Grimoire of Horror, Volume 3

0:02 Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

0:12 Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

0:16 And I am Joe McCormick.

0:18 And you are joining us for Grimoire of Horror, Volume 3. If you're wondering what this is, well, over the years here on Stuff to Blow Your Mind, We get into the Halloween spirit, of course. We tend to devote an entire month to all sorts of Halloween-y content. And for a while now, we've done Halloween episodes that kind of pick from assorted tales of one sort or another and sort of sift through them and find things that are interesting to talk about, be it scientific or purely cultural, or maybe it's just about what the story is and what it's saying. And so at one point, we did a series of episodes based on different creepypastas Then Joe and I turned to doing TV horror anthology episodes for

1:00 a number of years. And then we started a new tradition, one that sticks to shorter horror works, horror short stories, but also gets us back into the written word. Because I know a lot of our listeners from the old days missed the summer reading episodes that we did. We haven't done those in a number of years. So this seems like a sort of meet you halfway sort of thing.

1:20 We're going to talk about some spooky tales, but in doing so, we're going to talk about written fiction and, you know, feel free to go out and read them and then come back. Treat it like a little book club. And then if you have different thoughts about the stories or additional thoughts about the stories, write in and we'll chat about that in future episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind Listener Mail.

1:38 You know, doing horror short stories on Halloween still can feel like summer reading because it is quite often still hot on Halloween these days. Yeah, absolutely.

1:47 Yeah, so yeah, depending on where you are in the world and if you're certainly in the American South, yeah, it can still feel like summer. It is summer as far as the the skin temperature goes. Now, I do want to add a quick note regarding last year's episode. Last year's episode, which is actually going to rerun this weekend, my pick for that one was Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, a rather dark story about humanity conquered by AI. It's just as, if not more dark this year than last year, if you read it or hear us talk about it. And I want to briefly recommend another story as a chaser for that one.

2:24 1909's The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster. I listened to the new audiobook version of this performed by actress Carey Mulligan on a road trip several months back. And this is a story about humanity breaking free from AI. It feels very contemporary. It does not feel like a nearly 100-year-old work. And in fact, the other people in the car with me, uh, were not familiar with the story and did not realize until it was all over. And I told them that, oh yeah, this was written in 1909.

3:00 This was written in a pre-computer age.

3:02 Now I haven't read that one, but I think it's come up at least in passing on the show before is the premise basically that humankind becomes overly dependent on machines and even thinking machines. And that leads to some kind of collapse. Yeah. Yeah.

3:17 It deals with the collapse and the emergence. And, uh, Yeah, it's rather good. And I really like this particular audiobook treatment of it as well. So if you're into audiobooks, look for it wherever you get your audiobooks.

3:31 The downsides of over-dependence on AI are something I'm thinking about more and more every day. Not just all of the standard externalities that people talk about with the AI industry, but really thinking about what it's doing to us to have a tool this powerful and this easily accessed that can basically be your brain for you. It's a little more troubling the more I witness.

4:02 Yeah, absolutely agree. So I do recommend that story. And if you're not interested in any of that sort of thing at all, well, we've got good news for you because neither story that we picked this year has anything to do with artificial intelligence.

4:16 Yes.

4:17 And so I think we have a couple of nice stories. As is often the case, we select these stories independently. You go out and you select one. I go out and select one. We don't really compare notes until we've made our picks. But there's always something about the two that lines up. And this year, the accidental theme seems to be curious short horror stories by authors not known for being horror writers. Yep.

4:40 Yep. Both of these stories feel like they're not from... primarily horror authors, and they feel like an experiment of sorts. But I think in both cases, a very enjoyable and successful one. Absolutely.

4:54 Well, which one should we do first?

4:56 Either way. Cool.

4:58 Well, mine's up first in the notes, so I guess I can just roll into that one. Okay. My selection for this year is Jorge Luis Borges' 1975 short story, There Are More Things.

5:12 That comes from the Shakespeare quote.

5:14 Yeah, absolutely. This is from the Hamlet quote, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. But here it's abbreviated and I feel has a nice ominous weight to it. There are more things as opposed to putting the stress on the more.

5:31 Oh, and I just now made this connection, but I like how it attaches to something that happens at the climax of the story where the hero sees not a monster, but sees its things. That's true.

5:42 That's another nice connection. So in talking about Jorge Luis Borges, we're, of course, talking about the legendary Argentine fabulist who lived 1899 through 1987. He's come up many times in the show before because in his various fictions, he explores a number of areas of interest here on Stuff to Blow Your Mind. So infinities, dreams, books and libraries, mazes and labyrinths, tigers and knives. And then they're generally just really good little stories. Often, very often, they feel like experiments. And many of his stories do contain elements that you might see in a horror story. You know, existential dread, haunted blades, the rending of reality in one way or another. But it would be a huge stretch to really describe any

6:33 of them as horror stories. Generally, I think of them as little clockwork curiosities. You know, you pick one up. you take a look at it, you set it down, then you pick it up again, hold it in the light a different way. And you're like, oh, now I see this detail on it. But yeah, they're very much kind of like little creative academic experiments. Yeah.

6:57 A lot of Borges stories feel more like a narrativized thought experiment than the way we usually think of stories. I mean, Not in every case, but a lot of his stories don't go super deep on characterization or plot. They are more about exploring a singular strange idea. Yeah.

7:17 And that's certainly present in this story as well. But this one is, if you were going to classify any Borges story as a horror story, it would have to be this one. It would have to be There Are More Things. This story is dedicated, quote, to the memory of H.P.

7:31 Lovecraft.

7:32 So yes, it is Borges writing a work of intentionally Lovecraftian fiction. Lovecraft, of course, lived 1890 through 1937, and this is a much later story. You'll find this one in the Collected Fictions, published by Penguin and translated into English by Andrew Hurley. I have a copy of it right here. There's a matching book of his poetry as well.

7:59 But you will also find this story in its original collection, 1975's The Book of Sand, That translation, which you'll still find out there floating around in digital and physical forms, is by Norman Thomas DiGiovanni. The title tale in that, The Book of Sand, is also pretty tremendous. Now, I want to stress, though, if you've never read a Borges story before, I don't necessarily think this should be the first one. I'm not saying it's bad or anything, but there are stories like The Circular Ruins or The Library of Babel that are just so awesome and are just pure Borges that I would highly suggest seeking those out first.

8:40 And again, most of his stories are pretty short. So very, very small time commitment to any of them, at least, you know, talking about the first time you read them. But yeah, this is a great, this is still a great story. But it is kind of interesting how if you read the afterward to the 1975 collection, The Book of Sand, Borges himself is kind of dismissive of there are more things. He basically says, look, I was always more of a Poe fan anyway, but it was kind of inevitable that I would write a Lovecraftian story at some point. And then he writes, quote, at last I gave in. The lamentable result is titled, There Are More Things.

9:21 Well, he's being hard on himself there. Again, I don't think it's lamentable, but I can see why he might say it's inevitable that he ends up in Lovecraft territory again. there is a shared interest in infinities, in the witnessing of incomprehensible things. From the same types of phenomena that Lovecraft draws pure terror, Borges usually draws wonder and amazement and some degree of fright also.

9:51 Yeah, yeah, I think that's a good point. And yeah, I think Borges in general tended to be highly critical of his.

9:59 Of his own work.

10:01 You know, he would he would often say things that were like, oh, well, you know, I only see the flaws when I look back at them, you know, and and that's the way he would tend to play it. But but yeah, I did. I did find, I think, a 78 interview article. in which he mentions that he liked Lovecraft's stories, though enjoyed the plots more than the style.

10:21 And so, yeah, the style here is definitely, you definitely identify it as a Borges story as you're reading it. Yeah, I feel the same way about Lovecraft's writing. Like when you're reading Lovecraft, you know it's Lovecraft, or you know it's somebody pretending to be Lovecraft.

10:35 Yes, and though you can see the Lovecraftian shape of what he's trying to do here, it is very much Borges' own style, especially in that it has understated humor in it. There's more of a sense of irony than we usually get in Lovecraft. I mean, I think Lovecraft did write some humorous stories, but not usually.

10:52 Yeah, I'm blanking on remembering a single example of his humor, though it may be in there somewhere. I tend to think of some of his contemporaries as having a little bit more of a sense of humor, like Clark Ashton Smith.

11:06 But there's definitely humor in this story.

11:10 Yeah, absolutely.

11:11 Yes, absolutely.

11:22 All right, well, let's go ahead and get into the plot on this one. So we're going to have some spoilers here. So if you want to experience this story raw and unspoiled, now's the time to pause, go out, find a copy, read it. It's like six pages long, so it won't take you long. You can literally just pause everything and come back.

11:40 Yeah. I'm going to give a similar warning before my segment later.

11:43 Yeah. All right. So the story here concerns an unnamed Argentinian academic. who, as he's completing his studies at the University of Texas in Austin, receives word that his uncle Edwin Arnett has died back home in Argentina. And already early in the story, we do get this nice little passage here where the narrator says, quote, I felt what we always feel when someone dies, the sad awareness now futile of how little it would have cost us to have been more loving. One forgets that one is a dead man conversing with dead men. So I really like that.

12:23 It dips a little bit into the essence of grief as well as into the contemplation of time, which is going to come up again later on in the tale.

12:32 I like also how this statement blends some sentimental tenderness with a kind of fatalistic irony. It's a little bit embracing and a little bit casting off as well. Yeah, yeah.

12:45 So the narrator reflects a little bit on the nature of Uncle Arnett. It doesn't sound like they were super close, but he had spent some time with him when he was younger, visiting him in this kind of suburb of Buenos Aires known as Tordera, which Borges describes as being kind of like a lonely, boring place. I have no idea what it is actually like in reality, especially today, but that seems to be his basic read on it.

13:13 He describes it as being a place sort of between the city and the wilderness, you know.

13:18 Yeah.

13:19 So that it's a place that's reasonably close to Buenos Aires, but that, you know, he describes the swampland and the forest and the mountains around. Yeah.

13:27 And that seemed to be the big attraction for Uncle Arnett. Red House is situated like on this hill overlooking some swamplands. And so he was able to find a great deal of solitude in this place. Yeah. And the narrator reflects fondly on Uncle Arnett's various interests in philosophy, particularly immaterialism, his interest in theology, and in the works of British mathematician Charles Howard Hinton, who lived 1853 through 1907, concerning the fourth dimension. Hinton comes up in a few different Borges stories and also in H.P. Lovecraft's own The Shadow Out of Time from 1935. This is the guy who coined the term tesseract for a four-dimensional hypercube.

14:14 You know, I don't know that much about Hinton, so I don't know how generally valid his work is considered to be. But the way it's presented in the story, it's as if the narrator is talking about Uncle Arnett's interest in cranks that he liked that he likes pursuing and understanding theologies and philosophies that are not necessarily there to be agreed with or to be understood as correct descriptions of the world, but he just wants to get into some kind of esoteric system and figure out what it's about.

14:50 Yeah. Yeah. I think he's described as himself being an agnostic. Um, but, but yeah, he's very interested in theologies. Yeah. Um, So he would share these various ideas with his young nephew. And, oh, he also kept a big sheepdog named Samuel Johnson. Yeah. That'll become important later on as well. So our narrator here, he returns to Argentina in 1921. And Red House, by this point, the home of the late Uncle Arnett, has been auctioned off. It's been auctioned off to a foreigner by the name of Max Pretorius. Hmm.

15:27 Dr. Septimus Pretorius?

15:28 Exactly. I was looking into this a little bit. There may be some other connection in, like, deeper Borges lore, but it does seem to be, at least in part, a nod to Bride of Frankenstein.

15:38 Amazing.

15:40 So Pretorius, this mysterious Max Pretorius, proceeds to have everything in the house just thrown out. So, like, the books, you know, I think the furniture as well, just everything must go. And then he also... goes to the house's architect, a close friend of the late Uncle Arnett by the name of Alexander Muir. And he requests, quote, certain changes to the house. And Muir just flatly refuses. We'll find out later. It's just like terribly insulted by these ideas that are brought to him and says, no, absolutely not.

16:17 I won't do it. And so Pretorius has to turn to a firm from Buenos Aires to do the changes. And then local carpenters flatly refuse to do the work. So outside laborers are brought in to take care of that as well. Yeah.

16:31 So wants to make some changes to the house and the first line of recruits find them highly objectionable. Yes.

16:38 And so Borges writes, and this and all the quotes that I'm sharing are from the Hurley translation. He writes, quote, and it was by night that the new resident of Red House took up his habitation. The windows were never opened anymore. But through the darkness one could make out cracks of light. One morning the milkman came upon the body of a sheepdog, decapitated and mutilated on the walk.

17:01 That winter the Norfolk pines were cut down. No one ever saw Pretorius again. He apparently left the country soon after.

17:10 So he comes in, he has the house changed in secretive ways. We don't know what he changed exactly, but something was done inside it. Then he leaves, but there's a new resident there. Right. And dogs are losing their heads.

17:24 Yeah, yeah. He seems to have viciously mutilated a dog as well. And I think that, well, this is something I think that becomes apparent in subsequent rereadings, but it's like the changes that he made inside the house are tantamount to mutilating a dog, like in terms of what has been changed. So the narrator is disturbed by everything he's heard about this, but He's also very curious. And, Joe, I know you really love this aspect of the character.

17:55 Do you want to talk a little bit about the other curiosities in his life that leading up to this moment?

18:02 Oh, sure. Well, actually, I was thinking about this in the context of differences between Lovecraft's approach to this sort of story and Borges'. And one of these differences is in the characterization of the narrator or protagonist. So, Listeners probably know that I am always a fan of a weird, obsessive narrator, especially when they don't seem to understand how unusual they are. This is one of my favorite things about Moby Dick by Herbert Melville. It's the indirect characterization of Ishmael through what he chooses to observe and things he talks about and focuses on. And it's not that Ishmael and Moby Dick is insane or irrational or anything.

18:47 but that he just doesn't seem to be aware of exactly how weird he is and doesn't realize the extent to which he is just constantly on one, as they say. And this story is kind of like that, too, in a more compact way. The narrator has this understated way of revealing his own eccentricities, and that's one of my favorite things about it. So there's a passage where He says, I know that I'm notorious for my curiosity, which has variously led me into marriage with a woman utterly unlike myself, solely that I might discover who she was and what she was really like, into trying laudanum with no appreciable result, into an exploration of transfinite numbers, and into the terrifying adventure whose story I am about to tell. So that's

19:40 how he says he became interested in this matter. But the choice of those three details, the marriage to somebody who he's not compatible with just out of curiosity, trying laudanum, which he says didn't do anything for him.

19:55 What?

19:56 Like, is his body chemistry unusual? And then transfinite numbers.

20:01 Yeah. And it sounds like the third is the most troubling in his past. Like, yeah, and then I got into theoretical mathematics and woof. I got it a little over my head there. Not so much the hard drugs and the marrying somebody out of like academic curiosity. Yeah.

20:16 So Rob, you can correct me if I'm wrong here, because I think you've read more Lovecraft than I have, but I think this is not typical of Lovecraft's investigator style protagonists, which this would be an example in the Borges story too, right?

20:31 Yeah.

20:31 Yeah.

20:31 That's my memory that Lovecraftian narrators, main characters, they tend to be presented as highly rational, made irrational eventually by some level of exposure to the unseen world or the true horrible nature of reality. There may be something curious in their backstory, but if they are presented like pre-horror, they are generally presented as like the most rational man you could hope to meet. Right.

21:00 They're not eccentric weirdos to begin with, at least certainly not in the stories I'm thinking of, like Call of Cthulhu or Mountains of Madness. There, I think of the protagonists as kind of thinly characterized, but just straightforward intellectuals, people who display, people who are skeptical observers that can, by being kind of uninteresting skeptical observers, can lend credibility to the amazing things they witness.

21:25 Yeah, I think that's spot on. There may be a few exceptions to that rule where there's some sort of big twist. But by and large, that's true. Whereas Borges, yeah, he's typically the sort of writer who will do a whole story about a guy who is obsessed with something generally to the degree of like monomaniacal obsession, just all consuming obsession. Yeah.

21:46 And so that's one thing I really like about the story is that it's not dwelt upon much, but the narrator is himself quite strange before any of the supernatural weirdness kicks in. Yeah.

21:59 And so now he's hooked, though. He has to know more about what's happening with Red House and whatever lives there. So he seeks out that architect, that friend of his late uncle, Alexander Muir. And Muir tells him, yeah, this whole deal is real disturbing. He mentions that Pretorius had wanted him to tear down the house and construct an abomination in its place. But then he can't get a lot more out of him. So the narrator then heads out onto the street here in this house. this small suburban town. He runs into an old friend, and this friend is also spooked by the house. I think his horse is spooked by the house. And then he has a strange dream about a minotaur sleeping within a stone labyrinth. Quote,

22:43 but dreaming of what or of whom? He then ventures out to the town of Glue to chat with a carpenter who worked, one of the outside laborers brought in to work on the renovations inside of Red House. And this guy describes it just as outrageous work. He only did it for the money and then he'd never set foot in Red House again.

23:04 One interesting difference that the narrator highlights between the original architect who refused to do the renovations and this guy who came in to make the new furniture and do the renovations is sort of how. I don't know, scrutinizing. They were like the original guy is portrayed as, as a real, like strict guy. You know, he's very strict in his theology. He has theological objections to like building a church. Uh, like he's a certain type of Protestant and he refuses to work on a Catholic church. And so he's like got rigid standards, uh, about what he believes.

23:39 And so from his point of view, the work on the new house is implied to be sacrilegious in some way, but they never get into details about why. Whereas this other guy, the new architect or carpenter they go to, just seems like he doesn't pay a lot of attention to things. At one point he looks at the narrator's card and he gets interested in saying the words PhD after his name as if maybe he doesn't know what that means. But then the narrator also says that he thinks this guy mistook him for a lawyer, which is why he was so quick to hand over documents and papers about the work he had done. So it seems like the second guy is just like, I didn't see anything.

24:20 I don't know what I'm looking at. I don't know. I don't. It doesn't matter to me. Yeah.

24:24 But he seemed to agree that it was outrageous.

24:26 There was something.

24:27 This was not normal. So our narrator continues to keep finding the Red House on his walks. So he's still hanging out in the general vicinity of the Red House and he'll he'll just be on a walk and then he'll see it. He's just he's drawn to it. all the while contemplating the mysteries of time. Quote, that infinite web of yesterday, today, the future, forever, never. And then, it's in the summer, a summer storm sweeps in on one of his walks, and seeking shelter, he finds himself once more right next to Red House. And so he ventures through the gate, which is unlocked, through the door, which has been blown open. And inside, the narrator discovers a largely empty but rather alien habitat, one that reminds

25:17 me a little bit of the liminal spaces in the 2026 movie Back Rooms, that sort of vibe. And it's the last six paragraphs of the whole story where the narrator experiences the house. And I'm going to resist the strong urge to just read those six paragraphs. Instead, I'm just going to summarize some of the things that he sees.

25:43 So first of all, pitiless white light. I think this is the main thing that made me think of back rooms. Just pitiless white light. There's no atmospheric lighting, no use of lamps. It's like everything is just bright.

25:55 Overhead fluorescence. Yeah. He doesn't say that, but that's the feeling you get.

25:59 That's the feeling, yeah. Also large ruinous rooms. So that makes me think that like whole walls have been removed and like the entire first floor is just like open space.

26:11 Yeah, like almost like it doesn't need to be nice inside the house anymore. Now it's just a space to contain some things.

26:18 Yeah. And those things, that's where it gets even more interesting. He describes scattered pieces of furniture, but pieces, he almost hesitates to call them furniture. He can't comprehend them because they were clearly not designed for human bodies and not knowing what the bodies are like that they are designed for.

26:39 these things lack any meaning to him. A quote, in order truly to see a thing, one must first understand it.

26:47 I like this part. He kind of goes on a tangent, but he talks about how, you know, the passenger on the ship does not really see the rigging on the ship. Only the crew does. You know, the passenger might be able to see it with their eyes, but they don't see it in a way that that has meaning or recognition.

27:05 And in the same way, he could see what these he could see that these objects were there, but he couldn't really see them because he couldn't understand what they were for. Yeah.

27:14 So instead, these forms just inspire horror and revulsion. He finds a ladder and he's he's relieved to find a ladder because it's a weird ladder like the it's like it's iron. It's the spacing between the rungs is weird and But at least it's identifiable as a ladder and he knows how to use it. So he climbs up to the next floor of Red House. And here he observes more troubling objects, more alien furniture, including this one, quote, a long U-shaped piece of furniture like an operating table, very high with circular openings at the extremes. It occurred to me that this might be the bed used by the resident of the house whose monstrous anatomy is was revealed obliquely by this object in much the way the

28:01 anatomy of an animal or a God may be known by the shadow it casts.

28:09 So is this a tube? It's a, it's a, because it says it has circular openings at the extremes. Do you, are you picturing an enclosed tube?

28:17 Ooh, maybe that is more what he meant. Um, my reading and perhaps misreading was, I imagined it being kind of flat, but having, um, these two apertures at either end, kind of like what you put your face through on a massage table.

28:32 Okay. That makes sense.

28:33 But, um, but yeah, it could be, it could be supposed to, maybe I'm supposed to be imagining a tube instead. Uh, I could see either, either possibility being troubling because again, you try and imagine like what kind of body is going to interact with this in any way. If it's a bed, if it's a bath, whatever it is, like what is it supposed to do?

28:54 Yeah.

28:55 And we'll come back to this, but he says that it reminds him of Lucan's description of something called the Amphisbina, a mythological creature. And we'll get back to what this means here in a bit.

29:09 Basically a snake with heads on both sides.

29:11 Yeah, like a snake that also has a head on its tail. Not to say that the creature is that, but that's the closest thing. The only thing that even makes any sense is a nonsense animal out of... like medieval heraldry and the myths of antiquity. There's also a line where he says, I also recall a V of mirrors that faded into the shadows above. Again, that kind of leaves the reader to sort of try and piece together what that could possibly look like or mean. But then we get to some really great cosmic horror. So he says, what must the inhabitant of this house be like?

29:51 What must it be seeking here on this planet, which must have been no less horrible to it than to us? From what secret regions of astronomy of time, from what ancient and now incalculable twilight had it reached this South American suburb and this precise night?

30:09 Why us? Why here?

30:10 Yeah. And I like the idea, like this kind of offhand comment that, like, we find this world troubling. Like, how troubling is it to an outsider, you know? And then why is it, and that implies, why is it suffering to be here?

30:25 I like that.

30:26 There's a lot, just some sparse lines here, but you can really read into them. And so he's just lost in contemplation of this strange place. And then suddenly the rain stops outside. He realizes that it's 2 a.m., which there are different ways of looking at that. Either he's lost all sense of time in here, time is weird in here, or he was taking a walk at like 1.30 a.m. or something, which kind of goes back to his weirdness you know, pre-encounter. So it could be any of those things. Yeah.

30:57 But his weirdness and specifically his curiosity pre-existing this encounter will come into play at the very last lines. Yes.

31:06 The last lines are, quote, my feet were just touching. So he decides to come down the ladder to the lower floor. He says, my feet were just touching the next to last rung when I heard something coming up the ramp, something heavy and slow and plural. curiosity got the better of fear and i did not close my eyes.

31:28 So again a lovecraftian element there that the real horror is witnessing is glimpsing the the true nature of the thing that that you can't understand.

31:37 Yeah yeah and i really i really like the detail here that we we never get a description of it there's no additional reveal there's no like a lot of the sort of trope i find in stories like this by Lovecraft or people who are writing Lovecraftian horror is that there will be a brief description, like it was something like an X, but with a Y, you know?

31:58 So you'll have like at least two conflicting ideas to sort of slam together in your head to create an obscure, monstrous image, which is a great, I mean, still, it's a great tactic. I think it can be used rather well, but Borges doesn't go in that direction. Like he's already established that you cannot truly see a thing if you do not understand it. And so in a way, it would be a letdown to have any further illustration or description of what this thing is.

32:26 Yeah. We can only imagine based on seeing its things. Yeah. Yeah.

32:32 And I'll note that in this translation I'm referring to, it's described as heavy and slow and plural. But the other translation, the 75 translation, says something slow and oppressive and twofold. Hmm. So I like both. Either way you slice it, there's some nice horror there. And anyway, that's the end of the story, though. Yeah, you never get to see it. You just know that he's too curious.

33:02 And so his curiosity overpowers his fear, and he does not close his eyes in the presence of this thing that is slouching towards him. And we have no idea what happens next. Generally in these stories, it's madness. Madness or worse. Uh, but, uh, but that's all we get from the story. And it's, I think it's a fitting end.

33:20 You notice the connection also with, uh, that when he was a child in this house with his uncle, they spend a lot of time, uh, dealing with strange philosophies and, uh, trying to understand incomprehensible geometry and doing these like geometry experiments with cubes and triangles to try to see this dimension that, uh, that is not readily apparent to the eyes.

33:44 And then finally, when he does come back to the house, what does he encounter yet again? Incomprehensible geometry.

33:50 Yeah, yeah. So knowing what we know about these sorts of stories, I guess we can basically surmise that Uncle Arnett's interest in the fourth dimension caused some sort of anomaly in the Red House, something that may have contributed to his early death by aneurysm and led a true foreigner then to acquire the house and see it customized.

34:11 And either the mysterious Max Pretorius was the human disguise of this alien being or a familiar of some sort working on his behalf. But now the occupant of Red House is an alien being of some sort from some time or place working some unknown end on the planet. And, of course, any kind of face-to-face confrontation with that can only result in madness or worse, right? Yeah. Now, I want to come back to this idea that it reminds the narrator of Lucan's description of the Amphisbina, which again, like we said, is kind of a two-headed snake that pops up in the writings of antiquity, including Pliny the Elder.

34:51 Pliny says that it has two mouths, quote, as though one mouth were too little for the discharge of all its venom. A little bit of Pliny humor there, I think.

35:03 Yeah.

35:04 But it's a snake with a head on its tail. Its eyes glow like coal. Borges includes a write-up of this creature in the Book of Imaginary Beings, his bestiary. And the name means that which goes in two directions. And it's often discussed as kind of a paradox, an impossible animal. And I think that's part of the attraction here, that it is kind of like a tesseract. It is like a thing that can't actually exist inside. in our perceived reality.

35:36 Yeah, because anatomically, how would that animal work? Well, does it eat from both sides? Where does the digestive system go?

35:42 Yeah, what is the sense of it? But so Lucan, who he's referencing here, first century CE Roman poet, who wrote of this creature as one of the many different desert animals encountered by Cato's army in the Libyan desert. And so he listed among other dangerous creatures saying, Amphisbina, it's two heads facing each other. So kind of like, also kind of like the snake of Thulsa Doom, right?

36:08 With the two snakes.

36:10 Oh, interesting.

36:11 Yeah. I hadn't thought about to know. But Pliny also wrote about its curative features, writing, quote, for feverish chills, what is this, zisander or zikander?

36:23 Zikander. Zikander.

36:24 Gives as a remedy a dead serpent, this Amphisvena, worn as an amulet or even its skin. Nay, he says that if it is fastened to a tree, that is being felled, the fellers feel no cold and do their business more easily. So much does this alone of serpents stand up to the cold, being the first of all serpents to make its appearance, even before the cry of the cuckoo. So, curative properties.

36:50 Okay.

36:51 Yeah, and of note, there's a genus of legless lizards, legless ground lizards that are known as Amphispina, which, you know, the name derives from the myth. And then this creature also pops up in everything from Dungeons and Dragons to the Witcher novels and also is like regional Polish heraldry. So it's established out there. And also, yes, it's sometimes like an idea of something impossible that we're trying to imagine.

37:21 But as you said earlier, it's only a point of comparison for the narrator. And the story does not seem to be trying to say, ah, we've discovered the source of the Amphispina legend. Here is the creature they were talking about.

37:35 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So again, that's one of the things I really love about the story is that there's nothing spelled out about exactly what it is. We can't possibly even comprehend it. And I was looking around and I was pleasantly surprised to see that this creature has not been like fully canonized within, say, the monster manuals of the of the Arkham Horror and Call of Cthulhu role-playing games.

38:01 And they're generally pretty quick, I've found, to canonize and sort of spell out the properties and include illustrations of just about anything in Lovecraftian fiction or adjacent mythos fiction or even things in folklore and mythology. But either intentionally or by happenstance, they've left this one alone. And I think they should. How do you create the stats for something like this?

38:24 You can't.

38:25 You shouldn't.

38:26 You could only fight its furniture. Yeah. Isn't that interesting?

38:31 I don't know.

38:31 I'm, I'm hung up on the fact that what he sees is its furniture. Is there another story like that? That's the scary thing is all the stuff that's in its house and who knows what it's used for.

38:43 Yeah. I can't think of another one off the top of my head. And in a way only Borges would write a cosmic horror story about alien furniture, but it works perfectly. Like it, It cheapens it to say that it is a story about alien furniture, but it is. It is a story about alien furniture.

38:59 I like it.

39:00 The best possible.

39:03 Well, good choice, Rob. I like this one.

39:05 Oh, thanks.

39:05 Yeah.

39:06 Yeah, highly recommend it. If you haven't read it and you just listened to us discuss it all, well, don't worry. You can still enjoy all six pages of it. All right, Joe, let's go on to the next selection. What do you have for us?

39:27 Okay, the story I picked for today is called The Wife's Story by Ursula K. Le Guin. Published in the 1982 short story collection, The Compass Rose, it is truly short and a very brisk read. It's only about three or four pages, and the narrative is not dense. So in my opinion, the story is not dense. This is one that is really worth reading without having anything spoiled, and we are going to spoil it. We're going to talk about the whole thing. So if you're able, my recommendation would be to pause the podcast right here, go find a copy of the story and read it, and then come back. So we're about to move into spoiler territory.

40:05 Please consider yourself warned.

40:08 I absolutely agree, by the way, about how good this story is if you know nothing about it. I went into it completely blind. You had urged me not to read anything about it ahead of time. And it is highly rewarding. And it, like a Borges story, I feel it is like a curio. You know, you hold it up, you look at it, and then after you've experienced it the first time, well, then you've got to experience it another time because you know so many different things about it. Totally.

40:31 I really enjoyed looking back on this one a second time after having experienced it the first. So Ursula Le Guin is not a name that comes up usually when people think about the horror genre. Most of her work is considered science fiction or fantasy. So examples of her science fiction work would be the books in the Hainish cycle, like The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness. She also wrote fantasy, like the books in the Earthsea series.

41:00 Le Guin is just a great author, lots of different stuff to explore. Very, very thoughtful, careful writer who explored both the, I like that she explored both the intellectual and the emotional sides of her worlds very thoroughly. So the books I mentioned deal with plenty of horrifying scenarios, but I don't think anybody would make the case that they are horror. The story I picked for today is, I think, one of the only published examples of Le Guin experimenting with horror. In this case, with a simple, but in my opinion, wonderful variation on the werewolf transformation tale.

41:41 None of the characters in the wife story are given names. All of the identifiers are relational. So the characters are the wife, the husband, the sister, the child. And based on the title and the first line, we can infer that the narrator is the wife. The story is written in a very plain style. It's voiced. It's not just a disembodied narrator. It's first person, strongly voiced narrator. in a kind of casual spoken vernacular that sounds to me like a rural Southern American English dialect, maybe Appalachian.

42:17 Yeah, that's the kind of vibe I got from.

42:19 It as well. So, Rob, are you ready if I get right into it?

42:23 Yeah, let's do it.

42:24 I'm going to read the opening lines to give you a flavor for how the narrator speaks. So the wife says, He was a good husband, a good father. I don't understand it. I don't believe in it. I don't believe that it happened. I saw it happen, but it isn't true. It can't be. He was always gentle. If you'd have seen him playing with the children, anybody who saw him with the children would have known that there wasn't any bad in him, not one mean bone. So from here, she goes on to introduce the character of the husband and she tells the story of how she and the husband fell in love. The wife says that she first met him when he was living with his mother in a place called Spring Lake. And she first took notice

43:09 of him because of how good he was with his family, actually. He was friendly, even-tempered, good to his mother. And evidence of his even temper comes in an early encounter where she says one day she's out walking in the woods and she crosses paths with him while he's coming back from a hunting trip, which had been a total bust, no game at all. But he doesn't seem the least bit bothered about it. Quote, he was just larking along, enjoying the morning air. That's one of the things I first loved about him. He didn't take things hard. He didn't grouch and whine when things didn't go his way.

43:45 So she describes the husband as she gets to know him. He's a hard worker. He's handsome and fine looking, admired by everybody with a beautiful singing voice. And the narrator says that she was living with her sister at the time that she first met him. But he started coming over every day, and her sister eventually moved out to give them some space. But the narrator and her sister, she says, would always be close. And this will come back later. She becomes a little more lyrical remembering the husband's singing voice when he would lead the choir at local lodge meeting nights. She says, quote, it brings the shivers on me now to think of it. And she describes being able, in some instances, to hear the choir

44:28 singing together even on nights when she would stay home. Quote, the singing coming up through the trees there and the moonlight, summer nights, the full moon shining. I'll never hear anything so beautiful. I'll never know a joy like that again. So we've talked on the show before about how werewolf stories have a tendency to be tragic in nature, often have a kind of tragedy or melancholy about them. And I like that That melancholy comes through in the narration here before we even get to anything about a transformation.

45:01 Yeah, before we even know we're reading a werewolf story.

45:04 Yeah. I'll never know a joy like that again. But she says they fall in love, they become husband and wife, and they have children. But over time, the wife describes how she is crestfallen when things begin to turn strange. The husband starts going out of the house by himself when everybody else is asleep. or unexpectedly leaving by himself on hunting trips in the woods. But the wife says, quote, he was so good and responsible, it was no call of mine to go asking why and where and all like that. So, you know, he's turning strange. He's not exactly like he was when they first met, but also he's still so good in some ways that she can't bring herself to really bother him about it. And then she says, after these trips... She says he always comes

45:53 back worn out and bad tempered, which is so unlike him the rest of the time. And she doesn't want to ask him what happened. But she starts to worry, quote, not so much that he went, but that he come back so tired and strange. Even he smelled strange. It made my hair stand up on end. In these instances, the husband says he doesn't know what the smell is, doesn't know what she's talking about. But then later the wife catches him secretly running off to bathe himself when he thinks she isn't looking. So he's like washing himself over and over again. There's also a part early on where she mentions that she thinks whatever was wrong with the husband was something in his blood, something that he got from his father. Because she says his father was

46:37 from another place. He didn't have any kin around where they lived. And there was always talk about the father, about how something went off in him when there was a change in the moon. The wife says she doesn't know what happened to the husband's father, that he went away somewhere, maybe back where he came from. Eventually, we reach the part of the story where the catastrophe arrives, what the wife calls the awful thing. It comes one night when the husband is home and their youngest child, with no warning, begins acting afraid of the father, who again was always so gentle and good with the kids.

47:12 The youngest child hides behind her mother and cries, saying of the father, make it go away, make it go away, referring to the father as it instead of him. And they try to figure out what's wrong. The wife asks the child what's gotten into her. The husband says, guess she just waked up dreaming. So the husband stays away the rest of the day after that, like he does sometimes when he goes out. leaving the wife alone with the children. But sometime later, she's sleeping, and she wakes up when she hears stirring in the passage. She gets up and goes to investigate, and finds her husband outside, standing in the tall grass by the entrance to their home, looking like something is wrong with his head hanging. Then

47:57 she describes with terror that his body begins to change. His feet grow long, they're stretching, and then they begin smoothing over. And here I just have to read from the story. Le Guin writes, quote, The hair begun to come away all over his body. It was like his hair fried away in the sunlight and was gone. He was white all over then, like a worm skin. Then she describes his face changing while he looks right at her. Quote, The mouth flat and wide and the teeth grinning flat and dull and the nose just a knob of flesh with nostril holes and the ears gone and the eyes gone blue, blue with white rims around the blue, staring at me out of that flat, soft, white face. He stood up then on two legs. So, the big twist

48:50 in the story comes, the husband is a werewolf, but the normal parameters of the story are reversed. All along, the characters you've been reading about have been wolves. The husband is who has a curse in his blood, has changed. He's changed, it says, under the chilling glare of the sun. And what he's changed into is a human being. So now her good, beloved husband stands before her no longer this handsome, loving wolf, but a tall, pale, hairless man thing walking on two legs. If you can read the story unspoiled, I think it is a tremendous twist.

49:32 Absolutely. Not just in the nature of the twist, but just in the reading experience. Yeah. Having visualized everything up to this point and then experiencing the change. And so just as the character is transforming, your understanding of the story is transforming. Um, it's quite unique. Like I was thinking just how, if this was not like written so superbly and handled so smoothly, uh, this would feel so gimmicky. Like, like, and it would, I was trying to think, could this ever work as, um, like in a visual medium, like in a film?

50:07 I don't think so. Yeah.

50:08 I mean, it, if it did, you would have to, it would be something completely different. You could tell the basic story, but you'd have to tell it in a totally different way. Uh, this is something that just works so perfectly the way that it is put together as a, as a, as a work of written fiction.

50:23 It, it's amazing that the story manages to pass as being about humans until you realize the inversion. Like, once you look back on the earlier details or read the story again, it makes perfect sense thinking about the characters as wolves. Like, nothing that is said apart from sort of the imbuing of the wolves with sentience and the ability to communicate, which, you know, is often done in stories with animals. There's nothing otherwise that would violate the reality understanding of them being wolves. And if you think about trying to write this way, it's really difficult to tell a story like this in a way that's not overly conspicuous. I think it helps that the story is very short, but I still think it's a really interesting feat.

51:12 After the first time I read it, I looked back in the first half and noticed a lot of clues that That would later make more sense with the inversion, like all of the references to hunting trips, the husband's always going on hunting trips. Of course, when you first read it, you imagine a man going out in the woods with a gun, but they also make perfect sense with the family being wolves. You know, they never, the narration never talks about them living in a house, but does talk about them like going inside and outside and that's going into their den and coming out of their den. Uh, you know, they like going on walks in the woods, which humans do as well, but it has a different meaning now.

51:49 Yes.

51:49 The singing, the singing, uh, the, the howling at the moon, of course, singing at lodge meetings that takes on a different meaning than you originally thought. Um, and there's this kind of elemental storytelling, like the lack of proper names, the lack of physical descriptions, except of environmental things like the woods or the moon. There's a general lack of texture that would make clear that the characters are living in a wolf's den instead of a house. And I think it's pretty interesting that Le Guin is able to tell, again, a very short, but tell an emotionally compelling story within these constraints up to this point.

52:28 Yeah, yeah, because it's kind of like a tightrope walk to put this together. I don't really know enough about the author's process, but I'm easily imagining multiple drafts to get to this point where everything is balanced just so.

52:44 So the story does not end there. The wife sees the husband transformed into this terrible man thing, the thing walking on two legs. It's supposed to give you a shiver when there's something so wrong about that, the walking on two legs. And so the wife cries out in terror. She wakes up the others, presumably the other wolves in the pack. The man thing that had been the husband launches into an attack on the wolf den. It shoves its flat face into the opening of the den and the children all begin to whimper and wail. And it says that the man thing has no gun. You know, there's awareness that sometimes the man thing would have a gun, but this time it has no gun. And she describes with dread as she watches it looking around outside the entrance,

53:35 realizing it is looking for a The man-thing finds a heavy tree branch, which it picks up with its, quote, long white foot. And then it attacks the den, jabbing the branch down inside, trying to kill the wife and the children. But then we see the wolf start to show resilience. The wife describes how, quote, the mother anger comes into her. And she snaps at the branch with her jaws to defend her children. Then from outside the den, she hears her sister come running. Her sister comes running, quote, with her head low and her mane high and her eyes yellow as the winter sun. So I love several things here. First, like the heroic re-entrance of the sister into the story is like a thrilling moment. But also

54:24 a very interesting use of this short phrase, the mother anger. I like that phrase because it can be read in multiple ways. Like that could mean the anger that is uniquely possessed by mothers, like the mother anger, the kind of anger that can only be summoned by a mother defending her children, or it could mean the anger that is a mother of some kind, like a sort of emotion goddess, or this embodied force of anger that both maybe nurtures you and makes you ferocious. I like that it can be read either way, and I think either way works. Mm-hmm.

55:03 And I love this detail of the grabbing of the branch. And this is just basic human behavior, our ability to pick something up, update our body schema, use it as an extension of our body, use it as a tool, and very likely a weapon. The idea that anything we touch can become a weapon and frequently does. That's just the way we humans work. But of course, it's monstrous to the wolf. And the wolf's view of this frames it in a suitably monstrous fashion.

55:32 Absolutely. I have a whole section on that I want to come back to in a few minutes because I think that's one of the most interesting little horror moments in the story. So we're racing to the conclusion now. The man thing here raises its weapon to bash and kill the sister as the sister wolf is coming in to protect her family. But then the wife also attacks with, quote, the mother anger kind of animating her body. And the other wolves from the pack join in. They answer the wife's call. And we get this, again, kind of thrilling moment of cooperation, like the pack coming together in the face of this horrifying thing. And together they force the man thing to retreat. And it breaks and runs on its two legs, quote, heading for the cleared fields and

56:18 plow lands down the mountainside. So where you might get a scene in a normal werewolf story of the werewolf cornered by the villagers with pitchforks and torches, and it runs for the woods. The man thing here cornered by the wolf pack breaks and runs for the plow lands. It is running to this monster haunted wilderness from the wolf's perspective. Yeah. Yeah.

56:41 Like kind of the anti wilderness, like this place of human desolation, uh, not the wild world, but, um, like a managed heavily managed world. That's the alien landscape that it calls home.

56:55 So the wife joins in the chase going after the man thing, though she says she's running last in the group because as horrible as the man thing is, she still loves the husband. And if he's somewhere inside there, it's kind of hard to shake that love. But by the time she catches up, the monster is already dead.

57:16 Her sister's teeth are in its throat. And it's described as sort of a traumatic event for the whole pack. The young ones are still frightened and crying. They're looking for consolation from their parents. There is a horrible taste and smell coming from the man thing's blood. It describes the sister trying to get it off of her mouth, wiping all over. And only the wife approaches the dead man thing's body because somehow she's hoping to see the husband again. She imagines that somehow now that it's dead, it might transform back into him. And she wants to see her love again in his true form once more.

57:54 And we know this often happens in other werewolf movies, right? It's often the monster transforms back into the person after it has been vanquished.

58:03 Yeah, that's an ancient tool of werewolf storytelling where the slain monster is now returned to its human form.

58:13 But alas, it doesn't happen. Now, All it is is a dead, bloody, reeking man thing, and it will not do her the kindness of letting her see her husband again. The closing line is, quote, We drew back and back from it, and turned and ran back up into the hills, back to the woods of the shadows and the twilight and the blessed dark.

58:38 Yeah, excellent story. And I love that last line, the blessed dark, too. The darkness is not a place of... Of horror, terror. It is the refuge one imagines. It's the illuminated world that the man-things live in.

58:52 So even though this is an older story, I found this twist quite fresh and exciting. But I know it's not the only story that does this. I'm sure there are tons of reverse werewolves in fiction out there. I don't know if I've ever really come across them before, but I know they're there.

59:10 Yeah, I think they are a far rarer thing and a thing that is more a product of more or less contemporary fiction, like a play on the classic werewolf. It is something that has always existed in Dungeons & Dragons since the 1970s, where it is called a wolfware. You're just flipping it, right? And they're also positioned as enemies of werewolves, as makes sense for a reverse werewolf.

59:38 I don't think I've ever encountered them or used them in a game or anything. There's also apparently one in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel, Reaper Man, though that is not one of the Discworld novels I've read, so I can't really speak to it. He also has, of course, normal traditional werewolf characters. One in particular that's pretty notable, but But also, yes, one wolf wear on top of that.

1:00:02 So I do think that, yeah, this is something you tend to encounter outside of folklore. Though you do have, of course, lots of trends in general animism and mythology where you either have animals behaving as people or people who are on some level former animals. But I think this idea, when we do encounter it, it is about reevaluating the message of older werewolf tales, turning them on their head. And, you know, saying, who is the real monster?

1:00:31 Yeah, totally. You know, as I was talking about things that make sense when you think about the main characters as wolves rather than humans, when you go back and read it a second time. Another thing that I think really works like this is the day-night inversion in the story. So this can kind of go past you without you even noticing it the first time you read. But so the narrator says, quote, always it happens in the dark of the moon when everybody's home and asleep. Something comes over the one that's got the curse in his blood, they say, and he gets up because he can't sleep and goes out into the glaring sun and goes off all alone. drawn to find those like him. This isn't the part where they're talking about like what, what explained it.

1:01:28 And maybe it was something to do with the father or something he got from his father. Uh, but like I said, this can just go right by without you even noticing that it's different than the normal werewolf lore the first time. Uh, but it is inverting the day night cycle of the base human werewolf. So this werewolf goes home and is in his normal shape under the moon and but then goes out and turns into a man during the daytime when the rest of the family is asleep. This is somewhat based on thinking of wolves as nocturnal. I should note, you know, wolves are not actually strictly nocturnal. They have, I was reading about this, they have like flexible activity levels across the day and night, and these can adjust based on environmental factors, might change

1:02:14 seasonally or based on climate or prey availability, all kinds of things. But they often do hunt at night. But there's another side to this that I thought was interesting too in the story, which is repeated uses of the sun and the daylight as frightening environmental cues, the same way that the dark and the moonlight are typically used in horror stories. There are several examples of this in the story, but one is like when the wolves begin to fight back against the man thing, the narrator says, quote, The others all were coming, answering my call, the whole pack gathering there in that blind glare and heat of the sun at noon. So it's like setting this up as if like the daytime heightens the dramatic intensity of

1:03:00 the danger here. It's like fighting the vampire at midnight.

1:03:03 Yeah. Yeah.

1:03:04 I love it. Another thing I want to come back to is something you sort of raised earlier, which is the idea of this as a story in which the human being is the monster. This is not the only horror story like this. There are other stories that kind of drive at the conclusion that human beings are the ultimate monsters. But I think this story does it in a pretty unique way. And I'll explain what I mean.

1:03:28 A lot of the man is the monster stories, I think, ultimately come down to just pessimistic assessments of human nature or of the human heart. So it's like, look how savage and cruel humans can be or. Look how great is the chasm between our lofty, sophisticated self-image and the grubby reality of how we behave when the chips are down or when nobody's looking. I think Frankenstein is a great example of both of these versions of the man-is-the-monster story.

1:04:02 So you get both flavors. In Victor himself, we get the contrast between his hubris and his attempts to play at God Versus how he actually behaves in tough situations where he can be callous and cowardly and, you know, he can fail to do the right thing and take responsibility. And then in the broader world of Frankenstein, we just see general cruelty and heartlessness. There's the reality that the creature only wants love, but because he is ugly, people will not give him that chance. And so they try to destroy him on sight. I think that's the more standard man is the monster story. The wife story is very different take on, on the human being as the monster.

1:04:46 It's one that takes the premise in a more primal and ecologically rooted direction and asks, it asks us to see what is terrifying about the human as an animal from another animal's point of view. So in a normal werewolf story, a familiar person who happens to be of the species Homo sapiens is, transforms into a frightening, dangerous animal.

1:05:10 And you've got all of the biological markers of that terror, the sharp teeth, the claws, the, you know, the deadly jaws. The wife's story takes the same idea, but it flips it and it asks the reader to think from the wolf's point of view and to see the biological markers of horror in the human animal, that cunning brain, the grasping hands of of the bipedal primate standing up on two legs as horrifying the same way that we see the jaws and the teeth of the wolf. Because when you think about it, the human is a terrifying animal.

1:05:47 What if one were to suddenly appear inside your home and could like reach you and your pups while you sleep? And so you brought this up earlier, and I think this is a great point that the way that the human animal has this horrifying ability to further transform itself by picking up weapons. Like that moment right after the transformation when the wife watches the husband pick up the branch and attack the den. It just hit me how strange this is from the wolf's eyes. The wolf can fight and the wolf can bite, but it's always the same wolf. The man becomes ever more dangerous by changing itself by incorporating weapons and tools and You never know exactly what it can do by grasping something with those

1:06:35 hands and using it.

1:06:37 Yeah, because obviously a wolf cannot pick up, say, a pickaxe and swing it. There's some basic anatomy differences there. But also, does a wolf know what it's looking at? The wolf doesn't understand what's happening. And that would make it even more... It would be like watching somebody... commit an act of sorcery. And I think that's how it reads in the story.

1:07:04 I was thinking of the exact same thing. So there's another, I guess I'll get into it now. So the other horrifying feature of the inversion here is the mind inversion you get in the wolf to man transformation. As we were talking about earlier, you know, werewolf stories are often tragic in nature because the werewolf is a reluctant monster.

1:07:25 Not always, but often it's The werewolf character is a good and reasonable person. They don't want to be causing harm. The curse of the wolf transforms them, and then against their will, they are turned into a beast that is not only physically dangerous, but mentally beast-like. So it is vicious and unthinking. It doesn't retain the person's reason and gentleness and goodness. That has gone out of its mind.

1:07:54 Now it only has a predatory beast's mind. But this story does, I think, imply that we should imagine the transformation going the other way, not a transformation that removes the human intellect, but horrifyingly endows it. Now, there might be a kind of objection to thinking about the story this way, which is that the wolves in the story are not portrayed as purely animalistic. They're sentient wolves, and they have the ability to communicate complex ideas between each other.

1:08:28 And they have complex emotional lives. They do have a kind of culture. So I think it's not a case of an unthinking beast that transforms into a thing with intellect. But I do think there's still the implication that with this transformation, the new primate brain that is in this monster has a kind of alien intelligence, a frightening one that can, yeah, use tools. So like to the sentient wolf, The human world must be this terrifying maze of unholy myths.

1:09:00 We do all these strange rituals that the wolf can't understand, but it turns into death for the wolf. You know, all these things we manipulate and stuff, the stuff we do. It means that when the wolf meets us, it almost always ends in brutal violence for the wolf for reasons that the wolf cannot understand.

1:09:20 Yeah, I think that's a good read.

1:09:22 So it's very much like you were saying, that the tool using intellect of the human is like a type of magic. It's a terrible sorcery. One last thing I wanted to talk about as a theme in this story is the way that it messes with the common werewolf story themes of alienation and familiarity. So, you know, a lot of werewolf stories mess with alienation and the uncanny, like how something or someone that is familiar and comfortable and good becomes mysterious and frightening. It's this transformation of the good and the safe into the dangerous. And there are these moments in the story where you get that ambiguity, like when the wife senses something different about the husband.

1:10:05 It's unsettling. Or that creepy moment where the child senses the fundamental alteration before anybody else does, where the child is saying, make it go away, calling the man thing it before even the narrator does. when it's still in the form of the wolf husband. But I think it's also interesting the way that the sister character plays into the familiarity themes. Ultimately, it is the wife's sister who kills the monster in the end. And remember, we're told early in the story, the wife says that she and her sister were always close and they lived together at the beginning. But when she got together with the husband, sister had to move out to make room for them.

1:10:48 And I think it's raising concerns Common questions that it's a thing that's explored in horror in a lot of different ways, but it's a thing people wonder about. When you fall in love with someone, do you really know them? And do you really understand what they are? And how maybe love can make it feel like you know somebody better than you really do. They can come to you very quickly. feel very comfortable uh but there's always maybe some greater mystery like is part of this an illusion is this familiarity something i'm talking myself into just because of this feeling of love and the familiar can then later become strange again but in the end in the story the monster the man thing is killed by the

1:11:33 sister and so there's this idea that you know in the sister that's where like the real trust can reside.

1:11:38 Yeah yeah that's a good point as well Yeah, this is, like I say, this story is also like, in ways even more like a curio because your second experience reading it is going to be so different because you know what this twist is and you see all these little signs and you get to admire how it's, you know, it's almost like an anagram. You know, you can, you know, in the way that you can still read it both ways. Yeah, just very well done. And I think at the end of the day, too, It's just a really good werewolf story because one of the reasons I love werewolf stories of pretty much all kind is that it's one of those things where the thought-provoking aspects of the werewolf narrative are kind of baked in already. They're intrinsically a part

1:12:29 of the concept. And therefore, a werewolf story told badly can still be very thought-provoking because it's the basic concept. has so much wrapped up in it. And then if it's told well with intelligence, even more so. But these stories are often about some sort of comparison with the wolf. Generally, the wolf is more savage. And what if one became more savage by becoming like a wolf or part wolf?

1:12:58 And then other times it's about other aspects perceived in the wolf, like the nobility, the wildness, the free nature of the wolf. That's more of the the sort of modern counter-trend that you see, where the werewolf is a noble being, the noble lichen. But because at the end of the day, this is something that was explored in Ogden's The Werewolf in the Ancient World, is that the wolf is something that has these sort of savage aspects that we see in it. But also, there are all these different hallmarks of humanity in the wolf.

1:13:35 Like they are.

1:13:36 Wolves are highly social. They're intelligent. They're cooperative. They engage in tactics when they're taking down prey. And then we often also have plenty of traditions where we hold the wolf up as a noble beast. And so our relationship with the wolf is generally more complex than we think it is at first. And there's a lot of different ways that we can see ourselves in the wolf, both in positive and in negative ways. And I think all of that is still reflected here in the author's treatment of the wolf wear, if you will.

1:14:12 I think, yeah, the good comparisons between human beings and wolves are absolutely there in like the pleasures of this story, like the thrilling moments where the sister reappears and she attacks and then the whole community comes in. Those are the same types of moments in like a human movie or a human story where It's where you suddenly get chills or the character that you thought was out of the story comes back to save the day.

1:14:38 Yeah.

1:14:38 Uh, and, and here we get that too. So it's like that. It's showing that the, the, the sense of community and cooperation between the wolves is also the thing that is like the best in, in human love and relationships and storytelling.

1:14:52 Yeah. And, and to your point earlier, like when the wolves are doing this, yeah, the way that it's written and the way that the wolves think they're kind of, you know, it's written like a human. But they're not behaving like humans. They're behaving believably like wolves to the intended reader here. And that's, again, one of the ways that it works so perfectly. So you can go back and read it a second or third time, and you can force yourself to picture them as wolves the whole time.

1:15:17 Though I still didn't find myself doing that when I gave it a subsequent reread. I still pictured them as these kind of people. And then it kind of shifted more to pure wolf later on. But I guess maybe now that I think of it, maybe I did kind of in my subsequent read, think of it, think of them kind of as half wolf, half people, like not actually thinking of them as wolf people, but knowing where the story was going to go, like it kind of blurred the lines more for the way that I was thinking about them, you know?

1:15:48 Yeah. Okay. Anything else on this story?

1:15:51 No, I think that pretty much wraps it up. But we would love to hear from listeners out there, listeners and viewers, if you're watching on Netflix. that's where you'll find the video version of the show, write in because we'd love to discuss this more with you in a future Listener Mail episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

1:16:09 Maybe you have different interpretations, different thoughts, and so forth. Or you can speak to other examples of the sorts of things we're talking about with either story. But I would love to hear if there are other specific examples of wolfwares in fiction. Certainly if there's anything older that comes to mind because nothing really came up for me particularly that you could think of as a wolf wear.

1:16:33 But yeah, write in. We'd love to hear from you. And also, if you have any suggestions for next year, because we love to get ahead of the game in selecting these. This time, I think we both made our selections pretty late. But in past year, I think last year, I made my mind up like in the summer. So yeah, if you have things you want us to consider for the subsequent Halloween episodes, go ahead and write in now.

1:16:59 All right, just a reminder to everyone out there that Stuffed to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with four episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And then on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. We hope you've enjoyed our Halloween offerings this year. And we have just a little bit more Halloween to go before we wrap it all up.

1:17:18 Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J.

1:17:21 Posway.

1:17:22 If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future or just to say hello. you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.

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1:18:01 Thank you.