This week on the Drabblecast, we bring you a dark ancient tale from a distant lost land called “The Black Waters of Lethe,” by Oliver Buckram.
Also, exciting news! Norm is launching a new Kickstarter for his 3rd album, “The Instruction Book.”
And how!
Follow the upcoming campaign here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/drabblecast/the-instruction-book
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Tickets, please! Tickets! Right this way! Coupons to the right, and fast passes to left. NO pushing, folks. Watch your tendrils! Keep your goo to yourself. All lines will get you to the newest episode, “From Earth, to Io with Love. ” by Adelehin Ijasan!
Adelehin Ijasan is a Nigerian writer living in Scotland. He’s also an eye surgeon. His short stories have appeared in Fiyah, Interzone, Omenana and other venues. He was nominated for the Commonwealth short story award in 2014 and, more recently, was on the Nommos Award longlist for speculative fiction. Adelehin made the Locus recommended reading list in 2020 and is one of the co-creators of the Sauútiverse, a sci-fi fantasy shared project published by Android Press in November 2023
Cover art by Anike Kirsten
Do you want insider emails and bonus episodes? Interviews and behind the scenes diagrams of how the “sausage” is made? Then come to the Drabblecast Patreon!
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Our story this week is spoiling for a good time. Enjoy a delicious exploration of the human condition, “Bad Meat” by Chip Houser!
Chip Houser (he/him) has stories in Bourbon Penn, PodCastle, Daily Science Fiction, and various other markets. “Dark Morsels,” a chapbook of his very short fiction, is forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks. He’s a graduate of Odyssey, a practicing architect, and an avid walker of slow dogs and an equally avid yet even slower hiker of mountains. Links to his stories and other oddities can be found at chiphouser.com.
Cover art by Bo Kaier
Do you want bonus episodes and content, including a secret Norm Sherman podcast? Then come to the Drabblecast Patreon!
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Our story this week is “Those Who Forget and Those Who Perish” by K. W. Colyard. Enjoy!
Cover art by Steve Lillie
Do you long to be a part of the mob? Did this week’s story give you mob-envy? Then do we have something akin to a mob, but less angry, and less muddy, and also sort of just a rough collection of like-minded people who like similar things, and also it smells better. It’s the Drabblecast Patreon! Where you can meet your fellow less muddy, less angry, and collected new friends and get things like early access to ad-free episodes and bonus episodes! Plus with something new brewing in the dark coming to Patreon only.
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Let us quell your unease with our favorite platitude, “When God closes a door, he opens a window, but when Tom Floss squints at the mob through his window, Roy boards up the door for him.”
Our story this week is “He Who Ruined Everything” by L. N. Clarke. Cover art by Bo Kaier
Do you long to be a part of the mob? Did this week’s story give you mob-envy? Then do we have something akin to a mob, but less angry, and less muddy, and also sort of just a rough collection of like-minded people who like similar things, and also it smells better. It’s the Drabblecast Patreon! Where you can meet your fellow less muddy, less angry, and collected new friends and get things like early access to ad-free episodes and bonus episodes! Plus with something new brewing in the dark coming to Patreon only.
Podcast: Download
This week’s show has it all: vampires, evolutionary biology, and quivering jacked up Taylor Swifts.
We bring you three flash fiction pieces about the complications of being in love: Taylor Swift by Hugh Behm-Steinberg, The Evolution of a Breakup by Etgar Keret, and May I Come In by Adrienne Ryan.
Narrations provided by Avery Alexander, Adam Pracht and Norm Sherman.
Art by Anike Kirsten
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Norm is cryptic this week in terms of offering information on the featured story, “7099 Brecksville Road, Independence Ohio,” by JR Hamentaschen. He will say that that’s the story, and that’s the author. And to listen with headphones on.
And also, check out our episode sponsor this week, pixel-pulp video game Mothmen 1966! Available on steam, switch, xbox, and playstation now!
There were three toilet stalls in the men’s room at the Sunoco Gas Station at 7099 Brecksville Road in Independence, Ohio. One of them was occupied.
If you were, say, washing your hands and looking at the stalls for whatever reason, a mistaken glance, perhaps, you’d see in the space below the door a man’s feet, his black work boots and dark blue Wrangler jeans. (This was one of those bathrooms that had a distressing amount of clearance room between the stall doors and the floor.) The man’s feet flexed a bit, not staying stationary, but not in any unusual way; just in the usual fashion of a man using the toilet, shifting in the usual way a man does as he distributes his weight.
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This week’s show brings you an original commissioned HP Lovecraft mythos story by Nick Mamatas called “When the Sun Hits.” Afterwards, Nick talks about the story in an Author’s Note and Norm gives everyone an existential crises in a Drabble News presentation on The Boltzmann Brain.
When the brain is liberated from the body, only to be imprisoned in a steely new home, one interesting side effect of the process is that all the structures previously dedicated to vision, coordination, the autonomic nervous system, motor control, first atrophy, and then generalize. Perhaps it is an artifact of the nanotech-rich protein fluids in which the brain floats, or the peculiar nth-dimensional folding the Mi-Go use to fit a humanoid brain into their canisters…
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Shark week on Drabblecast has never been so unnerving! Enjoy an original Drabblecast story this week from Evie Mae Barber about what lurks even deeper in the depths…
The great white looked like he was having a good time, swimming upside down, bone-white belly above water, teeth gnashing playfully. Like a puppy dreams of finally catching a squirrel.
Just off the verdant coast, boaters came to see him play. Some reached out as he swam by, trying to stroke his luminous stomach, but he was out of reach.
-get them out-
I warned them to be careful. Something wasn’t quite right; the shark was clearly distressed. Nothing too strange—I’d seen this before—but I had to come out with my crew just to see if it might be research-worthy. Even a byline on a derelict local news site would be nice at this point. Hell, a quote would do fine.
i cant get them out-
Another boat rolled up. One of the boaters said it was tonic immobility—playing dead. “Might think we’re predators. We may want to back off…”
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This week’s episode is brought to you by J.R. Hamentaschen’s fourth horror fiction anthology “You Know It’s True.” Grab a copy for kindle or otherwise, here!
For our story this week, take a trip with us to the Fourteenth Floor, where you are every guest. We bring you “Stay,” by Davian Aw.
You were every guest on the fourteenth floor: none of you alike, a host of strangers across ages and ethnicities, genders and histories, but I knew it was you from the look on your face, and your eyes–your eyes were always the same.
“Stay,” you’d say, a plea steeped in sadness, sometimes desperation, anger, loneliness, or lust…
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Who says Drabblecast doesn’t do Young Adult Fiction?
This week we launch Women & Aliens Month with a fresh, original Drabblecast commission by Effie Seiberg.
We’re grateful to be able to bring you this story this week!
On the day I turned nine I didn’t get a pet nebula.
I’d really really wanted one, just like the one Shelly had. And I’d been talking about it FOR-EVER, so Mom could have the time to save up for the one in the pawn shop. I’m not usually patient, but this was important…
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Our next original Drabblecast-commissioned story for HP Lovecraft month installment, “The Wallpaper Out of Space!” by Adam-Troy Castro read by Jacob Boris.
All right, so it’s Cheryl’s kid, okay? I didn’t know she had a kid until we were two months in and already deeply involved, and then she tells me she has a sixteen year old from a prior marriage, and that he was what you’re what always supposed to say kids are, a great kid, even if they’re just hostile presences who respond to everything you say with a nod and a blank, “Okay…”
Closing Music: “Juzt Mizunderstood” by Norm Sherman
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The Drabblecast Annual Halloween Special kicks off this year simultaneously with HP Lovecraft month on the show, a full month of original Drabblecast-commissioned stories playing around with elements of Lovecraft’s style and mythos.
We kick things off this year with a fullcast adaptation of one of Lovecraft’s most popular stories– The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Do enjoy!
During the winter of 1927–28 officials of the Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth. The public first learned of it in February, when a vast series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting—under suitable precautions—of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty houses along the abandoned waterfront. Uninquiring souls let this occurrence pass as one of the major clashes in a spasmodic war on liquor.
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Another fantastic strange story sure to blow your mind from Drabblecast author Matthew Sanborn Smith.
The local Partyville starts to peel apart around us: the booth, the ball pit, a video game and the netting between them, the pizza on the table, and the table too. Shards of pressboard and plastic fly toward me while molding themselves into the form of a man. A couple of the other moms scream, and their kids run to them. I didn’t expect this, but I know what it is.
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A merry hanging and a game of jacks, this week on the Drabblecast!
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