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Study 066 - The Rocking-Horse Winner (Patreon)

Published:
2023-11-09 17:32:10
Imported:
2026-06
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It's your lucky day! We're discussing The Rocking-Horse Winner by D.H. Lawrence and the odds are good you'll enjoy the ride!

Special thanks to our reader, George Woodruff of Full Throttle Sound. You can hear his COMPLETE READING of The Rocking-Horse Winner on the Full Throttle Sound Podcast.

Next up: Feedback, then some Vonnegut!

Comments

Ratchbox

Awesome episode! It was the first time in ages I've had a chance to read the story before listening, and it was a great story. It really stuck with me afterwards. Your talk of luck reminds me of the episode of Red Dwarf with the luck virus. It's a really interesting exploration of those concepts. Excellent work once again, gentlemen!

Ben Gilbert

We read this one in high school.

Jim Cannon

All I could think of while listening was Lisa and Homer watching football together.

Jim Cannon

I don't believe in the supernatural, but as someone who rolls polyhedrons in order to slay dragons, I totally believe in luck.

Steve

Indeed, Sherwood Forest is mostly not trees. That's because a forest, in the medieval sense, is an area set aside as a royal hunting ground. Even in the supposed time of Robin Hood, the wooded area was only 20 miles by 8 miles, and it contained many large open areas and was managed by its inhabitants. https://www.nottinghamshire.gov.uk/culture-leisure/country-parks/history-of-sherwood-forest-robin-hood-and-major-oak#:~:text=Medieval%20Sherwood%20was%20not%20%2D%20as%20many%20imagine%20%2D%20a%20continuous%20swathe%20of%20dense%20virgin%20forest.

Steve

Keeping up with the Joneses is such a staple of English culture, long before America gave us the expression.

Steve

In Larry Niven's Known Space universe, luck is genetic.

Steve

I thought it was Sean Bean in the TV adaptation of Lady Chatterley's Lover, as Mellors the game keeper. I'm sure if Chad could say "Brace yourself, M'Lady." in a Yorkshire accent, we'd not know the difference.

Adequately Excellent Entertainment

Chad: “… I could be Lady Chatterly…” Me: “Yes. Probably.” Chad: “…’s lover.” Me: “Wait, what?”

Erick W Mertz

Great episode! Recently, I sold a house and realtors staged one of the rooms as a nursery. Of course they added a rocking horse. It was the only “toy” included. I kept thinking about how everything they added was to achieve some desired affect, the rocking horse symbolic of youthful innocence.

Sweatin' to the Great Oldies

"The love of money is the root of all evil" Paul's mother might have remembered. Would she have also have remembered that the verse warns those who covet so will have "pierced themselves through with many sorrows"? She cannot love her children, but she does love money. She lives beyond her means and wants her windfall in one lump sum to afford an even swankier lifestyle. And - inadvertently, to be fair - pushes her son to kill himself trying to win enough. I don't think that Paul's mother is evil. But she does end up piercing herself through with many sorrows. Paul might have focused his attention on Bassett and Uncle Oscar who help him, are honest with him, and do not focus on maximizing their gain. But he didn't. Perhaps he couldn't. And he dies trying to fill an unfillable hole. I fear this story is less Strange and more familiar. And very, very sad.

Jeppe Mulich

As a new parent (my son turned nine months today), Chris' discussion of the unique horror of parentage hit right in the gut. Nobody warns you about these new anxieties before you have kids.

Eric S. Vallone, M.D.

EXCELLENT! Shades of English class. You two may have already brought these other stories up in the past, but also consider, “The Swimmer” and “The Enormous Radio” by John Cheever for future shows. Both are “weird” and the first achieves it with themes that are very open to interpretation, leaving much up to the reader. As good weird fiction tends to do.

Jeffrey Kahrs

Below find my detailed thesis on this story

Jeffrey Kahrs

Safe at Any Speed by Larry Niven is about a future where humans have been bred for luck

Nic Wassell

Great to hear mention of Intacto - I film I loved and then completely forgot about and then randomly remembered just a couple of weeks ago. I think you're slightly off in the description of the Federico character. It's not that he's got different luck-removing powers than Max Von Sydow, but that they all can take luck from each other depending on their level of luck/power. So Federico can take it from regular punters but Max, being more powerful can take it from Federico. That's why none of the 'lucky' people want to touch each other (and it seems a taboo to do so) but they embrace and touch the poor people - who get a few euros for their trouble - to drain the last dregs of luck from them before a challenge on the 'luck circuit'. It's a very clever film I think and one that's been somewhat forgotten about - possibly the most heartbreaking moment in it involves the realisation that one of the main characters unwittingly stole the luck from her husband and child when she unconsciously reached out for them moments before a car crash, leading her to be the only survivor. Pus it has Max von Sydow one of the greatest actors in the world so what's not to like :)

Crom Thews

I rather enjoyed the short-lived television show Strange Luck from the 90's. It's possible I just have lousy taste, but I would love to watch them again to see if it had any legs.

Mike Ring

This sounded awful familiar. I came here to look for other commenters saying you released an old episode or something. I even checked the spreadsheet, but no D.H. Lawrence. Decided I might be going insane, because I'd definitely heard this story before.... oh, thank goodness, it was on Pseudopod last year.

Eric - Speaker in Digressions

Frieda was a daughter of a "Baron von Richthofen"?! So that made me do a Google, whereupon I learned that, while her dad was not Manfred "the Red Baron" von Richthofen, part of the reason the Lawrences were suspected of being German spies was that she was a distant cousin of the flying ace. A profile of Frieda on a "women of Taos" website also says that their neighbors in coastal Cornwall believed their hanging laundry contained coded messages to German U-Boats. I can see how having that kind of neighbor would get tiresome. Another fun fact is that Frieda's older sister Else was a prominent social scientist who was a student of Max Weber and racked up an impressive number of extramarital affairs worthy of a D.H. Lawrence novel.

Professor Murder

A great story with a fascinating inversion of the parent/child dynamic. The child sacrificing for the happiness of their mother. Dark ending all told.

REO Jackwagon

As Jack Nicholson's George Anderson said in Easy Rider, " Here's to ole DH Lawrence. YEEEEEEEEAH!" This one really hit me. We grew up quite poor and even as a small child, the shortage of money and the lengths we had to stretch everything was a constant presence. I had more good Christmases than I deserved and carry a lot of guilt about it. In the present, I've done quite well and my wife is a powerful professional, but I still chafe a bit when she books us a fancy BnB or super nice hotel, and this story really summoned that palpable sense of the edge of poverty and feeling that if I could just solve that, our little family of myself and my mother and sister could finally be happy. Such an effective story.

Aaron La Vene

This was possibly the best story we have heard in a long time. Just the story as itself. And a great episode along with it to boot. I gotta go read it . Like tomorrow while I’m on vacation in Costa Rica. Im gonna sit at the pool tomorrow and read this story and possibly cry about it itself, children, society, and everything this story is discussing . Someone will ask me why im crying . “I just wish the world didn’t need boys riding rocking chairs for their mothers” I don’t know what’s gonna happen after that statement. Should be interesting

Ryan Fahey

To Chris’s comment, Intacto is an amazing movie, I would encourage people to check it out.

Jack Saul

Isn't the point of the story that the idea of luck is BS? The little boy's power is that he can see the future not that he has supernatural luck, but because his mother is obsessed with the concept of luck, that's how he interprets what he's doing, and it kills him as he desperately tries to reach the unachievable category of "lucky person" One is also put in mind of the Ancient Greek maxim of "call no man fortunate until he is buried" the family's luck here is highly slippery: up £80,000 but down a son.

It's a Ghost.

Was the mother not happy when she read the letter because she was unhappy she wasn't getting the full £5,000 all at once? If so, yikes!

KateSherrod

Paul experienced prescience by riding a weird steed... did the Spice flow from David Herbert Lawrence to Frank Herbert?

Dave Parfitt

Writing from an alternate timeline here: just like House, MD was loosely based on Sherlock Holmes, Doogie Howser, MD was based on Doogifer Howserlandshire Lawrence.

MonsterTalk

You know how people go into houses looking for ghosts and skeptics are all like "what a waste of time, GHOSTS aren't real!" Yet at the same time... we all sure spend a lot of time trying to gain "economic security" don't we? #FeelingLikeAHypocrite

Lars Backstrom

This story was dramatised in a British TV series from the 1970s of horror stories. I do not remember the TV version as being as good as the story, as the element of greed was taken away, and it was just turned into a family drama.

Beanz

Edit: This comment was meant for this story, not the other 🤦‍♀️ This episode would have *messed me up* 4 years ago. The story resonates with childhood guilt that turned into adolescent goals that then became adult obligations. And then it does a triple sow cow because the child dies in the process of succeeding in his goals. I could write an entire autobiographical essay on this but I just wanted to say I'm grateful that you did this story. I'm going to sit this on my imaginary triggers-mental-anguish-from-my-childhood bookshelf, next to "The Metamorphosis" by Kafka.

Moonflight Dancer

In the words of a young HPL, who lived in a financially troubled household in the shadow of a decaying aristocracy - "Enough to pay for anything but the death of his sister."