From the Vault: Grimoire of Horror, Volume 1

Last Halloween, Robert and Joe took a seasonal tradition in a new direction with Grimoire of Horror, in which they each presented a horror short-story of note and discussed its connections to science and culture at large. In this volume, they discuss Clark Ashton Smith's "The Maker of Gargoyles" and Stephen Graham Jones's "Thirteen." (originally published 10/31/2024)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. Today's Saturday, So once more we venture
into the vault and who This one originally published ten
thirty one, twenty twenty four, Halloween of last year. It's
Grimore of Horror, Volume one. This was the first in
a new tradition that we'll be continuing this year in

(00:26):
which Joe and I each select a horror short story
of note and then we discuss it and even maybe
get into some of its science and cultural content as
well on the show. So last year, in this episode
we discussed a Clark Ashton Smith story and a Stephen
Graham Jones story. What will we discuss this year, Well,
you'll have to tune in to find out. So let's

(00:48):
go ahead and listen to the episode from last year
right now.

Speaker 2 (00:55):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (01:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert.

Speaker 3 (01:08):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.

Speaker 1 (01:11):
So over the years here on Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
we've done Halloween and Halloween adjacent episodes that pick from
us sorted tales of one sort or another, horrific tale,
scary tales, creepy tales, and then use them as sort
of a springboard to look at a particular scientific topic
or just look at that story through a scientific or

(01:32):
cultural lens. At one point we did a series of
episodes based on different creepypastas. Then Joe and I turned
to TV horror anthology episodes for a number of years,
and this year we're starting what I'm hoping we'll be
a new tradition, one that sticks to shorter horror works,
but also gets back into the written word, which I
know many of our listeners missed from the days when

(01:54):
we did summer reading episodes, so kind of meet me
halfway on that as well. Written horror fiction often does
come up on the show anyway, so it seems like
a solid direction to go in. Though this may be
in part because this is our first time out of
the gate with this particular series. It was kind of
a mad dash to put this episode together, and it's

(02:17):
going to be a mad dash as well for JJ
to get it edited and out there, but hopefully it'll
be worth it. I don't know about you, Joe, but
I had a number of trials and tribulations finding my selection.
I had like a list of stories I was considering,
and then I ended up not really using any of those,
and I had one that I thought was perfect, and

(02:38):
then it really took a turn halfway through the story
and went in a direction that I wasn't crazy about,
and only then I had to start from ground from
just ground zero on the whole thing. But I do
think I finally picked out a story that is going
to be fun to chat about here.

Speaker 3 (02:53):
You know, frankly this, I always enjoyed doing our anthology
of horror episodes, but I had the same issue with
those when we were doing like TV or movie anthology things,
where I would just spend forever in the pre research phase,
where I'd just be like trying to find an appropriate
one that had some kind of hook of something to

(03:13):
talk about that we hadn't already covered extensively before. And
I gotta admit I'm having the same issue here. I
spent probably more time trying to find a story to
talk about than I did actually getting ready for the episode.

Speaker 1 (03:28):
Yeah, so we'll go ahead and put the call out
to listeners help us make up our minds in advance
next year Salloween. If you can think of a really
great horror, halloweeny, creepy short story that would benefit from
this treatment. Go ahead and write in and let us
know again months in advance, and that'll help us be

(03:49):
ready for next year. All right, well, let's go ahead
and jump in here. I'm going to start with my
selection here. I ended up going with a story titled
The Maker of Gargoyle by Clark Ashton Smith, who lived
eighteen ninety three through nineteen sixty one. Clark Ashton Smith
remains probably my favorite writer of weird fiction from the

(04:11):
pulp era, mainly for his exceedingly rich and textured dark
fantasy tales, often stories in which doomed wizards delve deep
into forbidden knowledge and brings some sort of disastrous curse
down upon their own heads. Sometimes there's a little twist
of gallows humor to the whole affair. Along these lines,

(04:31):
I highly recommend the tales The Double Shadow, the Seven Geeses,
and The Empire of the Necromancers. Those are three of
the finest dark fantasy short stories you could possibly hope
to read.

Speaker 3 (04:42):
In my opinion is that last one, the one where
the two Necromancers are like wandering around in this terrible
landscape sort of arguing with each other.

Speaker 1 (04:51):
Yes, yeah, and eventually they're like, well, we're going to
go to this ancient tomb city and we're going to
raise everyone from the dead and make them serve us eternally.
And you know, they're absolutely horrible, comedically evil characters. And
of course eventually the undead creatures that they summon rise
up against them and tear them to pieces. Of course,

(05:13):
now I have to stress I've never been a Clark
Ashton Smith completist, though you know, he wrote a number
of tales set in a very contemporary twentieth century weird
tales setting, even though one of them, Return of the Magician,
is often considered one of his best works and was
actually adapted into a Night Gallery episode feature featuring Vincent Price,

(05:34):
but I've never read it. I tend to steer more
towards his dark fantasy. There's a great deal of his
work along these lines that I've never read. So his
work is largely centered in a few different settings, mostly
within the fantastic realms of Hyperborea, Poseidonus, Avarn, and Zohaka.

(05:55):
Today's tale takes us to Avon. This is a fictional
French province and it depends on the story. The stories
may be set anywhere between the years four seventy five
CE and seventeen eighty nine see depending on the story
in question. I haven't read all of these, but I
do remember the Beast of avar On being quite good.

Speaker 3 (06:16):
He generally, in the story you're about to talk about,
lays out kind of a landscape that hints at other
tales yet to be told elsewhere. Like he just mentions
this dark, haunted wood full of lou Garoo and other
kind of inhabitants.

Speaker 1 (06:31):
Yeah, yeah, alluding to you know, we've had problems with
Succuby and Incubie in the past and that sort of thing,
you know. And I haven't read all the tales from
the Avaron cycle either, so he may be referring to
specific stories or possible stories, like you said. So. This
particular short story, The Maker of Gargoyles, was published in
nineteen thirty two and it's set in the year eleven

(06:53):
thirty eight. If you want to read it for yourself,
you can find it on the Clark Ashton Smith website
dark dot com, and it is also featured in the
collection The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, a Ventage
from Atlantis the Collected Fantasies, Volume three. It's long title,
but worth it. This is one of those authors whose

(07:14):
work is in the public domain, as I understand it,
So there are a lot of less than satisfying publications
of his work out there if you're looking for an
actual like high quality digital or a physical collection, so
I recommend this. I also recommend there's a Penguin edition
that also features some of his stories. But if you're

(07:36):
looking to do it on the cheap, yeah, it's all
apparently in the public domain, and you can find it
all at that website I just referenced, all right. So
in the story, Clark Ashton Smith establishes Avaron is a
medieval city on the edge of dangerous and evil wilds,
a province in quote a world where the devil and
his works were always more or less rampant. Here, the

(07:58):
walled city of Villon has suffered more than its share
of demonic cars. But everyone's pretty confident that this newly
constructed cathedral is going to really shore things up. It's
going to bring greater protection against the darkness. Everything's going
to be all right. But unfortunately this is a Gothic
world where supernatural evil is absolutely real, but who can

(08:19):
say for sure about supernatural good. It's kind of a
gambol on the latter. So it's definitely a demon haunted world.

Speaker 3 (08:26):
And I like how in this story, the one main
representative of the church that we get seems primarily concerned
with the exquisite sophistication of the representations of evil on
the cathedral.

Speaker 1 (08:38):
Yeah, and pretty much the only thing that the church
is able to do to stand against the evil is
they send to Rome for some high grade holy water. Yeah,
and it never shows up. It never actually features into
the story, but that's all they can really do. So
the cathedral here, as they describe it, pretty standard fair
Gothic medieval cathedral and so forth, except two of its
mini gargoyles are creations of Villonne's own artisan Blasse Reynard.

(09:06):
This is the titular maker of gargoyles. He's kind of
a coffin Joe character, you know. He's he's hated and
feared by the townspeople. He has a lot of like
obvious inner turmoil. Most people tend to just sort of
put up with him and ignore him the same way
that they put up with and ignore all of the
supernatural evil that is writhing in the world around them.

(09:29):
All Right, I'm going to read the description that Clark
Ashton Smith gives us of these gargoyles. Okay. The two
gargoyles were perched on opposite corners of a high tower
of the cathedral. One was a snarling, murderous, cat headed
monster with retracted lips revealing formidable things, and eyes that
glared intolerable hatred from beneath fearine brows. This creature had

(09:55):
the claws and wings of a griffin, and seemed as
if it were poised in readiness to swoop down on
the city of Villonne, like a harpie on its prey.
Its companion was a horned sadder with the vans of
some great bats, such as might roam the nether caverns,
with sharp clinching talons, and a look of satanically brooding lust,

(10:16):
as if it were gloating above the helpless object of
its unclean desire. Both figures were complete even to the
hind quarters, and were not mere conventional adjuncts of the roof.
One would have expected them to start at any moment
from the stone in which they were mortists. So some
terrifying looking gargoyles here, yes, like very detailed, like fine

(10:39):
works of art, but really hard to take in. We
learned that, quite unknown to Renard himself, he has just
poured all of his hatred for his hometown into one
gargoyle and all of his lust for the tavern owner's daughter,
Nicolette in the other one. Naturally know what's going to happen.

(11:00):
Hard soon descends on the city once more, as a
swooping demonic monster begins to slay people in the night.
The body count intensifies. Everyone's afraid, but the best anyone
can do is against sin for that special holy water. Meanwhile,
another demonic form, the lusty one, is creeping on women
all around the city, but leaving them untouched and unattacked,

(11:22):
as if it's not seeking any woman but one woman
in particular. All of this comes to a head at
the tavern one night, deep in his cups and himself
traumatized by the horror in the streets. Like It's important
to note that he's not like, oh, the agents of
my hatred and lust are running rampant, like he doesn't
really put one and two together here, but he's drinking

(11:42):
in the pub. He's watching a rival court fair Nicolette,
and eventually he just loses it. He causes this big
embarrassing scene, and that's when the windows implode with the
arrival of the two animate gargoyles. The first of the
two begins massacring everyone in sight, spilling blood, ripping open throats,

(12:02):
and the second one grabs Nicolette, and a heavy stone
wing of one of the two gargoyles catches Reynard in
the head and knocks him unconscious. The next morning, he
awakens in this blood drenched tavern, surrounded by dead men
and the lacerated but still living body of Nicolette. Horrified
and suddenly understanding more of the connection he has to

(12:23):
these monsters, he forces his way through the angry crowd.
He collects his hammer from his workshop and he heads
up to the cathedral roof. He finds his creations there,
and he notices that their mouths and their claws are bloodied,
and so he begins to strike at them with the hammer.
But then the gargoyle that he strikes, the wrathful one,

(12:47):
knocks him to the edge of the of the roof,
and then like sinks, one of its talons into his shoulder,
and I believe takes to the air with him and
he's striking at the talon foot that holds him. Eventually
shatters that foot, but he falls to his death in
the street. And then we end with the archbishop finding
his corpse and noting the talent limb now relaxed quote

(13:08):
as if like the paw of a living limb, it
had reached for something or had dragged a heavy burden
with its fearine talents.

Speaker 3 (13:15):
I like that it's implied to me, at least that
the archbishop's response is when he finds this is like, oh,
my gargoyles, they're ruined. Yes, It's like as if, you know,
finding a murder scene where someone has been had their
head smashed with a vase and the person's like, my vase,
what happened?

Speaker 1 (13:34):
Yes? Yeah. There are other points in the story too,
where you have more concern given for just the state
of the art concerning these gargoyles, as opposed to what
their horribleness means. You know, either you know physically or
just the idea of them. So this story doesn't deliver
or I think, aspire to the dizzyingly dark magic vibes

(13:57):
of other Clark Ashton Smith's stories. I think it's a
pretty solid little horror tale in its own way. It
delivers both a sinister physical monster as well as a
tale of twisted inner torment, you know, So you know,
those are great things to have in a horror tale.
And I think we can all imagine some version of
the story which the gargoyles are his intentional creations and

(14:18):
like conscious minions of his wrath and lust, but instead
he only really glimpses his connection to them at the
very end, finally realizing that he has poured all of
his own darkness into these works and that he has
to destroy them. And I think there's a lot to
potentially dig into their regarding a horror writer and his work.
And it's worth noting that Clark Ashton Smith himself largely
abandoned writing in favor of painting and sculpture in the

(14:41):
second half of his life, so, you know, bec I
think it's fair to assume a lot of those ideas
were on his mind when he wrote this tale. And
I think this one would I don't think this has
ever been adapted, but I think it would make a
pretty great horror anthology adaption, because who doesn't love a
great animate gargoyle story, right? Sure? Yeah, they're a staple

(15:01):
monster in Dungeons and Dragons. They're the subject of a
fan favorite nineteen nineties Disney animated series. Did you ever
watch that, Joe Gargoyles?

Speaker 3 (15:10):
I was only a very little bit. I never like
followed the story. But I've actually heard good things about
it from people as an adult, Like, some people think
it was a really good cartoon.

Speaker 1 (15:19):
Yeah, that's what I've heard. I think I may have
watched one or two episodes as a kid. I've looking
back on it, I see it had a tremendous vocal cast,
including Keith David in the lead. But I brought it up.
I showed an episode to my son. I was like, hey,
maybe this can be the new series we're watching together,
and he was like, no, thank you, So oh okay,
so fine. I'm not going to watch it on my own.
So it's not for me, but a lot of people

(15:42):
love it.

Speaker 3 (15:42):
You know, thinking about movies with animated gargoyles and the
Stone comes to life, there's a great movie scene that's
actually the opposite process. And it's in Grimlins too, which
we covered on Weird House Cinema. I remember when there's
the joke where the Grimlin escapes the building, falls in
wet cement on the sidewalk, and then flies up to
the top of a building, perches, and then freezes in

(16:04):
the cement to become a gargoyle.

Speaker 1 (16:06):
I'm so glad you brought that up. That had slipped
my mind. But that is one of the many wonderful
scenes in Grimlin's two Let's see. On the B movie front, there's,
of course the nineteen seventy two TV movie Gargoyles that
various listeners have suggested for Weird House Cinema, and it
remains on our short list.

Speaker 3 (16:23):
I believe it's one of those that we've never seen,
but we keep like five different movies have pinged back
to it for some reason. I don't know what are
those like nexus movies that are like kind of weird
and get our attention, but we never watched them.

Speaker 1 (16:36):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I think I've seen part of
it maybe on A and E back in the day,
like on a Sunday afternoon, but yeah, I haven't watched
it in a full maybe one day, yeah, one day.
I'll also point out that the best sequence in nineteen
nineties Tales from the Dark Side. The movie retails the
classic Japanese ghost story a Yuki ownA The Snow Woman,

(16:56):
but with a with an urban setting and a killer gargoyle.
That's the one that stars James Ramar and Raydon Chong. Yeah,
and more recently, there is a twenty fourteen film titled
I Frankenstein in which Frankenstein's monster battles gargoyles like CGI gargoyles.
And I have not seen that, but there's a part
of me that really wants to watch that. On an
airplane one day.

Speaker 3 (17:18):
You included a screenshot from it. It looks dreadful, just terrible.

Speaker 1 (17:23):
It's got some good people involved. I don't know. Maybe
it's good. I don't know. It looks like great airplane viewing.

Speaker 3 (17:28):
Though, I'm just commenting on the CGI guardboy. No, I
know nothing about the movie.

Speaker 1 (17:34):
Now. Curiously, this is one of the things that really
led me to select this story by Clark Ashton Smith
is that it apparently plays an important role in the
establishment of the animate gargoyle trope. Though I should note
that naturally, as we've discussed in the show before, myths
of sculptures coming to life. These go back to ancient times,

(17:55):
and we might well look too obvious influences from not
only Pygmalion, but also the Goloam of Prague and so forth. Still.
According to the Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters
by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, there are two key works, both
from nineteen thirty two, that seem to influence gargoyle fiction

(18:16):
to come. One is this story by Clark Ashton Smith,
and the other is a Lewis Spence tale titled The
Horn of Vapula or Vapula I'm not sure which, in
which a gargoyle is not an evil construct but a
vessel that a demon is bound to by a corrupt bishop.
He also cites the nineteen seventy two Gargoyles TV movie

(18:38):
as the first work to establish a gargoyle as a species.

Speaker 3 (18:42):
Huh. As a species, you mean, like not just a
sculpture that comes to life, but as a type of
living being on its own.

Speaker 1 (18:50):
Yeah, Like, these are creatures, and we may have stone
versions of them that sort of thing, as opposed to
these are creatures that these are sculptures that we made
and then they in the case of these two nineteen
thirty two stories, they either come alive because of the
dark magic we've put into them one way or another
from ourselves, or you know, we've summoned some demon out

(19:10):
of the abyss and placed it in the stone form.

Speaker 3 (19:13):
Right, So, the idea of a gargoyle not as a
generic term for certain types of sculptures or architectural features,
but as like an orc with wings.

Speaker 1 (19:23):
Yeah, yeah, essentially. Now, when it comes to the reality
of the gargoyle, we could probably do a whole invention
episode on these. There are a lot of ins and
outs here, with different time periods and different architectural styles,

(19:46):
and then resurgences of those styles and re explorations of
those styles. But the basics are that a gargoyle is
an architectural flourish, is a decorative water spout to drain
water away from the building. And the origins of the
word itself are often linked to the Old French word gargoui,

(20:06):
as well as the Greek gargarazine. If these words remind
you of the word gargyle, then right on, because that's
essentially what we're talking about here, a word used to
describe the clearing or washing of the throat. Again, these
were animal and or humanoid creatures depicted in stonework with
rain water draining out of their spout mouths. The basic

(20:29):
concept here apparently dates back to the ancient world, with
examples found even in ancient Egypt in ancient Greek architecture
as well, often taking the form of a lion. And
it's kind of a no brainer, right, We can't help
but anthropomorphize the world around us, So a drainage spout
essentially becomes a barfing mouth. You know, many of us

(20:50):
did the same thing during the height of the pandemic
with their Halloween candy shoots, like can I get candy
to a child fifteen feet away from me? And should
I make it a vomit monster mouth? Of course I
should make it a vomiting monster mouth.

Speaker 3 (21:03):
Yes, yes, you should.

Speaker 1 (21:05):
Now. The term gargoyle itself really comes about during the
thirteenth century, still referring to water spout flourishes while the
various other non functional creatures I made out of stones,
so various little goblinoid creatures you know, and whatnot on
the outside or even the interiors of churches. These are
generally described as grotesques or grow teskeries generally apotropaic statues

(21:31):
to ward off evil, you know, getting down to the
basic Corgonian impulse that we see throughout human history, like
let me make a monster face to drive away the
evil vibes. The Catholic Church also sought to use these
statues at times as illustrative aids to reach illiterate masses.
But a lot of what we think about regarding gargoyles

(21:54):
today are really more properly these grotesques and growthesqueries as
pose to something that is actually spitting water away from
the church. You know, we tend to think more of
just sort of like corner of the building, monsters leering
out overlooking the empty space between the church and the

(22:14):
next building. And you know, and then we also, again
we have these different periods of like Gothic Revival and
even Art Deco. The Art Deco period ends up utilizing
gargoyles of one form or another, depending how stringently you
want to use that term. Like I've seen the iconic

(22:35):
like bird heads on the Chrysler building described as gargoyles
for example.

Speaker 3 (22:40):
Oh interesting.

Speaker 1 (22:41):
Now we love gargoyles in part because they seem counterintuitive,
you know, it's a church, one of their monsters all
over it, but it's also just part of it. It's
like if you see a fancy cathedral, you're like, show
me the gargoyles, right yeah, Yeah. There's a famous quote
a criticism that is attributed to a twelfth century and into ual.
This is Saint Bernard of Clervaux, who was apparently speaking

(23:05):
of interior sculptures in the church as opposed to stuff
on the outside, but it sometimes applied to gargoyles. And
I'm not gonna read the quote, I'm just going to
paraphrase him, but he was basically saying, hey, maybe we
shouldn't have any of these at all, but at the
very least maybe we shouldn't be paying for them. And
you know, I think Clark Ashton Smith's story kind of

(23:25):
like toys with this sentiment a little bit like, how
do how does the church feel about evil monster sculptures
on or in the church? Right?

Speaker 3 (23:35):
Well, I made reference to the character I think is
the Archbishop Ambrosius, who's like into them, he thinks they're great.
But it's I think it stated that there are other
figures in the church who are like, I don't know
about these things seems like an extravagance.

Speaker 1 (23:49):
Yeah. Now, a quick note on monster lore. I looked
up gargoyles and Carol Rose's encyclopedia, as I often do
from my monsters. She references a Eastern French legend in
folkloric story regarding a kind of dragon known as the gargoil.
She describes it as a kind of river dragon that
would target fishermen. And there's apparently a legend that a

(24:11):
seventh century saint by the name of Saint Romain finally
baited the creature with two condemned criminals, transfixed it with
the cross, and then marched the monster into town where
it was executed. Thus, the taming of the water beast
leads to a tradition of tame beasts that redirect water
away from our churches.

Speaker 3 (24:30):
Okay, feels like kind of a loose fit, but I
can see it.

Speaker 1 (24:34):
Yeah. So again, there's much more we could say about
the history of gargoyles, perhaps deserving a full inventioned episode.
But it's interesting to think about all of this, and
in connection with the story, you know, when we channel
the dark creative spirit into an act of creation, what
is the result. Can a vessel intended to ward away
darkness actually aggregate it. Do such creations take on a

(24:55):
life of their own?

Speaker 3 (24:57):
Yeah, certainly. I mean, I think there's a lot to
be said about the history of creating imagery that is
supposed to be a depiction of evil and is supposed
to be revolting or scary or something like that, but
in fact it becomes an object of interest to people.
People instead they're kind of like, oh, I like that,
I want more of that.

Speaker 1 (25:17):
Yeah. Yeah. Or in the Clark Ashton Smith story, you
also get a sense of perhaps here is a horror
writer suddenly realizing that he recognizes more of his own
inner darkness in these external works of darkness than he
perhaps intended on, you know, or at least it's a
meditation on that possibility. So it's a yeah, it's I

(25:41):
think it's a It's a juicy little story to bite into. Again.
Maybe not on the same level, certainly in my opinion,
not on the same level as some of his more
almost darkly psychedelic works, but still a solid little monster story.
Nice by the way. Jackie Craven, an author, has a
great article about Gargoyle for thought dot Co titled The

(26:01):
Real Story of the Gargoyle. I recommend checking that out.
She goes into a lot more detail, and I also
I turned to that in researching this, in addition to Winstock, Websters,
and Rows.

Speaker 3 (26:13):
Well, is it time for my selection?

Speaker 1 (26:15):
Yeah? And I'm excited for this one because you picked
a story by an author that I've long admired, but
I have not read much of in recent years. So
this was a nice return for me.

Speaker 3 (26:26):
Oh cool, Well, I'm excited to hear what you think
about the story. So I wanted to pick not just
a horror story, but because today is Halloween, I wanted
to pick specifically a story that had a Halloween theme
or Halloween as a setting. It took me a while
to find one, find just the right one, but I
eventually settled on a story by the author Stephen Graham Jones,

(26:46):
who has come up on the show several times before.
I think I talked about one of his horror fiction
collections on a summer reading episode we did years ago,
and Rob, I think you actually might have recommended one
of his novels. Was it Mongrels? The where novel from
twenty sixteen.

Speaker 1 (27:02):
Yeah, that's a really great novel. I hadn't thought about
this one recently, but it's a coming of age story
with were wolves lovingly crafted, and I think we see
a similar sentiment in this story. Maybe this just runs
through all of his writing, but like these aren't just
tales of horror and or monsters. There's a lot of
like deep personal connection there, you know.

Speaker 3 (27:24):
Yes, the story we're going to talk about today, I
think it is a great You can take it as
just a great spooky tale of the weird, but you
can also find a lot of feeling in it, Like
I found it a strangely moving story. Yeah, So just
brief rundown on Stephen Graham Jones. From my point of view,
Jones is a prolific and really interesting writer who dives

(27:45):
into a lot of different genres, but much of his
work is horror and generally what you might call weird fiction.
So with his fiction, I like the kind of the
variety and range of authorial sensibility that you can find
all wrapped up in the same piece. Like a Stephen
Graham Jones story can be sweet and thoughtful and even sentimental,

(28:08):
but also brutal, grizzly and cruel. It can kind of
plow straight into very familiar horror tropes in a way
that does not feel too you know, meta or screamy,
you know, not overly self conscious. But it can also
be like fresh and full of new ideas and bring
a lot of intellectual curiosity, scary but also funny, etc.

(28:31):
So I really like that variety you get within his writing.
And I also really like that while some of his
horror stories do have a very explicit monster or villain
like a you know, a cursed item or just a
straight up vampire, in the same collection that this story
is in, there is a pretty awesome messed up vampire

(28:52):
story called Welcome to the Reptile House. Have you read
that one?

Speaker 1 (28:55):
Rob? I haven't, but I picked up this collection of
short stories for this episode. That'll have to be the
one I read next.

Speaker 3 (29:01):
Okay, well, I don't want to spoil too much, but
it involves a tattoo artist who practices a beginning tattoo
artist who practices his craft on dead bodies at a
morgue and then happens to in doing so, irritate a vampire.
Oh but anyway, coming back to my point. So, while
some of the stories have a more explicit or classical monster,

(29:22):
you know, he writes werewolf tales and stuff. I also
really like his stories that have ambiguous, strange, unexplained situations
that just create this thematically loaded atmosphere of dread without
a specific monster, or at least not one that we
ever meet directly. I'm a big fan of that kind
of story, you know. I like ambiguous horror, the kind

(29:44):
that does not tell you the full solution to the puzzle,
that gives you some tantalizing details but leave some of
the mystery alive.

Speaker 1 (29:52):
Yeah. Like, we don't really know what the rules are
with this thread. We don't even know exactly what it is,
but here it is pushing against the limits of our world.

Speaker 3 (30:01):
Yeah, so I like that.

Speaker 1 (30:02):
So.

Speaker 3 (30:03):
Jones is currently a professor at UC Boulder, and I
don't know when he last updated his faculty page on
the university website. I know those can go untouched for eons,
but as of when I last checked, the final sentence
of that page reads. Jones' current projects are a paleoanthropological
thriller set in Boulder, a slasher, and another slasher, God Willing.

(30:26):
I do know several of his recent novels have been
described as slashers, and I haven't gotten to those yet,
but I would like to anyway, all that aside, The
story that I wanted to talk about today is called thirteen,
and it's the first piece in the twenty fourteen collection,
After the People Lights Have Gone Off. I have a
print copy of this book. I was looking around and

(30:46):
it seems like maybe the physically it is out of print,
I think because I was only finding used copies to buy.
But maybe I wasn't looking in the right place. I
don't know, but I think you can get a digital edition, right.

Speaker 1 (30:57):
Yeah. I bought it on Kindle for a dollar ninety nine,
and that is that is a steal for an award
winning collection from an author of this caliber. So yeah,
no reason not to pick it up.

Speaker 3 (31:18):
So warning that I am, I am going to go
ahead and summarize this story. If you want to look
it up, you know, get the collection for yourself and
read it without any spoilers. Maybe you could go ahead
and do that. And I also want to say that,
of course, it's always the case that you cannot communicate
the full effect of a piece of literature by summarizing it.
But I after I tried to summarize it, I found,

(31:38):
in particular with this story it is hard to give
a sense of the feeling and the way that it
works as horror with a synopsis. So a lot of
it just kind of depends on little phrasings and the
way a kind of pyramid of details is built piece
by piece. So you know, you'll be missing some of
the effect just through a synopsis. But I will do
my best.

Speaker 1 (31:58):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And that that holds for everything I
just did with Clark Ashton Smith's story as well. You know,
you can summarize it, but you can't really create the
sort of blow for blow build that is present in
a good horror story.

Speaker 3 (32:12):
So the story thirteen begins, like a lot of Jones's fiction,
with a kind of frisky sentence. It says, here's how
you do it, if you're brave enough. You know, a
lot of his stories have a very a voice, kind
of speaking directly to the reader's style. Opening and the
narrator of this story is presumably an adult or a
young man recounting a series of memories from his childhood,

(32:36):
specifically when he was in middle school around the eighth
grade or around the age of thirteen. The title of
the story the narrator remembers in his hometown. There was
a movie theater called the Big Chief, kind of a
low effort movie theater because it had only two screens,
and they were in fact right next to each other.

(32:56):
And in fact, originally the two theaters were just one
big room, now separated only by a heavy curtain, so
that sound from one movie would always bleed through and
become audible to the audience for the other movie. So
there's kind of a loudness war the soundtrack from a
war movie with machine guns and mortar shells encroaches on
the quieter movie next door.

Speaker 1 (33:18):
I've never been to a movie theater like this. I've
been to some that have you know, that are a
little you know, KOOKI ear and a little bit d
I y to a certain extent, but never one quite
like this. There was a was a really good one
in Asheville called the gray Ol Movie House, and I
think there will be again, but it was sadly heavily

(33:40):
damaged during the flooding there recently. Oh that is sad,
so look for it in its next incarnation. I think
that those guys really love cinema. It's a great place.

Speaker 3 (33:49):
Certainly, Best of luck to them. So the narrator of
this story sort of relates to this theater personally in
a number of ways. But one interesting detail he gives
early on is that the theater is right next to
the pizzeria where his father worked when he was in
high school. And he thinks about the smooth scars on
the tops of his father's forearms, which are I guess

(34:10):
burns from working with the ovens, which he says, yawn
with fire like mouths to hell. And it's a lot
of details like this in the story that just kind
of add up to create the full effect of the thing. Again,
I can't communicate all of these details in my synopsis,
but I love that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 (34:29):
Yeah, these little just sort of fragments of memory that
he brings up that may not even be too closely
connected to the plot and the story that he is
laying out, but they are a vital part of the
vibe that he is building and ultimately that tension of horror.

Speaker 3 (34:47):
That's right, So the story is about the movie theater.
It's not only notable because it's old and kind of
shoddily built. There is something special about this place. There
is a power in it which is hard to explain,
but everybody seems to know about, or at least all
the kids do. There are weird rumors and stories that
attach themselves to it. Who knows if they're true. There's

(35:10):
one very grizzly story that fifteen years ago, somehow a
guy mysteriously got castrated in one of the bathroom stalls.
The narrator's friend's uncle heard all about it. There's no
further detail on this story. It's just that kind of
weird detail you'd hear about when you're a kid. It'd
be like.

Speaker 1 (35:26):
Huh yeah, and no additional real explanation is provided, which
keeps it cryptic and strange.

Speaker 3 (35:33):
But then he gets to the real point of the story,
which is what should we call it? The game? Maybe
the game?

Speaker 1 (35:40):
Yeah? Yeah.

Speaker 3 (35:41):
So one of the urban legends that all of the
kids know about this movie theater is the following. You
get your ticket, your popcorn, you settle in to watch
a scary movie. It needs to be a horror movie.
And when it gets to the scariest part, maybe when
the vampire is approaching the heroine's bedside to drink her blood,
or the killer is raised up the knife, whatever, is

(36:01):
the really scary part that makes you want to close
your eyes because you can't bear to see what's next.
You give in and you do close your eyes, but
you don't stop there. You also plug your ears and
hum so that you can't hear what's happening. And then, finally,
and this is crucial, you suck in your breath and
you hold it and you count to one hundred and twenty.

(36:23):
So you've got to hold it for two straight minutes.
And if you can keep your eyes shut and keep
the sound out and hold your breath for the two
full minutes, something happens, something dangerous. Now, apparently, in the
world of this story, kids are trying this all the time.
Everybody tells the story and they all practice it, and
they do it, but basically nobody ever makes it the

(36:45):
full two minutes. They let their breath out early, you know,
they start laughing or something. They look back up at
the screen, and when they do look back at the screen,
they find themselves relieved, giddy, in fact, to see nothing
but the same movie they were so scared. Look at
a moment before, and the narrator says that your friends
sitting next to you will be looking at you, wanting
to know if it worked. So, how is it supposed

(37:08):
to work. Well, you get the feeling that nobody really knows.
It's just a ritual. We don't know why we do it.
It just gets passed on. But there is an attempt
to explain it that feels kind of back engineered from
the minds of kids trying this out. The narrator says, quote,
how it works is that when you're not looking or
listening or breathing. It's like how you're supposed to hold

(37:30):
your breath when your parents are driving by the cemetery.
If you don't, then you can accidentally breathe in a ghost.
That's sort of how it works at the Big Chief.
With you not breathing, playing dead like you are, it
makes like a road or a door, and the movie
seeps in. And then a little later it goes on
quote it's there because you invited it, because you left

(37:53):
a crack it could come through because you made a
sound like a wish, and the darkness just washed up
in that direction to cover it up. Oh, and I
love the ambiguity of the lore here, like, how does
it connect to the guy who supposedly got castrated in
the bathroom stall? Unclear, but it suggested he must have
done this game. Something from the movie came out and

(38:16):
got him.

Speaker 1 (38:18):
Yeah, So the.

Speaker 3 (38:19):
Narrator goes on to tell the stories of two people
he knows who enacted the ritual to let the movie in.
One was a boy in his class named Marcus, who
was the new kid in school. He's very handsome, popular,
full of bravado, and he's on the swim team, so
he is good at holding his breath. His new friends
tell him about the movie theater, they tell him about

(38:40):
the game, so he does it. He plays dead for
two minutes at the climax of a horror movie with
this writhing, horrible, tentacled monster. They don't say what the
movie is, but I was imagining like some kind of
Cronenberg thing. And then it seems that nothing has happened
to him. He's fine at first, until a few months
later when Marcus suddenly gets sick and dies from the

(39:01):
growth of an aggressive tumor. And the kids who know
what happened. They're in a life sciences class and they
see images of tumors and the shapes look familiar to them,
and the ones who were there that night agreed. They
think somehow the monster from the movie got inside his body. Next,
we learn about a character named Grace, and this is

(39:23):
a character the narrator cares about a lot. They've been
friends since they were young, and now they're in middle
school and it seems like they're in that awkward phase
where they're trying to figure out if their boyfriend girlfriend
or not. But the narrator he is in love with her,
and Grace's family has been through troubles. Her father recently
moved away and her parents separated, and her mother seems

(39:45):
to be from clues we get suffering from depression, and
the narrator plans to take Grace to a homecoming game
at school, but he ends up sick and unable to go,
and so he stays home by himself. In having fear
related to what happened to Marcus. He's obsessed with the
idea that he has a monster tumor inside him as well,
because he was sitting close to Marcus the night of

(40:06):
the game. Could it be contagious? But nothing happens there,
So to make up for the failed homecoming date, the
narrator and Grace decide to go see a movie at
the theater, not a horror movie this time. They're done
with the horror. Instead, they go see a romantic comedy
about a young woman who gets her heart broken and
then her well meaning but bumbling father tries to set

(40:29):
her up with the perfect guy, and it's a comedy
of errors. By the way, there's a detail that while
they're watching this movie, they hear screams and clanking metal
bleeding over from the theater next door. And the movie
date is going well, but at one point during the film,
the narrator leaves to get some more snacks from the
lobby and sneaks a look into the theater next door,

(40:49):
and Jones writes, quote, it was mayhem in there, chainsaws
and were wolves. It looked like no wear wolves with chainsaws,
the chocolate and peanut butter of the horror world. Very
good line.

Speaker 1 (41:04):
And I'm pretty sure this is not a real movie
he's allitting to. This is something made up. But I
love the idea of the just pure excess of this.

Speaker 3 (41:12):
I mean he has written novels that invoke both wear
wolves and chainsaws. That one of his recent novels was
called My Heart as a Chainsaw.

Speaker 1 (41:18):
Oh wow, I don't know about them.

Speaker 3 (41:20):
Anyway, The narrator in the story comes back to Grace,
and he finds her having a strangely emotional experience with
the romantic comedy. He says that he could see that
her cheeks were shiny and wet and that she had
her eyes closed, and then when he brushes against her arm,
she suddenly gets very startled and she starts coughing like
she's going to vomit, so she runs to the bathroom.

(41:43):
Narrator doesn't know what's going on, but then she comes
out later after the movie and they go home without
discussing what happened. Then the final setting of the story
comes a couple of weeks later on Halloween night. So
here's the Halloween tie in. The narrator has plans to
sneak off and smoke cigarettes with the bad kids in
the graveyard behind a condemned convent building. Perfect. And there

(42:07):
are more urban legends, I mean they're urban legends throughout
the story. One is the story that the kids tell
about the abandoned convent. They say it's haunted by a
zombie nun who wanders at night carrying a candle in
front of her, and when she sees you, she comes
closer and closer, and just when she draws right up
to you. The candle goes out. The narrator and his
middle school friends are out in the cemetery behind the

(42:29):
you know, the haunted graveyard, and they are engaging in
a performance of courage. You know, they're breaking rules, doing
what they're not supposed to. They are treading where the
ghost thread is high. And at one point the narrator
steps aside from the group. I think to be sick
because he smoked a cigarette and he shouldn't have and
he's going to be sick. And he goes to the
edge of a small cliff looking out over a neighborhood

(42:50):
where kids are trick or treating below. He knows that
Grace is out there because she apparently volunteered to chaperone
elementary school kids for the while they're trick or treating.
The narrator called her mother earlier to try to call
her house to try to make plans, but her mother
answered the phone, said where she was going to be,
and just said look for bo Peep. So looking out

(43:12):
over the children wandering the neighborhoods in the dark, he
does see her in the bo Peep costume with a
shepherd's crook, escorting a second grader in a robot costume,
and they're just coming up to a house that the
narrator knows it's his former English teacher, who would always
write out verses of poetry on little strips of paper
and tie them to the candy she handed out on Halloween,

(43:34):
and the narrator remembers once getting a candy bar from
her that told him the fields are white, the fields
are long, the fields are waiting. He never knew what
that meant. And frankly, I tried to look this up,
and I'm not sure I might have just missed the
reference somewhere, but it could be referring to a verse
in the Gospel of John where Jesus talks about the
fields being white, meaning essentially, you think that they're not

(43:58):
ready for harvest, but they are. Is time for the harvest?
And now who Anyway, What happens next in the story
is so strange. The narrator sees Grace he's looking down
from the cliff, and he tries to wave and get
her attention, but she doesn't see him. Instead, he watches
as she begins to talk to someone in a car
that's been driving around the neighborhood. Then, for some reason.

(44:20):
She just abandons the kid that she's been chaperoning and
gets into the car and it starts to drive away,
and the narrator is very confused. He runs along the
cliff until he finds a place he can climb down.
He chases through the neighborhood looking for the car, and
finally he sees it just before it it leaves the
town and pulls out onto the highway. When he sees it,
he sees the driver and he is sure he recognizes

(44:44):
the face. It's the face of a movie character, the
father from the romantic comedy movie they saw in the theater,
with what the narrator characterizes as a wide, sharp and
trustworthy smile. He sees them in a flash, and the
car drives away, and then nobody ever sees Grace again.
So the implication is that Grace played the summoning game two.

(45:06):
In the interval when the narrator was out looking in
on the Werewolves and Chainsaws movie, she must have closed
her eyes and held her breath. But it wasn't a
horror movie. There was no monster, so what did she summon? Later,
having swirling emotions about this whole series of events, the
narrator sneaks out one night and he sets fire to
the movie theater. He burns it down. He never gets

(45:28):
caught for the arson. His friends come and meet him
there and they sort of give him an alibi, and
they never tell on him, so he gets away with it.
But in the fire that night, he sees shapes moving
around in the flames, including a boy covered in blood,
and Marcus and his swim goggles. And then finally it
says quote, and I saw a pale white shepherd's crook
ahead of them, leading them through, leading them on, And

(45:51):
he ends the story saying that he's waiting to meet
her again. So oh, as I said earlier, I love
this story. But I think it's kind of hard to
convey the force of the story in summary, because so
much of it comes from this careful stacking up of
these only vaguely related details, but you can't tell all
of them without just reading the text in full. But

(46:13):
this is my favorite kind of horror story, one that's
both evocative and full of all these little observations, but
also with an original mythology and also just ambiguous enough
about what it all means. Like I was thinking, like,
how are we supposed to interpret the way the summoning
game works, especially since it's presented as just one of

(46:34):
many silly urban legends that the kids in the story
make up and repeat. Where does the power come from? Also,
how are we supposed to interpret what happens to Grace
when she tries it? Is it more benign or more sinister?
I feel like that's kind of left open. Has Grace
transcended the mundane world and become a kind of shepherding

(46:55):
angel for the lost? Or has she been like murdered
by a demon that she invited onto our plane and
become a ghost ready to reap a harvest of souls?
And the shepherd's crook is such a wonderful image because
it adds to the ambiguity there. If you're the sheep,
the crook could be seen either as your protection, keeping
you in the flock and away from predators, or it

(47:17):
could be your doom, pulling you in for the mutton slaughter.

Speaker 1 (47:20):
Yeah, it's so good. I too love the ambiguity here.
I also loved the completely accidental synergy with the Clark
Ashton Smith story and that both to some degree deal
with the idea of a channeling of dark energy and
works of art, yes, in this case cinema, So it's
a nice to a certain degree. This story meditates on

(47:45):
the power of cinema and the importance of cinema in
our life. And then it has this wonderful coming of
age energy to it, like young a young character trying
to sort of figure out how he works as a
human and how he fits into the world, how the
world works. It's just so beautifully put together, and again,

(48:05):
to your point, almost completely defies any kind of an
elevator pitch, because you can't make a statement like, oh,
this is a movie about a monster that's X or
about a haunting. That's why. No, it's You've got to
take in all the pieces in order to get the
full mosaic.

Speaker 3 (48:19):
I feel it took me great length to explain it,
and I feel like I still didn't fully get it,
Like you cannot summarize this story in a sentence. Another
thing I really love about the story is that it
creates an original urban legend. And it's not just a

(48:43):
descriptive legend one that tells a story, but it's the
kind of legend that has an enacted ritual. So with
this kind of urban legend, you you can go through
the steps of a specified behavioral algorithm, and in doing so,
you can experience the object of the legend directly in
some kind of paranormal encounter. I was trying to figure

(49:05):
out if there is a standard term for this type
of ritual summoning game in the anthropology, in folklore literature.
Maybe there is. If so, I couldn't identify what that
term is, but a well known example from American culture
would be the Bloody Mary game, where you stand in
front of a mirror in a dark room, perhaps on
Halloween night in some versions, and you recite an incantation.

(49:28):
Often it's just the name Bloody Mary a specified number
of times, maybe you say three times or thirteen times,
and according to the legend, you will have a supernatural encounter.
Maybe you will see a witch standing behind you in
the mirror, or maybe you'll see a woman covered in
blood who screams at you, or maybe a ghost that
reaches out of the mirror and tries to harm you,

(49:50):
tries to attack your eyes or something. And though I'm
less familiar with these, apparently ritual ghost summoning games are
very popular in multiple East Asians cultures as well. For example,
there's something known as the I think the Corner game
in Korea or the Square game in Japan, which involved
four participants, and it's a similar kind of thing. You

(50:11):
do a sequence of activities and it's supposed to summon
a ghost.

Speaker 1 (50:15):
Yeah, this weird connection between thought and action and ideas
of the supernatural. And if you put thought and action
in motion, like what does that? What does that do?
You know? It's weird because that also sounds like completely simple,
like I'm making them ount out of a molehile here,
But there is there's something strange going on. I think

(50:38):
we we sometimes interact with this in a like non
game even almost subconscious level, you know, like choosing not
to think about the thing that you know isn't real
lest it become real.

Speaker 3 (50:52):
Yes, yeah, totally, No, I think we do, even even
people who you know, at the rational level, you don't
think that your activities it will become a kind of
spell to summon spirits. You know, there's a part of
you that wonders and you just kind of shy away
from it. And it does require I would say, like
I am not a person who believes in ghosts. I

(51:13):
don't literally believe in ghosts, but I think it would
take some real bravery for me to play a ghost
summoning game, because like, there's a difference between what you
consciously assent to believing and what kind of scares you
in theory.

Speaker 1 (51:30):
My family and I we've been watching Agatha all along,
which is a witch based show on Disney about the
witch Agatha or Coven, and there's a scene with the
Wiji board, and so we had to explain to our
son what a Ouiji board is because they just had
not been exposed to it. And it's weird to explain
this as like, oh, yeah, it's like a supernatural summoning
game that as children growing up in you know, predominantly

(51:53):
you know, these very you know, Christian environments, you were
totally not supposed to do it. Would witchcraft, stay away
from it. But at the same time, you could buy
it at Walmart.

Speaker 3 (52:05):
Yeah, exactly, made by Parker Brothers. Yeah, so I don't know.
This story got me thinking about these kinds of summoning games.
Scholars studying the history of the Bloody Mary game, in fact,
they relate it back to earlier summoning games. I think
there were a lot around the turn of the twentieth

(52:25):
century which were sometimes practiced by young women with the
goal of seeing the face of their future husband.

Speaker 1 (52:32):
This is a oh my god, that's like gets into
a whole other realm of board games, right like this,
yeah street dight stuff.

Speaker 3 (52:38):
Yeah exactly.

Speaker 1 (52:39):
So you know.

Speaker 3 (52:39):
A version of this is you like get a candle
and a handheld mirror and you walk backwards up or
down a staircase holding the candle in the mirror. Don't
please people, no one listening try this because you heard
it here. That sounds so dangerous. But you do this,
and then you look in the mirror and you are
supposed to see a glimpse of future either your future

(53:01):
husband's face or you see the grim face of death,
which means you'll die instead. And other versions of this
don't rely on a staircase, just a dark room and
a mirror, some kind of ritual rabbi attached here for
you to look at. Some just like one hundred year
old Halloween postcards that are like again to come back to,
like the Parker Brothers thing. These are just like mass

(53:23):
produced postcards that are like, here's how you look in
the mirror and see the ghost. But I guess it's
a little more benign because it's giving you this supposedly
happy information about like Ooh, look at the handsome face
of your future husband.

Speaker 1 (53:35):
Yeah, look at the cute cartoon cat in the background. Yeah.
I love old timy Halloween stuff like this.

Speaker 3 (53:39):
So the technical term for divination specifically with the use
of a mirror is catoptromancy from catoptron Greek for mirror,
and in a more general sense, as a type of
divination practice, this has been documented since ancient times in
many cultures. The treatment of it more like a scary

(54:00):
game allah bloody Mary, played by young people to conjure
a supernatural encounter, I'd say, primarily for fun and to
test one's bravery. That's something I would be really interested
in finding evidence of going farther back in history, but
I couldn't. I wasn't able to turn up anything explicitly
of that sort. It seems like the most ancient references

(54:21):
to catoptromancy are about sincere attempts at divination, genuine desires
to get hidden information from the gods or from the
spirit world, or to commune with the souls of the dead.
So obviously the lack of evidence doesn't rule out that
there were games of this sort going back hundreds or
thousands of years. I just haven't come across that documentation

(54:43):
of that anyway, whether it's for sincere attempts to get
hidden information, or just as a game you play to
scare yourself for fun, it's interesting to think about the
phenomenon of seeing faces in mirrors. I don't have space
to rehash everything, but in our series on the Invention
of the mirror, we extensively got into research on something

(55:05):
known as the strange face in the mirror effect, which
is a documented psychological phenomenon where people with typical psychological
histories will often report hallucinating strange faces if they simply
stare into a mirror for a long period of time
in low light conditions. I think the rough numbers were

(55:26):
that if you just like dark in a room look
in a mirror for ten minutes, roughly two thirds of
people reported seeing weird stuff. This was largely explored in
some papers by a researcher whose name is Giovanni Caputo,
and there are a number of interesting perceptual and neurological
explanations that might contribute to it. But the strange face

(55:48):
in a mirror effect has been postulated as contributing to
the popularity of ca toptromancy games and things like Bloody Mary.
Due to this common quirk in our brains. It's apparently
just not unusual to actually see weird stuff if you
stare into a mirror in a darkened room, and it
doesn't take drugs, it doesn't take a history of hallucinations.
It's just a normal thing that happens. So if you

(56:11):
want to hear all the details about that research, go
look up our episodes on the invention of the mirror.
We go in depth there. But to bring it back
to the Stephen Graham Jones story, I'm interested that this
invented ritual, this invented summoning game involves it like there
are a lot of parallels with the Bloody Mary thing,
but it involves not a mirror but a movie screen,

(56:32):
and not prolonged staring, not prolonged stimulus relating to the surface,
but actually the opposite, completely cutting yourself off from the
stimulus while everyone around you is still watching. So by
playing dead and not watching, the scariest part of the movie.
This is actually what quote lets the movie in. It

(56:54):
conjures the most terrifying or powerful aspect of it into
our world. I love this variation and I love how
it interacts with the standard lore. And again, I don't
know exactly what to say about what it means, but
it feels so potent.

Speaker 1 (57:09):
Yeah, yeah, you know, this reminds me of something my
friend David Streepy does or used to do, where he
said that if he was watching a scary movie and
there's a scary part, he didn't necessarily want to watch
the scary part and he would like squint his eyes,
blur out his vision during that portion. You know. So
maybe it is rooted in sort of especially a you know,

(57:29):
a childhood attempt to sort of save face but make
it through the scary parts of the movie without actually
watching them. And yeah, it kind of turns that on
its head. What if by not watching you're allowing it
to seep into you in other ways? But again, it's
very ambiguous here, and that's kind of the beauty of

(57:50):
the Stephen Graham Jones story. You know, what actually is
going on here? What am I doing or doing wrong
that allows the darkness seep in at least at this
one theater, you know, wherever it is and whatever its
dark history may.

Speaker 3 (58:06):
Be Yeah, so I love that story. I love a
lot of Stephen Graham Jones's work, and if you want
to pick up that collection, you look for after the
People Lights Have Gone Off in twenty fourteen.

Speaker 1 (58:17):
Yeah, I noticed that Joe R. Lansdale wrote the introduction
to that collection, which I think is fitting because I mean,
these are both authors of sort of the same era,
I believe, and their work kind of reminds me of
each other's work. You know, both have a often have
a great sense of sort of in a way, something
that Stephen King did a lot. I mean, Stephen King

(58:38):
wrote a lot about author about professional writers dealing with
you know, darkness, but also a lot of like working
class blue collars sort of characters encountering a very you know,
unpaved road level version of horror. And I get that
in these two authors as well.

Speaker 3 (58:59):
Yeah, so I'm gonna have to look and figure out
if Stephen Graham Jones's pale anthropological thriller and Slasher and
Other Slasher are already out, so I'm gonna try to read.

Speaker 1 (59:12):
Them all Right, Well, there we have a couple of
I think solid Halloween stories for you to potentially read,
or maybe you have read them, or maybe you feel like, Okay,
I got enough, I don't need to read them, but
you have thoughts about them, you know, write in. We
would love to hear from you. If you have ideas
for next year, If you want us to continue this series,

(59:33):
ride in and let us know. Just a reminder that
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and
culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but
on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just
talk about a weird film on weird Houses cinema. If
you're on Instagram, follow us. We are stb ym podcast
and that's a good way to just stay abreast of
whatever's coming out in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind

(59:54):
podcast feed.

Speaker 3 (59:55):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:00:17):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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