Like SessionsX, this is another anthology podcast I found through Knifepoint Horror episode notes. What a thing to stumble onto… My expectations of the universe are reasonable: maybe four or five stories narrated by Soren Narnia a year. Here’s a cache of like fifteen. Incredible.
Anyway, in stanning the narrator, I’m neglecting the authors; Emma and Matt Fradd. Their work here is top notch. Just classic, pared back stories of people helplessly colliding with the unknown and stalked by the unknowable.
Something I think they evoke particularly well is a palpable sense of location. The towns and buildings these stories inhabit have a real sense of space. More than just texture, this is the bedrock for a certain style of horror; the place you shouldn’t enter, the thing that follows you out, the room you can’t leave… all reliant on delineated and sufficiently differentiated places. The Fradds adeptly deploy safe-ish places with limited vantage points. A car pulls up to a darkened drive-through, a back garden is seen from a kitchen window, a neighbour’s house is visible from a comfy porch. The instant tension of these unsustainable sanctuaries (The Fradds know what we’re here for) is where Sibling Horror distinguishes itself from Knifepoint’s more incremental descent into horror. In Soren’s own stories, while his narrator is sometimes trapped scrabbling or hidden in claustrophobic moments, more often than not he seems compelled towards trouble that reveals itself over weeks or years. Here, it tends to be thrust upon him in a moment. Transgressions played out over hours or days if delayed at all.
I was also really taken with the the darkly surreal edge to some of these stories. How often are the strange tales you listen to genuinely strange? A standout, genuinely uncomfortable early episode arrives with a cosy, Alvin Schwartz style setup only to lurch like a false awakening into something as cold and disorientating as a Thomas Ligotti vignette. Another takes a setup not too dissimilar from a classic Loony Tunes cartoon, and lets a failure of acceptance lead to absolute ruination. The indefinable becomes the unarguable, which in turn becomes the inescapable.
These stories have also been collected as a paperback anthology, and I’m really looking forward to picking it up (roll on, pay day). They’re worth revisiting, and I’m curious as to how different they’ll feel when disentangled from the voice of someone whose work I’ve been listening to for years. That the Fradds have created something distinctive even with a voice so familiar is testament to the quality on display in their podcast.