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Feedback 039 - The Other Christine (Patreon)

Published:
2025-09-16 17:05:00
Imported:
2025-09
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Listen in as we discuss your comments on August's shows! Clean-shaven fear, toilet monsters and Weird Uncle Jamie - this 'cast has it all!

Also: Trapped in Your House Due to Hans Christian Andersen!

Next up: The Second Wish by Brian Lumley

Comments

Ann Knight

The Stone Tape, penned by Nigel Kneale, is on youtube. Despite the antiquated tech it is still an effective horror film (in my opinion), and at the very end there is a nice Lovecraftian "twist."

Shay Fargel

as a victim of childhood abuse and also a person with terrible shitty relatives, I heartily endorse the "y'know what, I didn't do anything wrong, everyone can eat a (beep)" awakening. That knowledge helps me every day, people can only meet you where they've met themselves and that's that.

Aaron La Vene

Isekai is not a dungeon crawling anime it’s a “transported into a different reality” Don’t worry you guys didn’t miss it

Aaron La Vene

One of my best friends is a teacher who started a dnd club . He never played but kids wanted to start a club and needed permission. He reached out to me I donated him all the source material I had. It’s been two years he still has the club going. Not all teachers are assholes Also you should watch weapons. I’m not one to hype or not hype a movie as expectations can ruin it. But I’d be interested to hear your thoughts. Whether good or bad

Matthew Henry

I feel like our experience of Weapons was lessened by too high expectations. My daughter loves horror movies so I took her to see it at the drive in. She was so bored an hour in that she took out her cell phone and started playing a game. Different strokes for different folks, glad some people liked it.

Richard Horsman

Possession is a divisive film for sure, but the scene where Isabelle Adjani screams and thrashes in a subway station for 3 minutes is etched on my brain. It’s a VERY committed performance.

Forrest Rush

You asked about the box, so here goes. In 1970, when I was six, my mother died, and for a while there was a tug-of-war over whether my siblings and I would live with her parents in Arkansas or with my father’s side in Georgia. We ended up with my dad, but in those in-between years we spent stretches of time with my mother’s family in Arkansas. They were small-town ex-farmers — one uncle was mayor, others were pastors or teachers — and honestly about 30% of the whole town seemed to be relatives. Though none of them were big readers (my mom had been the exception), in the old house she grew up in there was a big box of books. That box turned into my lifeline. I was already a reading-obsessed kid, and with little else to do in a rural town — I wasn’t eager to go help neighbors bale hay — someone dug it out for me. Nobody cared what was in it, or whether it was “appropriate,” so I dove in. Inside were Dickens and other random mid-century hardbacks, but the real treasures were a horror anthology full of Poe, M.R. James, and Lovecraft’s The Outsider. I read that anthology cover to cover when I was six or seven, long before there was a Google or YouTube to help one sound out words like phantasmagoric, sepulchral, cyclopean, or tenebrous. I didn’t always know what they meant, but the tone got under my skin anyway. That box also had Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, though I didn’t actually get around to reading it until I was 13, after I’d hauled a bunch of those books back with me when we finally settled in Georgia. My dad wouldn’t let me take the whole box — too big, too heavy — but I smuggled plenty of its contents. So the Arkansas years gave me the box, and the Georgia years gave me libraries. We grew up on farms and later in trailer parks near Atlanta, where I could check out almost anything I wanted. But the spark came from that box. Without it, I doubt I’d have gotten hooked on Lovecraft so young, or later stumbled into Amis at all. Monsanto may have swallowed up the family farms, but I came away with words like eldritch, cadaverous, gibbous, and chthonic rattling around in my head. So fair?

Eric - Speaker in Digressions

Discussion of "trapped in RPGs" novels reminded me of Joel Rosenberg's "Guardians of the Flame" series that started in the 80s, with a "gamers magically transported into the game setting" premise. But instead of mastering the world through their knowledge of the tropes, they realize just how awful such a place would actually be, and that, say, a failed pickpocket attempt gets you stabbed to death for reals. Also, since the protagonists, instantly taking on the abilities and powers of their characters, did not actually learn those skills normally, they can't level up in them. But still, they decide to eliminate slavery. More whimsically and self-referentially, there's the "Gamers" movies from the Dead Gentlemen. Not sure we need a whole genre with sub-genres of this sort of thing, but then, I'm old.

Eric - Speaker in Digressions

Also: On the topic of "green man" vs. "*little* green man," consider that internet classic pointing out that there's a big difference between "butt dial" and "booty call," so we shouldn't be too sure that we understand texts from other times, languages, and cultures.

Christine M

"Toilet Monster"??? Wow. There are many hurtful stereotypes, spread by ignorant, unfeeling people. No wonder people like me more than the original Leigh.

Alan Ricks

Thanks for reading my comment. I don’t have any social media anymore so my online interactions are limited to comments with people here and talking to you guys and after a decade+ of it I feel like we all are a small family.

Alan Ricks

The “Toilet Monster” story made me think of Bora Chung’s short story "The Head" which is in her "Cursed Bunny" collection. It’s about a woman who is haunted by her own bodily waste. Its kinda gross but really sticks with you. Now that the podcast has become very Aickman and now Amis friendly I think its time for me to mention John Collier again! His fiction fits somewhere between the two. Maybe the fantastique? His collection "Fancies and Goodnights" never seems to be mentioned in Weird Fiction circles and it most definitely should be. His most well known story, which was made into a Twilight Zone episode and appeared in the seminal horror collection "The Dark Descent" (which starts with Stephen King then jumps right to John Collier), is "Evening Primrose". Its about a man who rejects modern society and decides to abandon his life and live unburdened and undetected in a Department Store. He soon finds he isn’t alone however. The empty desolate rooms and the strange society he discovers both tickled my horror-bone and more people should check it out.

Alan Ricks

Oh, I had wonderful teachers too! It was just that one that was living in an imaginary world of battling demonic spirits and projecting it onto her students. This was a public school but it was Florida so thats probably the explanation.

REO Jackwagon

Thanks for reading my comment! I'll come clean with it, and how it relates to the story. The party was supposed to investigate the seeming disappearance of dire moose in a northern preserve under the guise of being part of a hunting party, with a secondary objective of finding news of a missing guide family. The are traveling with a version of the guides from Blackwood's The Wendigo. They of course encounter a clearing with a yurt in the center, a thin trail of smoke showing. As they near the yurt, they hear the noise overhead, etc, and a figure starts approaching them from the edge of the clearing. It seems to blip from place to place, sometimes juddering and flickering. They all get different visions of eyeless faces and bloody mouths. It is of course a Wendigo-posessed person they must defeat. Once they do, they investigate the yurt. The figure was the missing guide. His family has been butchered and probably cannibalized, hung about the inside of the yurt. This is where I lost one player! They were supposed to follow an adventure that mimics the later half of the story, but when one PC was bunked with Defago in the tent, and there is the name on the wind and Defago's sobbing in his sleep, I lost that player! Granted, I totally surprised them with literature-based spookiness, but we had just been battling captive liches that were the guardians of an evil dungeon run by a family of necromancers not a month earlier, but that was more standard DnD dungeon crawling than atmospheric spookiness. I even quoted from the story in the tradition of this very podcast. I guess it's not for everyone!

Corey Wittig

Dungeon Crawler Carl has been huge at my bookshop! My understanding is that they had previously been self-published, but a subsidiary of Penguin Random House started releasing gorgeous hardcovers of the books last fall. The first three were released one a month for three months in the fall then there was a break and three more in the spring. Book 7 comes out next week and we have a few preorders! A certain kinda dude looooves them. Haha

Stacy Schumacher

Chris's reaction to Possession is fantastic and also 100% accurate. It's also why I do suggest that film for horror fans. Rare is the film that can be simultaneously that slow and also one of the most bonkers f-ed up things you've seen.

HRPrice

There are a LOT of isekai that directly interact with game mechanics like XP, leveling, and crafting stats, though- which is why they sidled into the genre conversation. There are also a lot of isekai that are notoriously terrible power fantasies that use game mechanics to torpedo their own stakes! So if you’re investigating the game-influenced fantasy genre, maybe start with Dungeon Crawler Carl and other curated picks.

Steve

I'm surprised Chris hasn't heard about Dungeon Crawler Carl because our mutual friend Jason has read all seven volumes recently and talks about them often.

Tyler

I just saw Patton Oswald in the newerGhostBusters movie. Love his call out to H.P. Lovecraft

Brian Pitt

Yeah, isekai are notorious for having a really interesting premise and then just devolving into having the hero being so overpowered that nothing is a threat or cheap harem comedy and totally ignoring all the interesting parts of the world. There are some gems out there but there's a *lot* of rough per diamond

Eldritch Golem (JPM)

Re. Ben A's comment about Ghostwatch (1992) and The Stone Tapes (1972) I would say these are slightly different examples of the same phenomenon; i.e. what scholar Michael Barkun calls "fact-fiction reversal." Audiences who saw Ghostwatch on the BBC mistook the film for a real documentary because it was presented in the style of one. Another example from the BBC is the faux-documentary Alternative 3 (1977) which has spawn a bunch of different conspiracy theories including, perhaps most amusingly, Project Pegasus which alleges that former US President Barak Obama was part of a secret CIA project to explore Mars in the early 1980s. Other examples of this type of "fact-fiction reversal" include Animal Planet's infamous Mermaid documentaries (2012 & 2013), Orson Welles' 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds, and Arthur Machen's story "The Bowmen" (1914) which was mistaken for an actual news article and which many people at the time came to believe was true. Kingsley Amis's "Who or What Was It?" would seem to fall into this category as well. The Stone Tapes is different in that it was not presented as real but as a work of fiction. However the central idea behind the film - that ghosts and haunting can be explained as a result of residual psychic energy trapped in physical stone - subsequently became widely embraced by parapsychologists as a real explanation for supernatural phenomenon. Here we see an element of a fictional work being removed from its original context and interjected into objective reality. There are plenty of examples of this as well, with Lovecraft's the Necronomicon being a choice example. Also the idea of shape-shifting reptilians infiltrating the halls of power which Barkun has shown can be traced back to Robert E. Howard's "The Shadow Kingdom." You can have a blending of these two types of fact-fiction reversal, such as Ambrose Bierce's "The Difficulty of Crossing a Field" (1888) which is written like a real account and which some people came to believe was true (look up the disappearance of Oliver Lerch). Another is Jack Finney's short story "I'm Scared" (1951) which involves various episodes of involuntary time travel. It too is written like a real account and, according to folklorist Chris Aubeck, the final episode of which was subsequently widely reported as having really happened.

Jeb Card

The notion of ghosts being psychic recordings of some kind has some predecessors prior to Kneale. Someone should write a paper (if they haven't), on the idea of water and water vapor serving a similar purpose. I've seen a few references to the notion, though I can only remember one at the moment (Margaret Murray's memoirs in which she suggested this was why there are so many ghosts in the American South and in Britain, they're both humid/foggy). I agree that it was with Stone Tape and a few similar ideas around that time re: ley lines where the EM concept really took hold, but I'd like to know how much if any transference there was between that idea and the water tape idea.