Lovecraft Month – Page 2 – The Drabblecast

Drabblecast 369 – In The Walls

On September 6, 2015

The deadliest things in war are not bullets and guns, but hunger and desperation.
I’m hungry.

Penny gets the bed tonight, I’m on watch, Erik is out looting for food and supplies. If he were white, he tells us seriously, the press would say he was scavenging. But for him, it’s looting.

Not that there’s a press anymore. The newspaper we stuffed inside our makeshift mattress were all from three weeks ago. Then the newspaper company was bombed. That was a week after the Internet service provider was bombed. And while we missed the Internet, no one missed Comcast.

Podcast: Download

Subscribe: TuneIn | RSS

Drabblecast B-Sides 63 – Doorstepping

By Drabblecast

On August 31, 2015

In Drabblecast, Horror, Lovecraft Month

There was a buzz at the door. Mike Jansen sighed. Just when you got yourself settled after a long day working on the cheese counter; just when you were looking forward to some quality TV; the door had to go. He’d been standing up all day. His feet were killing him. He nestled down into the settee, deciding to ignore the buzz. He turned up the TV a little.

Buzz. Buzz. Bleedin’ buzz.

The caller was a persistent fellow and no mistake.

Drabblecast B-Sides: <a href="http://www.drabblecast.org/donate/">Donate</a>

Drabblecast 368 – Restless in R’lyeh

By Drabblecast

On August 30, 2015

In Comedy, Drabblecast, Horror, Lovecraft Month

Dear Doctor Saperstein,

I’m a 44-year-old librarian from Kansas and a loyal reader of askdoctorsaperstein.com. Last night, after a relaxing day spent gardening, binge-watching “America’s Got Talent,” and organizing my snowglobe collection, I had a nightmare. A hideous octopus-headed monster performed a ukulele solo on “America’s Got Talent,” then killed and ate Howard Stern. Afterwards, Heidi Klum chanted tunelessly in a harsh alien language (possibly German). When I woke up, I was filled with unspeakable dread and all the snow in my snowglobes was whirling around as if someone had shaken each one. What could it mean?

–Worried in Wichita

Podcast: Download

Subscribe: TuneIn | RSS

Drabbleclassics 24 – Cinderlands (176)

By Charity Helton

On August 29, 2015

In Drabbleclassics, Horror, Lovecraft Month, Mystery

Dexter crouched beneath the toxic fruit trees in his grassless back yard, turning over black earth with the spade he’d taken from the old man, and every shovelful revealed worse things:
clumps of cinders and the dust of ashes; rusting nails, practically dripping tetanus; wickedly-curved shards of brown glass; bullets of various sizes, crusted with dirt; and a foot or so down, fragments of black-stone statuary…

Podcast (classics): Download

Subscribe: RSS

Drabblecast 367 – The Whisperer in Darkness pt. 2

By Drabblecast

On August 20, 2015

In Drabblecast, Horror, Lovecraft Month

Then, apparently crossing my incoherent note and reaching me Saturday afternoon, September 8th, came that curiously different and calming letter neatly typed on a new machine; that strange letter of reassurance and invitation which must have marked so prodigious a transition in the whole nightmare drama of the lonely hills. Again I will quote from memory – seeking for special reasons to preserve as much of the flavour of the style as I can.

To say that the letter relieved me would be only fair, yet beneath my relief lay a substratum of uneasiness. If Akeley had been sane in his terror, was he now sane in his deliverance?

Podcast: Download

Subscribe: TuneIn | RSS

Drabblecast 366 – The Whisperer in Darkness pt. 1

By Drabblecast

On August 9, 2015

In Drabblecast, Horror, Lovecraft Month

Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual horror at the end. To say that a mental shock was the cause of what I inferred – that last straw which sent me racing out of the lonely Akeley farmhouse and through the wild domed hills of Vermont in a commandeered motor at night – is to ignore the plainest facts of my final experience. Notwithstanding the deep things I saw and heard, and the admitted vividness the impression produced on me by these things, I cannot prove even now whether I was right or wrong in my hideous inference. For after all Akeley’s disappearance establishes nothing. People found nothing amiss in his house despite the bullet-marks on the outside and inside. It was just as though he had walked out casually for a ramble in the hills and failed to return.

Podcast: Download

Subscribe: TuneIn | RSS

Drabbleclassics 8 – The Wish of the Demon Achtromagk (214)

By Charity Helton

On September 29, 2014

In Drabbleclassics, Fantasy, Horror, Lovecraft Month, Strange

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.

Podcast (classics): Download

Subscribe: RSS

Drabblecast 337 – The Only Game in Town

By Drabblecast

On September 4, 2014

In Drabblecast, Horror, Lovecraft Month

Walking back up the road toward home, I saw Rich Hartzell locking up his cabin. His car was stuffed to the roof with cardboard boxes and black trash bags; only the driver’s seat was empty.

Podcast: Download

Subscribe: TuneIn | RSS

Drabbleclassics 6 – The Outsider (175)

By Charity Helton

On August 31, 2014

In Drabbleclassics, Horror, Lovecraft Month, Mystery

Here it is again – the very first H.P. Lovecraft month special! Listen in as we try to figure out what it’s all about at the end of the episode!

Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness. Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books. Such a lot the gods gave to me – to me, the dazed, the disappointed; the barren, the broken…

Podcast (classics): Download

Subscribe: RSS

Drabblecast 336 – The Mouth of God

By Drabblecast

On August 21, 2014

In Drabblecast, Horror, Lovecraft Month

There’s a dream you have.

It’s not a proper dream. It’s impatient, fired with urgency. It arrives without warning, veering suddenly out of the night.

You’re kneeling on the bridge. It’s late afternoon. Clouds mass low in the sky, seagulls wheel over the bridge spans, humidity hangs thick in the air. Cars speed by on either side of you, the whoosh of
their passage filling your ears.

Podcast: Download

Subscribe: TuneIn | RSS

Drabblecast 335 – To Whatever

By Drabblecast

On August 17, 2014

In Comedy, Drabblecast, Horror, Lovecraft Month

H.P. Lovecraft Month continues with an originally commissioned story: “To Whatever” by Shaenon Garrity.

To know or not to know is the penultimate question in Lovecraftian horror. What mysteries lie beyond the wall of our understanding? What if we were to commune with whatever lay beyond that wall? Or in that wall? That is the crux of this week’s story.

Story Excerpt:

To whatever lives in the walls—

Please stop taking my half & half.
Let’s get this out of the way: I know you’re there. Don’t think I’m unaware of the scrabbling sounds, the walls creaking from your bulk, the way my razor in the morning is never exactly where I left it last night. Richard always said it was the building settling—as if a building, however old, could take apples out of the fruit crisper—but he was as wrong about that as he was about a lot of things beyond the scope of this note. And since he moved out I feel you’ve gotten bolder.

Podcast: Download

Subscribe: TuneIn | RSS

Drabblecast B-Sides 50 – The Nameless City

By Drabblecast

On August 11, 2014

In Drabblecast B-Sides, Horror, Lovecraft Month

When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was traveling in a parched and terrible valley under the moon, and afar I saw it protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of this hoary survivor of the deluge, this great-grandmother of the eldest pyramid; and a viewless aura repelled me and bade me retreat from antique and sinister secrets that no man should see, and no man else had ever dared to see.

Drabblecast B-Sides: <a href="http://www.drabblecast.org/donate/">Donate</a>

Drabblecast 334 – The Colour Out of Space

By Drabblecast

On August 11, 2014

In Drabblecast, Horror

West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentler slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs.

Podcast: Download

Subscribe: TuneIn | RSS

Drabbleclassics 3 – The Tentacled Sky (178)

By tbaker

On July 7, 2014

In Drabbleclassics, Horror

The note itself simply read, “TUESDAY 7:13 PM”. Unsigned, undated, unadorned. Stuck into my door, just above the latch where I’d be sure to find the note immediately upon my return from my errands about the city…

Podcast (classics): Download

Subscribe: RSS

Drabblecast 294 – Partial Inventory

By Drabblecast

On September 3, 2013

In Drabblecast, Drama, Horror

The air conditioning only worked when the speedometer crept past 70 MPH which the lumbering GMC van (on loan from a friend of a friend who took pity on the family and their situation) rarely did. November in the South is hardly hot, but thirteen hours in any vehicle with nearly a half dozen relatives and mismatched belongings, each one trying to both curl and crowd themselves into their claimed seats had left the air warm and slick and smelling faintly of musk.

Podcast: Download

Subscribe: TuneIn | RSS

Drabblecast 293 – The Call of the Pancake Factory

By Drabblecast

On August 22, 2013

In Comedy, Drabblecast, Horror

The bar is plenty kitschy: goofy statues made from coconuts everywhere and strings of shell beads hanging from the ceiling. I smile when I see a coconut sporting a pair of mouse ears made from scallop shells.

Tourists from all over the world are sitting around, ordering drinks non-stop because the sun is so hot at this time in Indonesia that you’ll wilt if you go outside and also because the drinks are so watered down. But that’s all right with me. I’m here to blend in, not to get drunk.

Podcast: Download

Subscribe: TuneIn | RSS

Drabblecast B-Sides 26 – The Beast in the Cave

By Drabblecast

On August 22, 2013

In Drabblecast B-Sides, Horror

The horrible conclusion which had been gradually obtruding itself upon my confused and reluctant mind was now an awful certainty. I was lost, completely, hopelessly lost in the vast and labyrinthine recesses of the Mammoth Cave. Turn as I might, in no direction could my straining vision seize on any object capable of serving as a guidepost to set me on the outward path. That nevermore should I behold the blessed light of day, or scan the pleasant hills and dales of the beautiful world outside, my reason could no longer entertain the slightest unbelief…

Drabblecast B-Sides: <a href="http://www.drabblecast.org/donate/">Donate</a>

Drabblecast 292 – Hollow as the World

By Drabblecast

On August 14, 2013

In Drabblecast, Horror, Sci-Fi

One of the reasons Joshua loved Lydia as much as he did was all the secret rituals they’d devised. Their shared jokes were treasured secrets, never to be shared with the other kids at high school; some days, the way Lydia could send Joshua into high titters with a raise of her pierced eyebrow was the only thing that kept Joshua from slitting his wrists…

Podcast: Download

Subscribe: TuneIn | RSS

Drabblecast B-Sides 25 – Fungi from Yuggoth

By Drabblecast

On August 13, 2013

In Drabblecast B-Sides, Horror

I. The Book

The place was dark and dusty and half-lost
In tangles of old alleys near the quays,
Reeking of strange things brought in from the seas,
And with queer curls of fog that west winds tossed.
Small lozenge panes, obscured by smoke and frost,
Just shewed the books, in piles like twisted trees,
Rotting from floor to roof—congeries
Of crumbling elder lore at little cost.

I entered, charmed, and from a cobwebbed heap
Took up the nearest tome and thumbed it through,
Trembling at curious words that seemed to keep
Some secret, monstrous if one only knew.
Then, looking for some seller old in craft,
I could find nothing but a voice that laughed.

Drabblecast B-Sides: <a href="http://www.drabblecast.org/donate/">Donate</a>

Drabblecast 291 – The Lurking Fear

By Drabblecast

On August 6, 2013

In Drabblecast, Horror

There was thunder in the air on the night I went to the deserted mansion atop Tempest Mountain to find the lurking fear. I was not alone, for foolhardiness was not then mixed with that love of the grotesque and the terrible which has made my career a series of quests for strange horrors in literature and in life. With me were two faithful and muscular men for whom I had sent when the time came; men long associated with me in my ghastly explorations because of their peculiar fitness.

We had started quietly from the village because of the reporters who still lingered about after the eldritch panic of a month before – the nightmare creeping death. Later, I thought, they might aid me; but I did not want them then. Would to God I had let them share the search, that I might not have had to bear the secret alone so long; to bear it alone for fear the world would call me mad or go mad itself at the demon implications of the thing. Now that I am telling it anyway, lest the brooding make me a maniac, I wish I had never concealed it. For I, and I only, know what manner of fear lurked on that spectral and desolate mountain…

Podcast: Download

Subscribe: TuneIn | RSS

Tag: Lovecraft Month Page 2 of 3

Story Excerpt: