I Perform "Whatever Comes After Calcutta" On Pseudopod

It's been a long time (. . . gettin' from there to here), but I was recently asked to do another story for Pseudopod, the Horror podcast.  I may bellyache about it a lot, but I really do enjoy narrating and voice acting, and doing one of the Escape Artists shows is a much higher-profile gig than any of my own podcasts.  And hey, they pay their narrators now, so I can do these things for something other than the honor of it.

This week's story is "Whatever Comes After Calcutta" by David Eric Nelson.  And it is surprisingly long.*  About seventy minutes, in its final form, and these things don't edit themselves.  It's about a lawyer who goes home and finds his wife in bed with another man, gets shot, goes after the couple, and stumbles upon what looks like a public lynching in a small Ohio town.**  The townsfolk seem to have found themselves a witch.

The story is really dark, but there's something so delightfully absurd about it that . . . well, I was delighted.  I'd have probably pestered Big about running it on our own podcast if it had come our way.

One of my favorite Stephen King stories is "Nona" (from Skeleton Crew), and this story includes a remarkably similar moment to that one.  It reminds me of the time when, before I was a podcaster, I recorded a handful of King and Joe Hill short stories for posterity (none of which I still have), and "Nona" was one of them.  If there's not an official version out there, I might do that one again.

Anyway, I sat down and recorded it, and discovered it was considerably longer than the stories I usually do for Pseudopod.  Heck, it'd be long even for the Dunesteef.

But it's available now, over at THIS LINK, and if you like my work, it's what they call in show circles as a tour de force of Rish Benjamin Outfield's storytellin' abilities.  If you don't like my part-and-parcel way of narrating, though, I warn you . . . get out!  Get out now!  The 'casts are coming from inside the house!

RBO

*As of this writing, I've been working on it for ninety minutes, and it's only about halfway edited.

**Although, I looked it up, and Calcutta, Ohio is four times bigger than the town I grew up in, so it's all relative.