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Study 120 - Window (Patreon)

Published:
2025-02-06 17:36:22
Edited:
2025-02-06 17:39:14
Imported:
2025-02
Tags:

Content

We're looking into Window by Bob Leman, and we're seeing some scary stuff! Join us as we discuss this crazy scifi-horror-fantasy story!

Special thanks to reader Andrew Leman of the HPLHS!

Here's that bio for Bob Leman from Lesser-Known Writers.

Check out this adaptation of Window on Night Visions, starring Bill Pullman!

A Brief History of Things Were Better 50 Years Ago

Outro music is from a new collection coming this March!

Files

Comments

ESTY

the VVINDOW What a banger of a story! So fun. How do I find more stuff like this? Are the orange ice cubes clicking into the space, leaving “breadcrumbs” the entire time? Also, can we get Andrew Leman back to do a full reading?

Sundance

Such a trippy story. Reminds me of an SCP story. Granted any weird fiction/strange stories fits the archetype of an SCP story. I think it would be cool if y’all did an episode where you two read multiple SCP stories and talk about your favorite ones, least favorite to silliest and discuss the themes and parallels to weird/strange fiction. Keep up the great work!

Mark Simmons

Oh hey! I remember "Night Visions." The story "Patterns" from episode 13, starring Malcolm McDowell, is a particular highlight and I think a lot of Strange Stories fans will really dig it. And yes, great story! Kudos to all Lemans involved!

Daniel Weber

Great episode! I read this story as a kid, probably in an anthology from a used book store. It stuck with me as one of those half-remembered, “Did I really read that? Or was that a dream or something?” books. I rediscovered it and the amazing author a few years ago. I’m so glad you covered it. Hearing Andrew read the climactic section was so cool. If you can find it, I recommend Bob Leman’s story Feesters in the Lake.

Derek Scott

Well, that escalated quickly.

Jason Thompson

This is one of my favorite stories ever. I love it so much I wrote up stats and a description for these creatures for my Dreamland RPG I’m working on. When I think of “evil humanoids” in roleplaying games or whatever, I think, this is how you do them, I dunno what everyone else is talking about. You didn’t mention it, but there’s also the gross element that, based on the creatures’ actions and body language in the final scene, the researchers realize the ‘dad’ is actually the mate of the ‘daughter’ creatures. Also, doesnt Leman explicitly say the whole scene & vibe of the creatures’ clothes and architecture is sort of Pre-Civil-War Confederacy? I don’t have the story in front of me so I don’t remember. The whole story is so upsetting and disgusting. It’s perfect.

Viking Guitar

I'll gladly take Bill Pullman playing a little girl if it means we can erase the atrocious performance his son did in the new 'Salem's Lot adaptation. It was like watching a wooden plank trying to deliver lines around a mouth full of chewing tobacco. Then again, in light of some of the better recent Stephen King adaptations, it's nice to know that some filmmakers are still committed to tradition: using his stories to churn out the most bottom-of-the-barrel cinema out there.

a Little Bird

Hi Chris and Chad 🇹🇩 I just want to tell you two that I’ve loved your show since I was in college some decade or so ago. During the pandemic, your voices kept me sane in months of isolation, and I’ve listened to every episode at least twice, and most thrice, because your insight is incisive and down to earth, you share a “lethal self regard” that keeps you growing audibly (so inspiring), and your comedic timing is downright instructive. I recently introduced my partner to your podcast. I created a checklist on my notes app full of my favorite episodes/those I think are representative of the scope of topic, style, and depth that y’all play in the paint of. As I comb through the library of your dulcet tones a 4th/3rd time, I’m struck by your tremendous creative& comedic talent (Chad, your Colossus screenplay dominates the stage and screen of my brain) and unerring humanism (Chris, what I’m typing applies to Rachel Watches Startrek one hundred percent, and you carry the humanism in you like it’s your own Prime Directive to do well by people). P.S. As my notes app checklist grows and we check off episode after episode, now that my partner and I are 26 out of 96 episodes I’ve curated, she asked this as we were cooking breakfast: “Do you want to listen to the voices?! Chad and the other guy??” With glee, gentlemen. Bravo.

Ryan Thomas

WOW! The analogy of the whole "things were great in the past" myth as a lure of an angler fish, using nostalgia to bait its prey, hit me hard. Avoiding details, I will just say I have been trying to put into words this technique to open other's eyes. Now I have the words. Thank you.

It's a Ghost.

I totally didn't see any of the twists and turns coming in this story. Also, I loved it! Starting out, I expected it to be just a science fiction story of a type I found familiar, but it certainly was not that. My guess for why when they first stick things through the window the things disappear is that most of the time the window is physically open to some kind of void of nothingness or void of annihilation. In turn, I think when Culvergast performed his spell, he and a cube of space around himself was sent into this void (and was annihilated 🙁), and a visual window was opened between Earth and the other place with the old house and family. Then every so many hours there would be a 15-second physical connection to the house and family world. Then when the grad student jumped through the window into the world of the old house and family, the family became aware there was a connection to another place; the father reversed the visual window so he could see our Earth (and we couldn’t see them anymore); and he opened a permanent physical connection to our world, which is absolutely f-ing terrifying.

Alan Ricks

The midnight house collection of Leman’s collected works is out of print but it is downloadable on Internet Archive. Its called “Feesters in the Lake and Other Stories” . Also everyone should support Internet Archive.

Gideon Falcon

Holy crap... Now THAT was a RIDE. I was floored by just how modern a lot of the writing was; there's so much worldbuilding just in the brief explanation of how Culvergast found the incantation, which I would have loved to see further explored. Then the ideas of the house almost seeming like a physical manifestation of that nostalgia, which I thought was going to turn into a Mars Is Heaven type of thing like in Bradbury. But instead, in an instant we switch from contemplative, eerie dread, to imminent horror, which was just an absolutely fantastic presentation.

Gideon Falcon

Not only is the sentiment that "Things were better X years ago" common throughout history, so is the sentiment of "kids these days don't have any respect," to the point there's even a word for it: Juvenoia. The rose-colored glasses of nostalgia, combined with the self-serving bias glossing over the worst of our youthful indiscretions, leads us to instinctively see the rising generation as so much worse, so much less intelligent, so much less grateful; even when there's evidence that the reverse is true. It's a bias that a lot of millennials and forward have particularly been on the receiving end of, to much grief and consternation.

The Lonely Sand Person

These guys haven't read enough SCPs. Here's how you deal with an anomaly: First step, establish a cordon with automatic weapons and claymore mines. Once that's secure, build a wall around the whole site. Pour in concrete to a depth of 10 feet, wait for it to cure. Then build more wall on top of the old one, pour more concrete on top of that, and so on, until all the window looks onto is solid artificial stone. Equip that with vibration sensors and monitor it for anything trying to dig through.

Our old pal Brendan Gardiner

Never mind the breaking of the double mumbo-jumbo rule. What about the rule of threes they broke by having the timekeeper vomit only twice. Once would have been fine as a stand-alone event, but the second one suggests a third is around the corner to provide a resolution. Otherwise a great, very satisfying story.

Bugberry

Having recently watched the Netflix adaptation of 100 years of Solitude, the specific interplay between themes of dangerous nostalgia and fantasy was fresh on my mind, but that twist was something else altogether.

Clayton Patteson

Holy smokes. I saw the adaptation on late night TV as a kid and didn't know what it was. It only took over 20 years for your episode to come out and let me know what it was based on.

Braccus Rex

Glad you covered this story. Recommended it in the Discord a while ago. I never thought about the family as a specific lure, like Chad suggested. Such implication is way creepier though. I'd also recommend such stories by Bob Leman as "Industrial Comlpex", "The time of the Worm", a neat Dracula story - "The Pilgrimage of Clifford M" and specifically for narattive device - "Instructions" from Feesters in the Lake collection. The book also has additional info about Leman and his stance on HPL specifically. So I think you'd find it interesting)

Camshaft

I know y’all keep politics off the show, but may I say, “you think you have 15 hours of peace before the window where the Patriarchal Nostalgia Monsters can get you… but it could actually happen any time now…And if you try to join their nice family they’ll tear you apart,” is the neatest metaphor for how being an LGBT American in 2025 feels I can think of. Thanks for the catharsis? 🤣

Richard Upton Sinclair Lewis Pickman

Agh, I had the story downloaded and resolved to read it in advance. Fast forward to this morning, and my impatience got the best of me, but I absolutely regretted my decision when I learned of that bonkers twist! 😩

Donny Bliss

I’m going to start shouting, SUSPECT! or VERIFIED! whenever someone says something wrong or right.

Jim Cannon

This was a great story, very entertaining, a lot of fun to listen to you guys summarize and discuss it. I'm always dubious about the conclusions to these types of stories though, the whole "how will the world deal with the knowledge that they could come back any time?" thing. Even Lovecraft would hit that note on occasion, although usually he would imply it was already too late. But anyway: we human beings build permanent residences in the path of earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanoes, and wildfires. We have a spectacular ability to believe "it could never happen to ME" and so I think even with the threat of interdimensional cannibal monsters hanging over our heads, we'd still live life like it wasn't a threat. This story was from 1980, right? This is also a perfect Cold War parable, living under the shadow of imminent nuclear annihilation and pretending its not likely to happen. Of course, all that atomic weaponry still exists and the global political situation is more unstable than it was in 1980, but we pretend even harder these days that nuclear annihilation won't ever happen.

Newk

Chad said he likes ANY kind of kinesis but didn't even mention kinephews

Scott McCrate

Just started watching Night Visions S01E03 A View Through The Window, Quiet Please on YouTube, the Bill Pullman piece and the story is introduced by Henry Rollins doing his best Rod Serling...which is not particularly good, LOL!

Jeremy mathews

I know this is way after the publication of this episode, but I think the really horror was that they were nice people who cared for eachother. I don't think that was part of the illusion.

adam burke

This story almost feels like a precursor to The Backrooms — an eerie, seemingly random window discovered by an organization that uses nostalgia to lure people in. The whole concept has that same unsettling liminal-horror atmosphere. I was also wondering if you guys might consider doing a bonus episode on the movie once it comes out? 👀