Launch Day – The PseudoPod Tapes 2 – Approach with Caution

If you are not already familiar with Escape Artists horror podcast you should check it out. The whole Escape Artists podcast family is professionally put together and brings great stories and fabulous narration right to your ears!

For the horror podcast, Alasdair Stuart is the host and this is the second volume of his outro essays, in this case covering 2013.

Alasdair is a gem of genre journalism, as anyone who reads his newsletter The Full Lid, or our own, Not the Fox News will be familiar. He is a veritable geekpedia of knowledge, mixed with a rare openness that makes his writing extremely personal.

We are delighted to welcome the tentacled horrors of PseudoPod and their host back to Fox Spirit.

Ebook is available now from our own store and will be appearing on amazon worldwide as we speak, the print edition will be available from Monday. 

 

The Pseudopod Tapes Volume 2 : Approach with Caution

Pseudopod Tapes 2 : Approach with Caution by Alasdair Stuart
Cover by Jonathan Chaffin

Alasdair Stuart, host of the Pseudopod podcast, part of the Escape Artists group, is back with a second volume of outros. 

Opening Paragraphs of Pseudopod Tapes Volume 2

Capital Ghosts

(This essay first appeared on Pseudopod Episode 315, Bad Company by Walter De La Mare, read by Paul Jenkins. Due to an accident of scheduling, this episode actually ran on March 18th 2013 but is included here because this was its originally intended position)

London has a gravitational pull. As someone not so much Northern as one part Northern, one part Celto-Viking I push against that good and hard, but it’s true. The first time I was in London was a family holiday, delayed and removed from our usual venue of York by a family bereavement. It was a cultural bank raid; in, see some things, out, in a long weekend.

I think, with the benefit of hindsight, it changed my life. I mean, look at some of the things I got to do.

I had a whole hotel room to myself.

I stayed up past 9.

PM.

And there were still TV programs on.

I watched Jonathan Ross.

He had Norman Lovett from Red Dwarf on.

They swore.

IT WAS AMAZING.

Revisited : The Pseudopod Tapes Vol 1

In 2012 Alasdair Stuart collected his outro’s for horror podcast Pseudopod into a book sub titled ‘Not the end of the World, just the end of the Year.’ It’s a collection that showcases Alasdair’s deep genre knowledge and his very personal and honest style of journalism.

FINALAMZPSeudoTapesVol1

Pseudopod Tapes by Alasdair Stuart
Cover Art by S.L. Johnson

‘Not the end of the world, just the end of the year’

Alasdair Stuart, one of the UK’s most knowledgeable and passionate genre journalists has finally decided to do a book. And not just any book, he’s not just offering up his in depth genre gems for your delectation, it’s better than that.

In the Pseudopod Tapes, Alasdair gathers a years worth of outro’s from one of the worlds leading horror podcasts and collects them all together for you in this volume. Stuart hosts Pseudopod with a sharp wit, clear insight, tremendous honesty and warm humour. It translates extremely well to the page.

‘Alasdair Stuart, host of the must listen Pesudopod just became a must read!’ -Steven Savile

If You Like Books Vol 1 :  Stuart acknowledges that the zombies scratching at your door might be real or imagined, but if you don’t escape them they will eat you alive. The goosebumps and raised-hairs on the back of your neck might just be an evolutionary quirk, or they might be the very thing that keeps you safe from the monsters under the bed.

BFS reviews : Each little piece is a gem: insightful and intelligent, and I often find myself re-evaluating a story, or examining my own opinions or my whole life, based on Alasdair’s little snippets of wisdom

Opening Paragraphs

Sunday in the Park With Bruce

(Originally appeared on episode 264, January 13th 2012, A Study in Flesh and Mind by Liz Argall)

Let’s talk about comics for a minute. Grant Morrison, Scottish comics writer to some, electric wizard of the post human post millennium new fiction zeitgeist to others, is engaged in an interesting experiment with his current work on Batman. Morrison is telling a multi-year story, across multiple titles, exploring the character from every possible angle as he delves deeper not only into the psyche of a man who dresses like a flying rodent to frighten poor people, but also into the nature of fiction and fictional reality. He’s done this before, the fiction suit idea toyed with in The Invisibles for one, but he’s rarely done it in more detail and at more length than he has with his Batman work. Batman is, after all, a man with a lot more history and life experience than pretty much everyone reading him. To borrow a quote from another Scot, and horribly mangle it, Batman and Gotham City, his home has been mapped out of obscurity into street by street reality.

Don’t believe me? There is a map of Gotham City, initially designed for the No Man’s Land story years ago which has now been modified and adopted by the Christopher Nolan-directed Batman movies and the Tracy Hickman written novel, Wayne of Gotham. A fictional city is not only mapped down to individual blocks, that map is carrying across different media. Morrison talks, a lot, about fictional reality and is on record as saying he believes the DC universe is sentient and it’s only a matter of time before we make first contact. He’s been saying that for a few years now, and whilst I think if we ever do make fictional contact it’ll be with a certain madman in a blue box, but I can see his point. After all, Gotham City is now the same across three media. It’s growing, extruding, reaching out, the amalgamated geography of hundreds of creative teams’ work, a city made of stories, gleaming in the early morning light. A model ecosystem made of fiction.

But where does the model end and the art begin?

The Pseudopod Tapes Volume 1

FINALAMZPSeudoTapesVol1

Pseudopod Tapes by Alasdair Stuart
Cover Art by S.L. Johnson

‘Not the end of the world, just the end of the year’

Alasdair Stuart, one of the UK’s most knowledgeable and passionate genre journalists has finally decided to do a book. And not just any book, he’s not just offering up his in depth genre gems for your delectation, it’s better than that.

In the Pseudopod Tapes, Alasdair gathers a years worth of outro’s from one of the worlds leading horror podcasts and collects them all together for you in this volume. Stuart hosts Pseudopod with a sharp wit, clear insight, tremendous honesty and warm humour. It translates extremely well to the page.

‘Alasdair Stuart, host of the must listen Pesudopod just became a must read!’ -Steven Savile

Buy this book

Reviews

If You Like Books Vol 1 :  Stuart acknowledges that the zombies scratching at your door might be real or imagined, but if you don’t escape them they will eat you alive. The goosebumps and raised-hairs on the back of your neck might just be an evolutionary quirk, or they might be the very thing that keeps you safe from the monsters under the bed.

BFS reviews : Each little piece is a gem: insightful and intelligent, and I often find myself re-evaluating a story, or examining my own opinions or my whole life, based on Alasdair’s little snippets of wisdom