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Tagged with “short story” (28) activity chart

  1. The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe

    PodCastle Miniature 56: The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe Read by Eric Luke.

    THE “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal — the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.

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    —Huffduffed by Jax 2 years ago

  2. Incubus by Tim Pratt

    Read by Chris Reynaga

    Every forty or fifty years the incubus and the succubus got together to catch up. This time they met in a quiet little bar, and the incubus said, “Yeah, it’s been hard these past few years. I did porn for a while, but these days, with Viagra and everything, it doesn’t matter what kind of a woodsman you are, because anybody can pop a pill and perform superhuman feats of sexual prowess.”

    The succubus nodded in sympathy, invisible serpents twining in her hair. “I hear you. There’s easy money in internet porn, but it’s no good for me, I miss the personal connection. But you can still do the gigolo thing, right?”

    Source: http://podcastle.org/2009/10/30/podcastle-miniature-40-incubus/

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    —Huffduffed by Jax 2 years ago

  3. Monstrous Embrace by Rachel Swirsky

    Originally Published in Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy

    I am ugliness in body and bone, breath and heartbeat. I am muddy rocks and jagged scars snaking across salt-sown fields. I am insect larvae wriggling inside the great dead beasts into which they were born. Too, I am the hanks of dead flesh rotting. I am the ungrateful child’s sneer, the plague sore bursting, the swing of shadow beneath the gallows rope. Ugliness is my hands, my feet, my fingernails. Ugliness is my gaze, boring into you like a worm into rotting fruit.

    Listen to me, my prince. Tomorrow, when dawn breaks and you stand in the chapel accepting your late father’s crown, your fate will be set. Do nothing and you will be dead by sundown. Your kingdom will be laid waste, its remnants preserved only in the bellies of carrion birds.

    There is another option. Marry me.

    Source: http://podcastle.org/2010/07/27/podcastle-115-monstrous-embrace/

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    —Huffduffed by Jax 2 years ago

  4. The Town No Guns Could Tame by Louis L’Amour

    Basin City is a place where no respectable citizen feels safe. That’s why three of the town’s foremost businessmen have gone and hired a new marshal. Tomorrow he’ll be in charge of protecting a stagecoach carrying over a quarter million dollars in gold. For Perry, a gunfighter on the run, this job should have turned his life around. Instead, it’s landed him in a peck of trouble.

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    —Huffduffed by Jax 3 years ago

  5. Sixth Shotgun by Louis L’Amour

    "The Sixth Shotgun" is Leo Carver’s story, and if the town of Canyon Gap has anything to say in the matter, it’s going to be a very short tale indeed, as Leo has been convicted of murdering two men and faces death by hanging.

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    —Huffduffed by Jax 3 years ago

  6. A Memory of Wind By Rachel Swirsky

    After Helen and her lover Paris fled to Troy, her husband King Menelaus called his allies to war. Under the leadership of King Agamemnon, the allies met in the harbor at Aulis. They prepared to sail for Troy, but they could not depart, for there was no wind.

    Kings Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Odysseus consulted with Calchas, a priest of Artemis, who revealed that the angered goddess was balking their departure. The kings asked Calchas how they might convince Artemis to grant them a wind. He answered that she would only relent after King Agamemnon brought his eldest daughter, Iphigenia, to Aulis and sacrificed her to the goddess.

    http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=story&id=58211

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    —Huffduffed by Jax 3 years ago

  7. Scales by Alastair Reynolds

    Fresh from signing a £1m deal with Gollancz, the science fiction author Alastair Reynolds has penned a story for the Guardian which follows a new recruit sent out to battle in an interstellar war.

    Nineteen years after his first short story appeared, and nine years after the first of his eight novels was published, Scales is Reynolds’ first foray into militaristic SF. In it, he explores the transformations war imposes on soldiers as his hero Nico’s mission evolves into something stranger than he could have possibly imagined.

    Reynolds is best-known for his mastery of space opera – the SF sub-genre in which the stakes are high and the aliens deadly – but, after 16 years working for the European Space Agency, he brings a scientist’s rigour to the genre’s high drama.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/audio/2009/jun/19/alastair-reynolds-scales-short-story

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    —Huffduffed by Jax 3 years ago

  8. Silver Linings by Tim Pratt

    Silver Linings by Tim Pratt

    "Cloudmining is a rough business at the best of times, mostly because everyone on the ground wants to kill you, but I had more particular problems…."

    http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=story&id=55339

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    —Huffduffed by Jax 3 years ago

  9. A Weeping Czar Beholds the Fallen Moon by Ken Scholes

    A Weeping Czar Beholds the Fallen Moon by Ken Scholes

    "Frederico leaned close to smell the poison on his thirteenth wife’s cold, dead lips. It tickled his nose and he resisted the strong desire to kiss her that suddenly overcame him….."

    http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=story&id=13879

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    —Huffduffed by Jax 3 years ago

  10. A Study In Emerald - Neil Gaiman

    Alluding to both the Sherlock Holmes canon and the Old Ones of the Cthulhu Mythos, this Hugo Award winning short story will delight fans of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, H.P. Lovecraft, and of course, Neil Gaiman. A Study in Emerald draws listeners in through carefully revealed details as a consulting detective and his narrator friend solve the mystery of a murdered German noble. But with its subtle allusions and surprise ending, this mystery hints that the real fun in solving this case lies in imagining all the details that Gaiman doesn’t reveal, and challenges listeners to be detectives themselves.

    Story as PDF: http://www.neilgaiman.com/mediafiles/exclusive/shortstories/emerald.pdf

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    —Huffduffed by Jax 3 years ago

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