Bonus 20 - Original Fiction - Babies, Cats, and Dogs

That's right

Is this considered the Topics 20 show?

Well done! Many thanks for putting this out there.

More.

I agree, the laughs-per-minute rate of that story has to be one of the highest in my reading history. But at the same time, the baby creeped me out! Reminded me of the author (was it Machen?) talking about how truly horrifying it would be if our pets just started talking to us. And of course, if the baby is a delusion, then I'm creeped out by the narrator. The story packs a lot of punch into a small package!

Christine M

These were great. The first one being horror and the nature of the podcast, I just thought these would all be horror but it was a delightful Whitman's Sampler of stories and Afraid of Dobermans had a nice mix of both horror and wholesome.

Josh Decker

"The Baby Downstairs" was a delight.

It's a Ghost.

These were fun to hear. The first one in particular speaks to a low-key fear or suspicion I've had for years. You gotta watch out for those babies.

One more comment - though I really enjoyed all three, I loved the concurrent narrative tracks and weirdly anchored nature of Two Cats on a Ledge. What a great modernization of the Aesop's Fables concept! Really well done.

I love them all. The second one reminded me of Spacetime for Springers. The last one, I thought the twist was going to be "... and then SHE fed HIM to a doberman!" but what we got instead is so much better. It also reminds me of the time I facetiously texted my boss saying, of my doorknob-to-doorknob shift, "a doberman bit off three of my fingers, a nine-year-old pointed a shotgun at me, and a nine-year-old doberman tried to sell me meth." Her response: "Really? Are you okay?"

These were great!

MORE original stories please.

Jeff C. Carter

My cats were scared by the second story, you monsters!

Peter Larsen

I don’t usually comment as I feel I don’t have much to add, but this was awesome! The baby was both creepy and ridiculous, the cat story was...quite something. A real cool, fun piece on perspective that was a nice contrast to the first. Afraid of Doberman’s was a serious case of emotional whip lash😅 holy crap, in a great way. I appreciate how short they are, makes me appreciate my own fragments of writing, I enjoy writing scenes, just a few moments or one event that could be within a larger narrative but I find my imagination jumping about a little much to focus in on one longer narrative.

MortalGlare

Good stuff. Makes me want to finish some of the stories I've been working on. Probably won't though.

I was thinking the same. It is too short for an entire episode I think. But it could be paired with something else.

That sounds like an awesome Hammer film!

"Fifer and Klinke" sounds like the perfect law firm to call when you've been hit by a wildly out-of-control gothic carriage driven by conjoined twins frantically escaping from a 1920's travelling carnival ringmastered by a man who's face is always covered in black velvet. I mean, generally.

If not that, how about Sonia Greene's "Four O'Clock," a short horror story that HPL must have influenced a bit. It was written in 1922, the same year as "The Horror at Martin's Beach," but apparently largely solo. It's mentioned in some of HPL's and Sonia's surviving letters. Joshi treats it dismissively, so there is (shall we say) room for more scholarship on this short tale. It can be found for free online at Wikisource, and is Sonia's only other piece there besides "The Horror at Martin's Beach."

Mike J.

Can I beg you guys to to Frank Belknap Long's "The Eye Above the Mantel," which IIRC, was the story that turned HPL onto FBL? Noth that it's an undiscovered gem of lost horror literature, rather a sort of Dunsany-esque pseudo-fable about the end of the human race. Vaguely reminisecent of "The Time Machine" or some of HPL's fears about man being displaced by another species, a la the great post-human beetle race mentioned in "Shadow Out of Time." It's in "Great Weird Tales," an small anthology edited by Joshi, published by Dover.

Mike J.