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Episode 466 - The Battery (Patreon)

Published:
2019-09-07 16:56:56
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Patton Oswalt returns to help us connect with the Michael Shea story The Battery!

Warning: some language and themes not appropriate for younger listeners.

Can’t get an affordable copy of Copping Squid? Check out Demiurge: The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales of Michael Shea!

Next up: The Loved Dead by C.M. Eddy and H.P. Lovecraft!

Comments

Mandy Reznor (She/It)

When you're feeling parched and you want some spinal punch, what do you reach for? The Spinal Tap.

Ben A

Actually, Pringles come in _both_ bags and tubes.🤓

The Call of Cassandra

Now for something completely different. For a while now I have been meaning to thank you guys for your show. It is wonderfully entertaining of course. I wasn't sure what to think when you ran out of HPL material and went on to other writers. But I am glad you did continue on, and that I continued to listen. You exposed me to a lot of classic fiction (dare I use the term Literature?) that I otherwise would never have read. Now when I am listening to other podcasts like MonsterTalk, or just people's conversations, I understand references I would have missed otherwise. For example, in a Monstertalk episode they were talking about the Hollow Earth theory, and I instantly thought of the Poe story you guys covered about the ship going down the polar vortex. In another they were talking Wendigos, and I immediately said out loud "My feet of fire! My burning feet of fire" Then the host Blake said exactly the same thing. Without your show, I would never have gotten the in-joke on these, and so many other things. I have learned and grown as a person, and maybe raised my Library Use skill too. So kudos guys! I hope your stars remain right!

Sweatin' to the Great Oldies

I was so hoping that Shea would use the battery (a fortish thing) and battery (storage of energy) homonym - perhaps even working in battery (physical attack) - for a cyclopean eldritch pun of cosmic horror. But I guess a toad god acting as a go-between is . . . well it's something. Right? It has to be something.

Steve

Witnessing, in the religious sense, is about showing faith to the community, and the deity. It's a sublime moment of human nakedness before the awesome. Also, Gunnunga is Nyarlathotep, messenger of Azathoth. It's seems pretty on point with the Mythos.

Steve

For me, Shea read some Norse mythology, recognised some tropes similar to Lovecraft and wrapped it all up in some Boho Socal trappings, chucked in a few shoggoths, his fave frog friend. It's not all that different from what he usually does, but I think the characters are more isolated from their social setting than they usually are, and the scale goes from sherry round the pool to knitting the world together in perhaps a less than satisfactory way. The two main characters are basically just witnesses to the action and don't really have any agency. They don't even seem particularly affected by what happens. I guess they might change their yoga practice. Throw in a downward shoggoth perhaps, or a yawning gap.

Peter Larsen

Speaking as a weird pasty scholar who lives alone, I feel very dismissed.

Forrest Rush

Coming this fall to ABC, Patton Oswalt is the smart smarmy dad and Chad Fifer his smarter smarmier son. Listen to them trade quips while sitting on the couch, downing endless cups of coffee. It’s the Sheamore Boys. With special guest Chris Lackey as their ever suffering neighbor.

Peter Larsen

I’m waiting for the sitcom “ Shae, It Isn’t So,” which features Shae as an old regular in a seedy diner. People ask him how his day has been, he tells a story of uncaring horror, and they react with comedy disbelief. If you look carefully, you can see Thomas Ligotti running a puppet show in the window of the derelict storefront across the street.

Mark Brett

I think Chris is exactly right about Gunnunga paying off the neighbors. He would have paid off anybody living there, for the same reason he had the windows in his house covered: he doesn't want anyone knowing what he's up to until it's too late. That gold means nothing to him, but it might buy the silence of greedy humans willing to look the other way while he gets up to his weird shenanigans. Of course, as we know from the stories of any number of serial killers, he needn't have bothered. People are perfectly willing to ignore all kinds of suspicious crap in the name of getting along with the neighbors. A bag of gold is just overkill. And also a bit gauche...

Ben Mund

Please tell me that your muttered "what's he building in there" was a Tom Waits reference. Because the first thing I thought of when Gunnunga appeared at the door - dry despite the rain - was Waits' apocalyptic Earth Died Screaming in which the singer "walks between the raindrops". I always thought Waits' music, while not Lovecraftian, carries a similar feel of the unknown sliding just below the surface. Also, I love the idea of unleashing one slightly known uncontrollable force to hopefully counter another. Like letting a bear loose in your backyard to deal with that goddamned velociraptor.

Darth Pseudonym

A minor etymology note. It sounded like you were saying "ginnungagap" is the origin of the english word "gap", which isn't correct. Rather, the term "Ginnunga-gap" uses "gap" in the same meaning as in English and Old German; it was an existing word in all the germanic languages. The meaning of "Ginnunga" is more unclear and is subject to some debate. The common interpretation as a variation on "yawn", thus "the yawning chasm", is not very well supported. Another theory links "Ginnunga" to a few other "Ginn-" words in Norse, which tend to relate to the power of the gods, so it could be interpreted as "the void filled with the power of the gods". But we probably won't ever know what Ginnunga really meant.

Peter Larsen

...and that’s just the way Ginnunga likes it.

Andrew Trnacek

So the battery reverts back to its original purpose as a defensive structure perhaps it was always designed to defend against cosmic enemies.

The Call of Cassandra

I had a long post that I wrote out about my thoughts on the story. Then I lost the entire thing. Maybe it was eaten by a gap monster? I was on the same page as Chris, in that my impression is that the Man-In-Gunga-Black was bribing the protagonists to stay out of his way. Why a mystical monster destroying the world would bother to bribe someone is beyond me however. I mean, he can eat the world after all. Why not just kill them and be done with it? I guess because then the story would have been really short. Maybe this story should have been that short. I definitely put this on Shea's B-sides. It is an entirely subjective observation on my part, but I find that the Shea stories I like most are those where the protagonists are ordinary people struggling against the Mythos. Dagoniad, Copping Squid, Tsathoggua, Fat Face, and the like. In those stories I can identify with the protagonists, and root for them to succeed, or at least survive. But this story was basically one god fights another god, while pathetic humans look on doing nothing. There is no one here for me to root for, or even care about, because the humans literally have no agency, and I cannot identify with the 8 Tentacle Beast or NorseGungaDinGap. The entire thing feels very remote and impersonal to me. Speaking of which, it was also my impression that Tsathaggoua and Tenta8 were fighting against NorseGungaDinGap simply out of their own enlightened self interest (which as G'kar pointed out, is one of the three elements that hold the Universe together). The Earth was their territory, and they did not want another predator coming along and wrecking it until they had sucked all the marrow out of it. Certainly they were not protecting the human race, or anything else on the planet. I do not think that NorseGungaDinGap was Nyarlahotep. Nyarly tends to be a manipulator behind the scenes. Not a direct in your face, eat the world kind of guy. I am also not so sure he would want to ruin the Earth when there is still so much fun to be had with it. Like Tsathaggoua, Cthulhu, and the others, our world is that bright pane of light creatures like him are attracted to. Not to destroy outright, but to exploit, until there is nothing left to harvest from the corpse. So I too suspect that Shea simply read a book on Norse Mythology and invented NorseGungaDinGap, and pitted it against Cthulhu (or whatever Tenta8 was) in his own version of Celebrity Mythos Deathmatch. Oh, and I wanted to add that I heard Patton was doing some musical collaborations. The first was that he was teaming up with the Zombies to redo Shea's Not there. Then there was the Joy Division song, Shea's Lost Control. I even hear that if he can get Patrick Swayze's essential saltes, we might be hearing a new version of Shea's Like The Wind.

Karl Eisenbraun

I got really excited when Patton mentioned Fritz Leiber’s A Bit of The Dark World, which has got to be one of my all time favorite stories. I’ve hoped the guys would cover it at some point for a long time, just to hear their take on it. Great episode lads, as usual, can’t wait for the next one!

Eric - Speaker in Digressions

I’m guessing that the former flop house Patton stayed in when he was in Providence (for a show I had to miss, dammit) was the Dean Hotel, a fairly spiffy place (and the home of the Boombox, where there was some Saturday night karaoke at NecronomiCon a few weeks ago). When I first moved to the area, it was a cheap hotel / "gentlemen's club" (not the kind where you sit around with brandy and tell of your exploits abroad, unless Brandy is the name of a stripper). But before that it was housing for Episcopalian clergy, and I always found it comforting somehow that this strip club bore an inscription on a wall outside that it was dedicated to the greater glory of God.

Sanjay Mathew

Yeah somehow this just didn't grip me. Shea generally manages to immerse you in his characters living in that grey area on the fringes of polite society. I just didn't find these characters particularly effective.

Thomas Panzarello

Hi guys I love your show! Will you ever consider covering stories from Stephen King?

Ethan Cordray

I think I liked this one a little more than you guys and Patton did. It reminded me more of HPL stories like "He" or "The Statement of Randolph Carter" in which the narrator is mostly a passive observer of somebody else's occult adventure. The mood and descriptive language is more important than characterization or real narrative coherency. I think this story achieves that effect pretty well. Though in fairness, it's clear that Shea is capable of better work, combining both weird mood and solid storytelling without sacrificing one for the other, so maybe it's a bit of a step back coming off of his San Francisco stories.

Rafe Ball

I heard Patton’s planning to do a documentary piece on Michael Shea’s little-known side business where he sold old artillery ammunition from a hut on his private beach - “Shea sells Shea’s Shells on the Shea Shore”

Robert Curtin

Love me some Patton! Always great to hear his voice and his progress with all his Shea projects! Still can’t find them, perhaps I need to be more in tune with the other worldly brainwaves of those below...

Morbid Smile Art

Loved the podcast, but that music really stayed with me! Any way we can get that outro song?

Andrew Blanke

Great episode friends! I was curious whether or not you guys were planning on covering Shea’s “The Color out of Time”. It’s really a great book that expands on Lovecraft’s story in really interesting and chilling ways. It’d be a multi-part episode and might be difficult to schedule with Patton but I think it’d be awesome to hear you guys cover it. Sheaptember or DeSheamber?

Benet Devereux

Shea Hate Me (like others) (sorry if that's already been done)

Lord Rancid

Some hints of of Joy Division in the closing music I think? Nice 👌