looking out over this dangerous city. There is, you remember, a dull view from my roof. There are no parks to break up the urban monotony, no towers worth a damn. Just an endless, featureless cross-hatching of brick and concrete, a drab chaos of interlacing backstreets stretching out interminably behind my house. I was disappointed when I first moved here, I didn’t see what I had in that view. Not until Bonfire Night.

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Drabblecast 414 – Dance, Siege, Swoop

By Drabblecast

On August 20, 2019

In Drabblecast, Fantasy, Horror, Lovecraft Month

Lovecraft Month continues as the Drabblecast brings you an original, commissioned piece of H.P. Lovecraft mythos fiction, “Dance, Siege, Swoop” by award-winning author Robert Reed.

Be sure to keep a night light on, this one will chill you to the core!

Story Excerpt:

“My foot did not discover the prize, nor was I the first of the object’s erstwhile owners.

According to every account, it was a young girl who innocently tripped over the mostly buried artifact while skipping across a whisper field. Since this was near the edge of the habitable world, onlookers assumed that the object was an artifact lost by one of the Great Cranes, and perceiving rarity, it was the girl’s uncle who excavated the prize…”

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Drabblecast 413 – The Rats in the Walls

By Drabblecast

On August 9, 2019

In Drabblecast, Horror, Lovecraft Month

Kicking off this year’s H.P. Lovecraft month with a classic from the man himself. It’s not your mind playing tricks it’s The Rats in the Walls!

On July 16, 1923, I moved into Exham Priory after the last workman had finished his labours.

The restoration had been a stupendous task, for little had remained of the deserted pile but a shell-like ruin; yet because it had been the home of several of my ancestors, I let no expense deter me.

The place had not been inhabited for a century since a tragedy of intensely hideous, (though largely unexplained) nature had struck down the master, five of his children, and several servants; finally driving forth under a cloud of suspicion and terror their illegitimate third son— my lineal progenitor, who had been taken in as their own. The final survivor of the cursed line…

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Drabblecast B-Sides 76 – Sad, Dark Thing

By Drabblecast

On July 15, 2019

In Drabblecast B-Sides, Horror

Drabblecast Exclusive Premium Content.

Aimless. A short, simple word. It means “without aim”, where “aim” derives from the notion of calculation with a view to action. Lacking purpose or direction, therefore, without a considered goal.

People mainly use the word in a blunt, softened fashion. They walk “aimlessly” down the street, unsure whether to have a coffee or check out the new magazines in the bookstore or maybe sit on that bench and watch the world go by…

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Drabblecast 410 – Go Between

By Drabblecast

On July 5, 2019

In Drabblecast, Drama, Horror, Strange

On this week’s Drabblecast, Norm and NPR’s Chioke I’Anson bring you stories about the voices in your head, including “Go Between” by acclaimed writer China Mieville.

“Go Between” tells the tale of a man who, for several years, has been receiving strange instructions to deliver seemingly random items from location to location. Agonizing over effect his deliveries, he considers stopping, unsure whether the deliveries support a malignant cause or aid a good one.

Story Excerpt:

“Something was in the bread. Morley was cutting, and on the fourth strike of the knife, the metal broke.

Behind him, his friends talked over their food. Morley pried the dough apart and touched something smooth. He had marked it with a scratch. Morley could see the thing’s colour, a drab charcoal. He frowned. It had been a long time since this had happened…”

China Tom Miéville is a British urban fantasy fiction author, essayist, comic book writer, socialist political activist and literary critic. He often describes his work as weird fiction and is allied to the loosely associated movement of writers called New Weird.

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Drabblecast B-Sides 75 – The Five Hundred Days of Ms. Between

By Drabblecast

On May 30, 2019

In Drabblecast, Drabblecast B-Sides, Horror, Sci-Fi

For this bit of Drabblecast Member Premium Content, we bring you “The Five Hundred Days of Ms. Between” by Joshua Alan Doetsch.

Joshua Alan Doetsch is a “sentient word virus spreading across the collective unconscious through the vector of human language.” His writings include novels, short fiction, and video games (including Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey).

Click here to become a Drabblecast B-Sides Premium Content Member with access to extra stories like this each month!

Warning: story contains violence and references to suicide.

Story Excerpt:

Can’t feel my legs. So I slither along the ground, toward the audient window, humming that song. I hear the wet-velcro rip of the thousand hands rending flesh. I see her through the window. That mocking grin.

The first thing Ms. Between said to me was, “I’m a mad woman with a lab.” The second thing she said was that I could leave at any time with no obligation. The third thing was that there could be no questions—questions would cause her and her offer to evaporate. I believed absolutely in that, so she handed me the murder weapon.

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Drabblecast Director’s Cut – The Box Born Wraith

By Drabblecast

On May 11, 2019

In Director's Cut, Drabblecast, Horror

“Just Lookin’ for Chocolate.”

Norm and author Kevin Anderson discuss the horror genre, the origins of Cryptkeeper Norm, and of course, the hit story “The Box-Born Wraith” featured as Drabblecast episode 87 back in 2008 and published as our second official Halloween Special.

“We all die in the dark, Benny…”

Another Drabblecast Director’s Cut bringing more detail and author insights to a fan favorite episode.

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Drabblecast 406 – Beauty Tips for the Apocalypse

By Drabblecast

On May 9, 2019

In Comedy, Drabblecast, Horror, Sci-Fi, Strange

Today The Drabblecast brings you an original story commissioned by Karen Heuler: “Beauty Tips for the Apocalypse.”

Karen Heuler wrote her first novel when she was eleven, and she’s been worshiping books at the altar ever since.

Story Excerpt:

In times such as these, with the world shaken to its core, it is all too easy to give up on routine cosmetic care. Yet a fresh look in a war zone can do so much to uplift those suffering and dying right in front of your eyes. Consider it a humanitarian obligation that you owe to those around you, no matter the particular effects of the zone of destruction you find yourself in…

Enjoy the show (the full story is printed below the player)!

Drabblecast 406 – Beauty Tips for the Apocalypse

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Drabblecast B-Sides 73 – That Only A Mother

By Drabblecast

On March 31, 2019

In Drabblecast B-Sides, Horror, Sci-Fi

This Drabblecast B-Sides episode features Judith Merril’s story “That Only A Mother”

This story is available to our $10/month B-Sides subscribers! Not a member yet? Here’s how you can support the show!

Story Excerpt:

Margaret reached over to the other side of the bed where Hank should have been. Her hand patted the empty pillow, and then she came altogether awake, wondering that the old habit should remain after so many months. She tried to curl up, cat-style, to hoard her own warmth, found she couldn’t do it any more, and climbed out of bed with a pleased awareness of her increasingly clumsy bulkiness.

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Drabblecast 401 – We Who Stole The Dream Pt. 2

By Drabblecast

On March 15, 2019

In Drabblecast, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi

Women and Aliens Month continues with Part 2 of “We Who Stole The Dream” by James Tiptree Jr., aka Alice Bradley Sheldon.

If you have not heard part one, you can find that here.

Sadism, slavery, power and oppression… are we ever truly innocent? Or is there the potential of cruelty in all of us?

You be the judge.

Story Excerpt:

An alarm shrieked and cut off, all colors vanished, the very structure of space throbbed wildly—as, by a million-to-one chance, the three most massive nearby moons occulted one another in line with the tiny extra energies of the cruiser and its detonating missile, in such a way that for one micromicrominim the Dream stood at a seminull point with the planetary mass. In that fleeting instant she flung out her tau-field, folded the normal dimensions around her, and shot like a squeezed pip into the discontinuity of being which was tau.

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Drabblecast 400 – We Who Stole The Dream Pt. 1

By Drabblecast

On March 9, 2019

In Drabblecast, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi

The Drabblecast launches its 8th Annual Women and Aliens Month with Part 1 of “We Who Stole the Dream” by James Tiptree Jr.

This is a dark, dystopian tale about sadism and slavery, and the potential for cruelty in all of us. Published postmortem in the 1990 compilation “Her Smoke Rose Up Forever,” this story was originally written in 1978. True to the times, Tiptree was wrestling with sexism and feminism in much the same vein as Ursula Le Guin and Margaret Atwood. These issues are all still relevant, and still topical forty years later.

Story Excerpt:

The children could survive only twelve minims in the sealed containers.

Jilshat pushed the heavy cargo loader as fast as she dared through the darkness, praying that she would not attract the attention of the Terran guard under the floodlights ahead. The last time she passed he had roused and looked at her with his frightening pale alien eyes. Then, her truck had carried only fermenting-containers full of amlat fruit.

Now, curled in one of the containers, lay hidden her only-born, her son Jemnal.

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Drabblecast B-Sides 72 – Looking for a Key

By Drabblecast

On March 6, 2019

In Drabblecast B-Sides, Fantasy, Horror, Romance

This Drabblecast B-Sides episode features S. L. Bickley’s story “Looking for a Key”

This story is available to our $10/month B-Sides subscribers! Not a member yet? Here’s how you can support the show!

Story Excerpt:

My lover is a used bookstore, and when I have money we play a game. He closes me inside him and won’t let me out till I find a certain book. And I do not know what it is or where it is, and so I have to touch every part of his insides to find it. And I wander him all over and touch his spines with my dry fingertips – slide the books from his worn-smooth wooden shelves and riffle his pages. I like the deckled edges best. Sometimes I will find an uncut page and when that happens I will turn my back so his clerk doesn’t see me and slit it with my pocketknife that I keep for only that purpose. That excites him, I think, more than most things I do, and often it means I have found my key.

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Drabblecast 399 – Trifecta: We Don’t Talk Any More

By Zimmerman Bledsoe

On February 23, 2019

In Drabblecast, Horror, Trifecta

This week the Drabblecast presents a Trifecta Special: “We Don’t Talk Any More.”

“One in Four Adults”

by Catherine Schaff-Stump

Cath Schaff-Stump writes fiction for children and adults, from humor to horror. She is the author of the Klaereon Scroll series, the most recent of which is The Pawn of Isis, coming in March, 2019. She lives and works in Iowa, teaching English to non-native speakers.

Story Excerpt:

She placed the pan on the burner. “Lycanthropy?”

He wasn’t joking. “You know there are genetic indicators.”

“First of all, just because Peter Stumpf is the most famous werewolf in the werewolf books, and you’re related, I don’t think that means you’re going to become a werewolf. He had an enchanted belt, right? That’s not a genetic indicator.”

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Drabblecast B-Sides 71 – The Man Who Has Been Killing Kittens

By Drabblecast

On February 4, 2019

In Drabblecast B-Sides, Fantasy, Horror

This Drabblecast B-Sides episode features “The Man Who Has Been Killing Kittens” by Douglas Warrick.

This story is available to our $10/month B-Sides subscribers! Not a member yet? Here’s how you can support the show!

Story Excerpt:

So you want to know about the man who has been killing kittens.

There’s a little congress of dead men in bad suits at the bottom of the reservoir. Some are handcuffed to steering wheels and float upside-down from shattered windshields, and others have their ankles chained to old cinder blocks. Some, their murderers evidently keen on homage, even have their feet sealed in buckets full of cement. They bicker and gossip and lie to one another. Blank-eyed and bloated and secretive are the dead men in their underwater garden.

The Man Who Had Been Killing Kittens

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Drabblecast 396 – Trifecta: Losses & Sacrifices

By Drabblecast

On January 23, 2019

In Drabblecast, Horror, Trifecta

This week the Drabblecast brings you three stories about shipwrecks, murder, and Nazis. It’s a Losses and Sacrifices Trifecta!

“Seven Losses of Na Re”

by Rose Lemberg

This is a brooding look back on things taken, things lost, and things always remembered.

Rose Lemberg is a queer, bigender immigrant from Eastern Europe and Israel. Their fiction and poetry have appeared in Lightspeed‘s Queer Destroy Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Uncanny, and many other venues. Rose’s work has been a finalist for the Nebula Crawford, and other awards. Their novella The Four Profound Weaves is forthcoming from Tachyon Press. You can find more of their work on their Patreon: patreon.com/roselemberg

Story Excerpt:

My life is described by the music of mute violins. When my

parents married, my great-grandfather, may the earth be as a

feather, ascended the special-guests podium, cradling the old

fiddle to his chest. “And now the zeide will play the wedding

melody,” they said. “A special blessing,” they said, a sgule, a

royal blessing. But the bow fell from his fingers.

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Drabblecast 394 – Dirty Santa

By Zimmerman Bledsoe

On December 25, 2018

In Drabblecast, Holiday, Horror

Merry Christmas strangers! The Drabblecast has something rather wicked fixed up for you this holiday season! We present to you a festive tale from fan-favorite Tim Pratt! It’s called “Dirty Santa.”

It’s a story that takes us on a journey with one awkward, balding, twenty-something to a Christmas party where he meets a mysterious stranger carrying a mystical and dangerous gift. This is a white elephant he’ll probably never forget.

‘Tis the season of giving, right folks? Yes, the season of learning how to genuinely thank people for upping your supply of socks and underwear. It’s a season of family and friends and maybe learning the difference between the two. Whether you’re opening up presents or opening up old wounds (thanks Kate) we’re reminded this is the time of year to be mindful of what you wish for. You just might get it.

Story Excerpt:

Kieran wallflowered. The apartment was a bustle of twenty other people more extroverted and festive than himself, all dressed in the requisite hideous holiday sweaters, drinking bourbon punch and rum punch and some sort of strange vegan eggnog, flirting and joking and ranting and, in one case, openly making out against a wall underneath a dangling branch of mistletoe.

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Drabblecast 406 – Beauty Tips for the Apocalypse

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“One in Four Adults”

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The Man Who Had Been Killing Kittens

“Seven Losses of Na Re”

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