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Episode 477 - William Wilson (Patreon)

Published:
2019-11-29 17:18:17
Edited:
2024-12-12 19:02:10
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Ending Poevember with a Dopplegang - it's William Wilson!

Special thanks to reader Greig Johnson!

Next up for the Holidays: The Phantom of the Opera 

Comments

Eric Sroka

"We just hacked our girlfriend to bits with a chainsaw. Does that sound...fine to you?" Awesome reference to Evil Dead II! I vaguely remember reading this when I was a kid, I should look to see if I have a copy of the story kicking around. I like the concept.

Hermagoras (pronounced HerMAgoras)

"Out-Herods Herod" is from Hamlet, Act 3 Scene 2: " O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumbshows and noise: I would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it."

Sweatin' to the Great Oldies

Well hide me in a chair and call me quirky, I'm glad to have been name-checked on this one. I've often been impressed with Poe's ability to get at the workings of the human mind without that getting in the way of a good yarn. In this case, that old chorus of us. Yes, we can argue with ourselves. We can give ourselves a pep talk. We can bargain with and serve ultimatums to and frankly hold ourselves contemptible. Although we tend to walk around pretending that there's a single identity knocking about our skull, we certainly don't behave that way. It's not all that shocking that a fella from a fine family might wrestle with and ultimately have to kill that member of their chorus that keeps popping in with counterpoint to the harmony of roguish, egotistical villainy we're trying to wallow in. Jiminy Cricket'll harsh a mellow and that ain't no lie. If it takes self sabotage or self harm or, at last, self destruction to shut the little smug bastard up, we'll do it. Like a lot of Poe, I think this works (to the extend it does for you) because we recognize a lot of ourselves in Wil Wheaton, er, Will Wilson. Yes. Make it so.

Andrew M. Reichart

I'd love to see that 30-doppelganger audition waiting room in a horror movie. Such an uncanny image.

The Call of Cassandra

I liked this one best of all the stories this Poevember. Maybe because it did not involve torturing animals or bizarre horse-relationships. I figured out that the Doppleganger was some sort of split personality pretty quickly. The first major tip off was that the other kids at the boarding school did not find the similarities between them to be remarkable. It was clear to me then that we had an unreliable narrator. The card game where he was outed for cheating made it obvious. First with the lights going down so no one else could clearly see the Doppler. The coat being exactly the same was just a cherry on top. I also saw some nice Outsider action with the mirror at the end. I wonder if Lovecraft got the idea for the big shocking finish of that story from this Poe tale? Chad, you were wrong about Oceans 11 however. It was Brad Pitt who was teaching young movie stars how to play poker, not Clooney. He wasn't fleecing them either. He was not even playing in the games. He was straight up being paid to teach them. One of them wanted him to become incorporated so he could pay Pitt with a check and write it off on his taxes. OTOH, Clooney was entertaining his fellow cons at a New Jersey State Correctional Facility at the start of the movie.

H P Lovecraft's Cat

I just come to notice how much sexual innuendo revolved around the 2000 Florida recount .Hanging, Swinging, Pregnant or dimpled and Tri-Chad (a new sexuality) ,Thanks Chad!

Brandon Basil

HBO’s Barry did a great job of tackling that surreal feeling of walking into an audition lobby and being confronted with 25 versions of you all mumbling the same lines to themselves. The show is not lovecraftian in any way but enthralling and hilarious Television nonetheless.

Richard Horsman

Any thoughts on what English translation of Phantom you're going to use? I did some cursory research and it sounds like all the public domain ones are pretty bowdlerized/abridged. I just grabbed the Mirelle Ribiere one based on some Goodreads recs: it's the one Penguin commissioned for their classics line, which is usually a pretty solid version, in terms of both accuracy and style.

Mandy Reznor (She/It)

I really need to finally watch The (Lon Chaney) Phantom of the Opera. The full, corrected print is up on YouTube, after all...

Tara Murphy

I am always thrilled to hear Greig reading. That guy is brilliant.

Rafe Ball

Apropos of nothing in particular, have you guys checked out The August Derleth Literary Podcast with Chad Piper? His Dissembling Christopher Lee bit is hilarious!

Allison Albright

When I was a teenager I was pulled over for speeding. The cop ran my license, came back to my car and made me get out and sit in the back of his car. He explained that when he ran my license through their database, he got a hit for another Allison (also spelled with two L's) with my same last name, date of birth, and general description, who was reported as a runaway in Arizona. I had to convince him to call my mom to verify that I was who I said I was and that I had not run away. Years later, I was renewing my drivers license and had to assure the DMV worker that I was not this other Allison with my same date of birth who, by that time was too old to be a runaway, but had a DUI in Arizona. I don't mind having a doppelganger, but I really need for her to get her shit together.

Ryne Davis

I hope you guys will cover The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym some day. It is such a great novel, and Lovecraft borrowed a lot from it when writing At the Mountains of Madness.

OverfedHousecat

Spoiler for Black Swan I guess but the ending especially was pretty similar with the mirror stabbing and emphasis on the gravity of the realization at that point. Glad you mentioned Us as well, it's even got the creepy whispering voice!

David Azzageddi

My real family name is Farnell, which isn’t terribly common. (Azzageddi is a character from a rather obscure Melville novel, and I’m active in the Melville Society...anyway...) For decades I’ve been aware of a David Farnell who is also a university professor, but he’s a prof of religion at some small religious college. Every once in awhile I get an email someone meant to send to him, so I direct them to his page at the college’s website. But anyway, for a long time if I googled myself I was happy to see almost everything on the first page was me—papers I’d published, comments on sites about Lovecraft or Melville, etc. Then a few years ago that all changed. There was a pretty big story about an Australian couple who’d contracted a Thai woman to carry their child, but they refused to take the child when the poor kid was born with Downs Syndrome. This got even bigger as surrogate motherhood was illegal in Thailand. And THEN it was uncovered that the husband had served time for child rape. Of course, the name of this utter scumbag is David Farnell. Now if anyone searches my name, that’s what pops up more than anything else. It made me want to crawl into a hole.

David Azzageddi

Huh! I never noticed before the Glendinning in this story! The main character of Melville’s novel Pierre, written about a dozen years later, I think, is named Pierre Glendinning. And it’s a rather Poe-esque novel in some ways, with an aristocratic family falling from grace, discoveries of immoral family secrets, incest, and so on.

Andy O'Dowd

One of the creepiest doppelgängers for me was in the old Hammer House of Horror series shown in the UK in the 80s. The episode “The Two Faces of Evil” starts with a family heading down country Lanes on holiday (Ok,Ok vacation) in the pouring rain. They spot a hitchhiker wrapped up against the weather and give him a lift. He proceeds to creep them out, speaking only in grunts and eventually IIRC his hood is pulled back revealing him to be a doppelgänger of the father at the wheel of the car. The car crashes and the mother wakes up in hospital to find her son safe. It seems the doppelgänger was killed and it’s remarked how similar he looks to the father. The father has taken a wound to the throat and can only speak in grunts. As the story unfolds the mother begins to doubt the man in her house recovering is indeed her husband. There are a few very creepy moments and in the spirit of weird fiction there’s no attempt made to explain where the doppelgänger might have come from.

Martin Rundkvist

Evil Kid Month: a classic in this little genre is Saki's short stort "Sredni Vashtar" (1911 or earlier). Explains Wikipedia: *** "The story concerns a sickly ten-year-old boy named Conradin, who lives with his strict cousin and guardian, Mrs De Ropp. Conradin rebels against her and invents a new religion, idolising as a vengeful, merciless god a polecat–ferret he names Sredni Vashtar. Conradin keeps the ferret hidden in a cage in the garden shed, and worships it in secret. The story comes to a climax when his cousin discovers his god." *** https://www.classicshorts.com/stories/vashtar.html

Bag Of Coins

Chad and Chris (and Edgar Allan) pointed out how annoying it is to have name doppelgängers out there, but I consider dealing with the opposite circumstance alot more frustrating. My parents were hippies and gave me a very unique first name and we have a distinctly ethnic last name, so I am almost certainly the only person ever to bear my name or anything like it. While this has positive aspects, my parents did not foresee the advent of the internet and Google. My first and last names are so unique that search algorithms really single me out among the rest of the noise on the internet and anything remotely associated with me online is indexed and cross referenced directly to my name. As an example of what I mean, for almost my entire adult life if you Google my name, the top of the first page of search results shows my high school yearbook photo and there's no sign that's ever going to change (thanks, classmates.com, for immortalizing that difficult phase in my life without even asking me). Thank goodness I've never done anything really, REALLY bad in my life (and I've got to stay vigilant) but it can still be embarrassing. Long-forgotten interests, marginal associations, casual activities and events that I participated in long ago are prominently and disproportionately represented in search results. I also live with a low-grade, background terror that a sex offender with a similar name may pop up or someone with a grudge against me might leave objectionable material online under my name where potential employers, professional acquaintances, and romantic partners might find them some day. Because it's a very unique name and it'd be hard to deny. Interestingly, Poe captures something similar in the story when William Wilson tries to run away from his disgraced past but is constantly exposed wherever he goes (Paris, Rome, etc) by his doppelgänger. I know we're not supposed to sympathize with the dastardly protagonist, but maybe he wouldn't be such an a-hole if he wasn't always being thwarted by a tattletale he knew from middle school. I'm shamefully aware that this is a first-world problem, but most people should still be grateful that there are name doppelgängers out there running interference for them and giving plausible deniability on the internet, because a tiny fraction of us are not that lucky.