Episode 471 - Skeleton

I could see how one might obsess and freak out about the bones beneath the skin. When I was a kid; I started drawing a comic about the this skeletal grim reaper who really sucks at his job and, for awhile, I couldn't help but imagine the skull under everyone's face. I'd look at a teacher, at a friend, at a stranger, and I'd see where their cheekbones, jaw, teeth, eye-sockets, where all the features were and it freaked me out. I couldn't stop noticing it in people, so I immediately stopped drawing the comic, I was so disturbed by it. I imagine Bradbury may have felt something similar once and just extrapolated on the theme.

What an amazing faculty for storytelling did Mr. Bradbury possess!

Regarding the ending of this podcast: Chad, I agree with YOU 100 percent when you say that this story worked for you! The main character's "phobia/obsession" over his bones + the creepy Dr. M = Weird Fiction Extraordinaire!

They have 15 minutes. Fifteen because that's what's needed to run an extremely profitable concern with massive overhead costs. Kinda like "needed" more than needed.

This story was crazy good!! Oh my gosh, it had me freaking out. I can get obsessive about crap like this, but this went so far! You guys gave me the feeling of needles on a chalkboard when you were describing your knee cap shifting. I don't think mine does that, but I don't want to know!! However, I love my skeleton ...

The protagonist's skeleton hang-up does seem superfluous when you also have this awesome creepy bone eating guy, but if he didn't have some mental issue with his skeleton, then why would he need to go to a weird bone "specialist"? I think it's common for people to have some issue that they seek help for, only to be dismissed or let down by medical professionals. My husband and I experienced that when we lived in a house that had a huge toxic black mold problem and learned pretty quickly that the medical help or information available on that subject is just a thin dusting of science over a much deeper deposit of "natural" cures, essential oils, fancy clay treatments, crystals and exorcisms. And going to the doctor with unexplained medical problems (as we did before we knew about the mold) just results in being told (often rudely) that it's all in your head and then charged a bunch of money for that. I think that's the scariest part of the story because it's so grounded in reality - having this huge problem that you desperately need help with and the only people willing to provide it are just trying to hurt you.

I don't think the novel as a whole is weird but "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" certainly is. In a very different way from how we usually encounter it on this podcast though since the Weird isn't horrific. It's numinous- awe-inspiring spirituality. Of course this is Pan interacting with the animals- to a human observer, not part of the courses of the natural world it might well have been mind breakingly horrific (cf The Man Who Went Too Far).

Thanks for this one. It's one of my Bradbury all time favorites! Too bad you two decided to waste time on "The Lake" next, which (in my opinion) doesn't even belong in this "October Country" collection. Too autobiographical feeling.

According to the internet, Clarisse is the French form of Clarice means "she knows" and if you divide Munigant into muni gant it means fitted glove in French. Not sure if this matters.

I read this story when I was in middle school and it creeped me right out. Looking back on it, the relationship between Harris and Munigant seemed to me a little like the way cult leaders or con artists prey on the vulnerable. I don't think there's really a problem with Harris' skeleton -- the idea that his skeleton tries to kill him in the car is just a rationalisation of his own self-destructive behaviour. What he has is some kind of dysmorphic disorder or delusion. He tries in his way to communicate his fears to the people who care about him, like his wife and doctor, but they just tell him that he's OK or that there's nothing wrong with him -- which is true in a sense, but not what he wants to hear. So he goes hunting for someone who will take him seriously, but the only person who does that is someone who just wants to take advantage of him. I'm sure we can all think of examples of people who are genuinely desperate, genuinely hurting, and who express that hurt in ways that seem off-putting or ridiculous to the people close to them. As a result, they can sometimes wind up in the clutches of people who want their money or their loyalty or whatever. People suffering from incurable or even imaginary illnesses throw away vast sums of money on fake medicines, for instance, sold to them by people who are making them feel heard and cared for. By people, indeed, who are able to make them feel heard and cared for precisely *because* they don't care about them at all and just want to prey on them.

James Holloway

Can I click a green heart?

A minor semi-correction: as with Poe's M. Valdemar, I believe the intent is for Munigant's "M." to read as the French/Continental abbreviation for "Monsieur", as "Mr." is for our "Mister", rather than as the initial of a first name.

Joe Beck

You almost sound like you have a bone to pick with Bradbury...

I was disappointed. Everyone talks about how original Bradbury was, but this is a pretty typical “boy meets skeleton, boy loses skeleton, doctor eats skeleton” plot, the likes of which we’ve seen over and over....

Peter Larsen

That part about the breadsticks was red flags for me, what kind of doctor keeps breadsticks? The fact that he offered one to the protagonists made me feel that the whole losing weight problem was because he was poisoned in a way that would draw out his bones for examination (turns out it was for consumption), maybe I am reading too much into it.

Disclaimer: I do not have Lymes' Disease. I don't trust the "it's obviously all psychological" diagnosis because it has been badly misused by physicians in the past. It's sort of like "vintage" on etsy, it means "I don't know." Anyone else remember how ulcers were all in the mind? Please research further. I found this online: Bacterial persistence is not a new concept. “The term “bacterial persistence” is used to describe the ability of pathogenic bacteria (“persisters”) to survive in infected host tissues despite the presence of effective levels of antimicrobials and antibacterial cellular and humoral immunity,” writes Cabello from New York Medical College in the journal Environmental Microbiology. https://tinyurl.com/y2msbx33 Morgellon's has not been roundly disproved. Rather, there is some hard evidence for it. See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31108976 where it's tied to Mixed Borrelia burgdorferi and Helicobacter pylori Biofilms.

The whole issue of unnecessary surgery to remove body parts, etc, is explored in a really interesting fashion in Geek Love by Katherine Dunn. Great novel.

Over at the Lovecraft Reread, Emrys and Pillsworth suspect that Clarisse was a nurse in the war, accounting for her keeping an even keel, bucking up someone in mental distress, and knowing all about human anatomy. https://www.tor.com/2018/08/29/rolling-the-bones-ray-bradburys-skeleton/

Christine M

Thing is, he wrote every episode. Whether direction ran it off the rails or this is how he actually envisioned the stories, we may never know.

The wife Clarisse was so supportive and loving. Interesting that Clarisse McLellan was another likable character from Bradbury, in Fahrenheit 451. Too bad in the end she was reduced to a reaction, like it was she was built into the story just for a shock and feeling of dismay and disgust. I guess that applies in both cases.

The Ray Bradbury Theater adaptation of this story is ridiculous. And yet it is nearly identical to the written story. Eugene Levy was definitely out of his element. His performance is ham fisted and cringe worthy at times. It kind of highlights how a lot of these stories really should not be seen visually. The moment you place it in a real world context it turns metaphor into absurdity. And the final scene with jellied Eugene Levy is just laugh out loud bizarre. The adaptation of The Jar was pretty good though it put in absolute definite point on the end of the story confirming that he does kill his wife and put her head in the jar. For the most part though I’m finding that ray Bradbury theater kind of did a disservice to his work. It turned very poignant stories into camp parodies.

I don’t think the story started out supernatural, I think the main character was simply somebody with a particular kind of dysmorphia, (or possibly there really was something going on with his bones that was difficult to diagnose.) So he looked for a specialist. I think the “little man” wasn’t just on the prowl for people with this specific brand of dysmorphia, but he was a con man who wanted bones. So he set himself up as a medical specialist and would tell people who came to him for whatever bone related reasons whatever he thought they needed to hear to let him do his thing. He was probably SUPER thrilled to have a subject that didn’t actually have anything wrong with his bones!

Michelle Elbert

Absolute non-sequitur, but I've been listening to an audio version of "the Wind in the Willows", and I hadn't read it since I was a kid, so I completely forgot about the part where Rat and Mole have a vision of Pan. I'm sure there's a lot to unpack there in terns of symbolism, but does this mean it's "weird fiction"???

As a small child my mother took me to a specialist for reasons we won’t get into. This guy was supposed to be the best of the best in his particular subsection of pediatrics. In my first session with him he basically tortured and then gaslit me. (“Stop screaming and saying the eye drops burn. They don’t burn!”) Which my mother noticed, discussed with my regular pediatrician (“If course she was screaming, those eye drops burn.”) and (thankfully) never took me to him again. So this story spoke to me from the perspective of somebody who fears having their concerns dismissed and worse by people calling themselves doctors. The bit in the beginning where he was like, “Why do my bones ache?” And the doctor says, “Loose some weight.” Really set the story up for me, because this poor man just wants somebody to take his pain seriously and I could tell it was going to make him receptive/vulnerable to whatever quackery or monstrosity that was coming.

Michelle Elbert

I hadn't read the story before this week, but I well remembered the conclusion of the Ray Bradbury Theater episode. Shudder. It basically eschews the monster angle, which almost makes it weirder. The series is on Amazon Prime, by the way. I watched The Jar this weekend. Faithful to the letter, except for a more definite ending.

A terrible disappointment to see how standards have slipped at this once great podcast. Gentlemen, gentlemen, I was expecting half an hour of wall to wall boner jokes, but barely a sniff. Still, I did at least learn why people refer to Chris as Jumping Jack Flash.

Oh, Chad; I think the Doctor may have grabbed a bone or two from Harris, but the main point of the process was to deposit eggs or larvae in him--hence the reference to something gnawing him from within, and the fact that apparently his whole skeleton ends up going.

Mandy Reznor (She_It)

This story gives me Junji Ito’s Uzumaki series of stories, especially the idea of obsession of the mundane (ie the skeleton to the spiral), the only difference is one has a stranger meaning behind it. I won’t say which.

Rick Hound

I was pretty creeped out by this story's ending when I first read it as a kid. It felt like the bone eating doctor was just a predatory being that preyed on people with dismorphic issues. The sudden appearance of the story's climax may have been jarring for some, but I was pretty willing to go along with the magical realism of the moment. Bradbury's writing helps enough to sell it for me. It even feels a bit ahead of its time, relative to most of what would have been available for macabre fiction in the mid-1940's. A bit later, authors like Robert Aickman would be, if anything, much looser with the particulars of what just happened in a story, albeit with a very different style.

The skeleton obsession reminded me of a few real-life situations. First, I have moderate OCD, which my therapist often refers to as "sticky brain." I notice things others don't, I tend to assign more meaning to things I notice than the average person, and my brain relentlessly brings up the thought no matter how logically I dismiss it. For example, my internal monologue might go, "My scalp has an itch . . . did the kids bring home lice? . . . no, scalps itch sometimes and there's no evidence it's anything more than that . . . but what if it IS lice? . . . no, that's silly . . . but what if it IS?! . . . etc." And of course, thinking about lice makes your scalp itch more! So I sympathize with Mr. Harris on that score. The story also reminded me of things like "Morgellon's Disease" and "Chronic Lyme Disease." Neither has any scientific support as a physical disease, buth both are manifestations of a mental problem - victims believe they have mysterious fibers infesting their body, or that they have insidious bacteria that don't respond to standard treatments. These beliefs cause real suffering, but many physicians write them off with annoyance, as the doctor does in this story. This pushes people to find quack practitioners who often do more harm than good by encouraging the delusion and prescribing dangerous "remedies" - very much like Munigant does.

Christine M

Ahh, yes, a classic!

Mandy Reznor (She_It)

Also, this story reminds me of this weirdly motivational post from Chuck Wendig: https://twitter.com/ChuckWendig/status/1029345631578587137

Christine M

Edit We get Chris at 10 a.m. Eastern and then Chad when he decided to wake up lol.

Really enjoyed this story, munigant was an excellent pseudo-antagonist? Loved him creepily playing the flute to the tune of that poor woman’s screams. Also loved the scene of him fawning over the fat man, as someone who just recently undertook a weight loss journey(106 lbs down and counting!) I couldn’t help but laugh at the concept of my mass being an advantage, an unbeatable force holding back the tide of my militant calcified framework. Although with that being said, Halloween is coming up, and I don’t necessarily mind giving myself up to my skeleton...for the season

I logged in to wish Chris well with his flatulence problem. :)

I think they were wrong, but they wouldn't get him into trouble. They'd get people mad at him, sure--but that's a burgeoning industry regressive types have been thriving off of. The weird thing about cancel culture is that after someone gets "cancelled," they often come back with a dedicated audience that wants to enjoy their work *because* they are actively antagonizing the concept of treating marginalized groups like human beings with dignity. (I mean, hell, a certain edgy ginger comedian is still doing stand-up performances that get standing ovations, and he did a lot *more* than just say offensive things.) If he were around today he'd likely do well economically, but get a lot worse as a human being.

Mandy Reznor (She_It)

I think Bradbury's sexist attitudes would not only get him into to trouble, but they were also wrong. Also, now that Chris has mentioned it, I think his sentimentality is what I don't like about Bradbury.

Steve

Yeah, that's important to note, too. As I alluded above, a few weeks ago I started to question my own gender. My body doesn't feel alien, but it is very...insufficient. I've started to realize that all the "little" things that bother me about it actually trouble me more than I preferred to admit and they form a pattern--and that if my body were much more feminine I'd consider that an across-the-board improvement. But that doesn't mean I think my body hair uproots itself at night to try to strangle me. ...Although honestly that'd be kind of nice because it'd mean my body hair gets rid of itself. I'd have to start sleeping with a knife in-hand, though.

Mandy Reznor (She_It)

I do remember that. That was the episode with the alligator if I recall. Now you have me thinking of the episode with the sideshow performers - Humbug. One of them really laid into Mulder about how awful it must be to have been born so boringly perfect. Dana Scully: [talking about her autopsy on Lanny] I've never seen anything like it. Dr. Blockhead: And you never will again. Twenty-first century genetic engineering will not only eliminate the siamese twins and the alligator-skin people, but you're gonna be hard-pressed to find a slight overbite, or a not-so-high cheekbone. You see, I've seen the future, and the future looks just like him! [points to Mulder] Dr. Blockhead: Imagine, going through your whole life looking like that. and in another scene: Mr. Nutt: Well, why should I take offense? Just because it's human nature to make assumptions about people purely on the basis of their physical appearances? Why, I've done the same thing to you, for example. I've taken in your all-American features, your dour demeanor, your unimaginative necktie design, and concluded that you work for the government... an FBI agent. But you see the tragedy? I have unconsciously reduced you to a stereotype, instead of regarding you as a specific, unique individual. Fox Mulder: But I am an FBI agent.

On a slightly more serious note, speaking as a transperson, this is nothing at all like how I feel. I have never thought that my Y chromosomes are plotting against me. Nor have I ever thought that my genitals arranged a car accident to kill me. I don't like the body I was born in, because it does not match my identity. That simple statement does come with a lot of attendant emotional baggage. But the important thing I mean to point out is that I do not think my body is a separate, intelligent entity that is trying to kill me. TBH, this does not sound like body dismorphia, but rather paranoid schizophrenia.

Who doesn't want Skeletor's bone? ...Alright, alright, I'm leaving.

Mandy Reznor (She_It)

Chad: I was in Skeletor. This is now officially the most homoerotic episode ever! :D Awesome how you Came Out and shared like that. Especially timeful as it is National Coming Out week. You rock Chad!

Does anyone remember in The X-Files where Mulder talks about wishing he had a peg leg? It's from a season 3 episode called "Quagmire". He goes on to say that if he had a peg leg or other disability that getting up every day and surviving would be courageous whereas having a whole able body you're expected to make something of yourself.

David Halstead

One interesting thing to note about discrepancies in your experience of your body is that it can be quite hard to notice, which I've come to appreciate firsthand in the past few weeks. After all, your body forms the baseline for your entire experience of the surrounding reality. If *it* has some defeciency or critical flaw and has had it for as long as you remember, how the hell will you notice? It'll cause you problems, of course--stress, despondency, revulsion, or the like--but these feelings will either be a constant in your life and seem "normal" or, if you recognize they aren't, you'll misattribute their source. It may well take a sudden shift in your perspective to realize the body you're stuck with has been an issue the entire time. Then, finally, you can seek a solution. Then, finally, you can work towards getting the titty skittles. ...Okay, maybe that *last* one is just me.

Mandy Reznor (She_It)

Ahh, yes, good catch on that.

Mandy Reznor (She_It)

The flute playing at the end reminded me strongly of the Old One from T.E.D. Klein’s The Ceremonies. He’s a creepy little old man who performs the titular rituals, one of which consists of him playing a flute to animate a unnameable creature. Klein’s description of him is similar to Bradbury’s of Dr. Marmaduke or whatever his name is. One small quibble : Chris you referred briefly to gender reassignment surgery. The term “reassignment” implies that someone’s gender is being changed by the procedure, which is not the case. A person exists as their gender whether they have the surgery or not. The procedure merely serves to align the person’s body with their gender. The more correct term is gender confirmation surgery.

Andrew Blanke

I liked the story, so far as Bradbury could make me read anything. I do agree with Chris that it was a bit over skeleton kill. Is that skellikill? Did watch the Bradbury presents and that was fantastic!

Erik Gordon

I was pretty much on board with this all being a nocebo tale and then we got all monstery. I was more disappointed than freaked out (or entertained) by the ending. But, heck, it was well written.

Programming Alert! SiriusXM Road Dog Trucking on Saturday Night/Sunday Morning 3 a.m. Eastern Leslie Klinger with be discussing Cosmic Horror on the second half of C2C 10 a.m. Eastern Chad and Chris with be discussing Cosmic Horror on the final hour of Dave Nemo Weekends Channel 146 Good Buddy

YO GIORNO GIOVANNA LISTENS TO HPPODCRAFT!? ...Does this mean Chad and Chris are secretly Stand users?

Mandy Reznor (She_It)

I remember you guys covering "The October Game" some time ago- what a great episode and story- and have been hoping you would do as much Bradbury in the future as you have Howard and Smith. The Bradbury well is so rich and deep, you have an almost endless supply of great stories that could be covered.

Ok, you crazy guys are two for two in picking my favorite stories from my favorite Bradbury book!!! If you do it again next week I’m totally going to crap my Frankenstein Halloween costume! Knock knock... “Trick or treat.” “Whoa, damn kid, what is that smell?”

Steven Vincent

Dark Carnival is one of the greatest story collections of all time. The most prized book on my shelf is the Gauntlet Press edition of this book signed and with artwork by the master himself. It also features a couple extra hard-to-find stories from this early time in his career.