“What It Feels Like To Die” by Warren Benedetto
I’m usually against drabble[1]; I’m not against this. Go read it now.
[1] short version: the constraint is uninterestingly arbitrary, and very few authors are up to the limitation; much as “five-minute horror film” almost always translates to “one dumb jump scare,” “drabble” almost always translates to “squandered half-an-idea.”
I often bounce from a fiction Podcast because I’m a “monster-of-the-week” guy (in the X-Files sense of “Monster-of-the-week” vs “Mythology”), and far too many “serial drama”-style podcasts 1) fall in love with their Mythology arc and 2) the writers (in my humble) just cannot sustain those long, heavy arcs. Listening becomes a chore and strain; I have enough chores, and if I wanted homework I’d go to grad school.
Thus far, Mayfair Watchers Society is delivering the thing I desperately wanted: a monster-a-week, no cast of 1000s to keep track of over years-long lightly scripted arcs. You can pick it up anywhere; Autopsy happened to have been the episode where I resoundingly felt “This is for me!“
Also, love the art!
Enjoy!
Mayfair Watchers Society: “The Autopsy” (Season 1, Ep. 3)
I generically hate TED Talks (because they are, on average, garbage), but I’m sharing this because:
I just love every damned bleep, bloop, reverberant clang, and lady robot sigh in this thing.🤖
“The idea of using the short grunts and groans came to me when I watched people playing the game, the way that people expressed their frustrations or their involvement with the game.”
Suzanne Ciani
My novelette “This Place is Best Shunned” made the 2022 Locus Recommended Reading List/Ballot. (Story is free-to-read online, linked from the list.)
Voting on the Locus Award is open to all. Ballot deadline is April 15, and you may come back and add to or change your votes anytime until then.
RECOMMENDED READ “Mister Ice Cold” by Gahan Wilson
I first read this when I was 12—already an avid reader of OMNI, the 100% perfect magazine for my adolescent Mysteries of the Unknown pre-X-Files brain—and it changed my world:
The chant-like repetition!
The onomatopoeia!
The unheimlich at its core, the disconcerting flesh it shows peeking through the drowsy mundane skin of the midwestern suburbs (where I myself lived)–stumbling across this story was like like bitting into an orange that turns out to be full of blood-moist teeth and a Chinese fortune.
The goddamned art!!!
The second person?!
In many ways it was exactly the sort of story I’d always want to write forever after. “In the Sharing Place” is warped by the enormous gravity of this story–and especially its art–forever looming large just below the horizon of my brain.
(Incidentally, if you wanna read “In the Sharing Place” right now, $3 Patreon Patrons get instant access to the story, audiobook, and 40-minute analog horror film versions.)
And, predictably, it was Ellen Datlow (esteemed editor of the Best Horror of the Year anthologies) who commissioned “Mister Ice Cold” and put it in OMNI—and thus into the hands of a 12-year-old kid outside Detroit who really should have been practicing his Torah portion, not up late reading a slick from the drugstore.
Presented without further commentary: “Funkytown” vs. “Closer to Funkytown”
Brief reflections on MLK Day from a younger me:
“Dr. Martin Luther King, the Eight Commandments, and Bending the Arc of History”
Remember: The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice—provided that we get up every morning and put our weight towards bending that mutherfucker. It ain’t gonna bend on its own.
You may recall this brief news item from 2017, about “adolescent female monkeys in Japan engaging in sexual behaviors with adult deer”:
(Aside: Is anyone else weirded out that the deer always look at the camera? That doesn’t seem like happenstance. Like… is it… is it part of the kink for them? ’cause that makes me sorta feel… like, I don’t want to be made a part of this without my consent. That’s all I’m saying. I do not consent to this.)
What may have slipped past you was this parenthetical toss-off from the first—and least sensationalistic—mainstream coverage: “Scientists Say Japanese Monkeys Are Having ‘Sexual Interactions’ With Deer” (Thanks, NPR!)
Japanese macaques are known to ride deer like humans ride horses, for fun or transportation — behavior the deer seem to tolerate in exchange for grooming and discarded food.
So, just an FYI: Japanese monkeys are in the midst of domesticating deer—you know, for fun, or transportation, or (as we did before them) to increase their travel range and capacity to haul loads. Loads, like, I dunno, the lifeless bodies of the defenseless denizens of Tokyo, after marauding teen-nympho sex monkeys start raiding that once grand metropolis, charging in under cover of night astride their deer consorts, cutting us down, smashing our skulls, and feasting on the goo within!!! IT’S IN REVELATIONS, PEOPLE!!!
Anyway, point being there are are only two ways this story ends, and neither of them is good. Our future is either this:
or this:
(first posted back in Dec 2017; lightly revised since. no updates on macaque progress toward world domination)
I can’t swim, so the ocean is baseline scary for me, but man, there’s something about this lonely planet bouncing around out in the middle of a sunless sea that—and the very notion of an entire planet that’s less dense than water—the whole thing gives me the… 🥶💀 yikes! Creep City!
(And it doesn’t help that Saturn is watching us, and probably planning to devour us as well.)
