Dark Podcast Tie-Ins

I mentioned in my last entry how I’d been trying to maintain a Halloween mood throughout the fall in spite of any distractions we might have of late. I have found that listening to some dark, creepy podcasts while cooking or walking the dog has been one of the most effective tactics to stay in a pleasantly spooky state of mind.

I’ve been listening to more podcasts over the last few years (and especially this year for reasons I think we can all understand), and they’ve been growing on me. A flexible medium, relatively easy to produce, and appealing to an audience stuck at home, podcasts have really taken off and will continue to grow. Creepy, mysterious, and even horrifying topics, whether delving into nonfiction, documentary styles appealing to fans of This American Life, or fictional accounts harkening back to the radio dramas of the early twentieth century, are among the most popular. So popular, in fact, that there have been quite a few tie-in books published to give the audience more of that content that they crave.

Over the past few months, I’ve binged on a few titles and checked out their requisite tie-in novel or book. Like any adaptations, there are those that complement and expand the originals and those that are less successful. It can be difficult to shift something so dependent on audio, with sound design, strong voice work, and music to a more static, print version. I’ve found that there are two main strategies to recreate the vibe of a podcast in the works I’ve looked at, either trying to keep things as close to the podcast medium as possible or by attempting to go in a new direction from the podcast, something that works better in the medium of a book. Both styles have their hits and misses, though perhaps listening to these spinoffs as an audiobook may provide the best transition.

First, I’ll discuss a few works that use the medium of a podcast for fictional storytelling and drama.

Welcome to Night Vale, for instance, is a really weird, unsettling, but ultimately hopeful piece of audio drama that has drawn a huge following in spite of its surreal, almost impenetrable world. I’ve written a little bit about the podcast before. All in all, I feel it’s one of the prominent and influential works of cosmic horror today. Over time, it has become deeply self-reverential, expanding its world to an intricate, or unwieldy, tapestry. Over the past few years, the podcasts writers, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor have published several novels deepening its narrative, Welcome to Night Vale and It Devours! Their latest, The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your House, was my favorite of the Welcome to Night Vale novels published so far, which is interesting because it takes us the farthest from the titular friendly desert community of the three.

I also have to wonder if I enjoyed this one the most out of the three because I listened to it as an audiobook rather than just reading it. Mara Wilson, who voices the faceless old woman (TFOW) on the podcast, reprises her role here, providing a very effective narration of the story. In addition, The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your House definitely functions most successfully as a stand-alone novel, most accessible to those who may not know every nook, cranny, and glow cloud of the podcast and its dramatically bizarre world. Of course, I’m not sure why someone totally ignorant and unconnected to the world would pick this book up in the first place. If they did, I don’t think they would be completely lost in the odd minutiae and lore of the show, but lost instead in the intricate, intertwining stories tying together contemporary millennial life with a conspiracy-laden swashbuckling romp across the seas and courts of Napoleonic Europe. Focusing on the fan-favorite character of “The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your House,” a mysterious, menacing, and omnipresent figure that represents Night Vale at its most paradoxical and bizarre, I feel like some of the more outre aspects of life in Night Vale were played down here, making it easier to get into.

The novel delves deeply into the origins of TFOW, and how exactly she started living simultaneously in your and everyone else’s home. I especially enjoyed the juxtaposition between the adventurous tales of pirate and revenge in the Mediterranean and the mysterious Alpine nation of Lufnarp as TFOW recounts her past and the mundane 21st-century life of Craig, an immature 30 something who TFOW has taken a special interest in. Like all Welcome to Night Vale novels, there are deeper ideas being hinted at under the trappings of strange fantasy-horror, and The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your House provides both a nice introduction to the Welcome to Night Vale universe and a great encapsulation of what it’s about.

Joseph Fink, one of Welcome to Night Vale’s co-writers wrote and produced his own podcast, the gripping and provocative horror drama Alice Isn’t Dead. There are a lot of heady, thought-provoking ideas in the podcast, each intriguing in their use of the horrors of our daily existence in the United States to make the inevitable supernatural incursions feel even more unsettling. The Alice Isn’t Dead novel, on the other hand, was a disappointment, especially as it was described to be a “reimagining” of the podcast but seemed instead to be more of a lackluster distillation.

Without the voice of actor Jasika Nicole, telling the story of the anxious truck driver Keisha in the first person through snippets whispered into her truck’s CB radio, a lot of the immediacy and personality of the narrative is missing. Nicole’s voice, her inflections and emotion in audio, really bring Keisha to life, and, along with the other actors and the eerie soundtrack of Dispirition, make the podcast feel dynamic in a way that feels absent from the novel. Instead, Fink writes in the third person, following the first three seasons of the podcast quite directly as Keisha discovers that her wife, Alice, a woman she had thought dead, is alive and involved in some secretive conspiracy.

Less than the sum of its parts, the novelization magnifies the story’s flaws and some of the concerns I had all along. Part of the appeal of the podcast for me was the random weirdness encountered by Keisha along the American highway in her search of Alice, but this was downplayed in favor of a more didactic political message. Keisha, a gay woman of color suffering from mental illness, knows how terrifying life in America can be, so she seems uniquely suited for confronting these topical terrors. Unfortunately, even she plays second fiddle to the points the novel is trying to make. While I am definitely in favor of using genre fiction to explore the injustices of our current neoliberal hellscape, here it feels a bit heavy-handed.

I would definitely recommend checking out the podcast, but the novel seems unnecessary. I wonder if I would have liked it better had I listened to the audiobook, though it still would not have very many new ideas to the story.

When I listened to another super popular horror podcast, Limetown, this fall, I quickly found myself sucked in by the skilled ambiance of the story, written and performed as a non-fiction true crime podcast by a public radio reporter, very much inspired by and in the style of Serial. The first season, as American Public Radio journalist Lia Haddock delves into the mysterious disappearance of hundreds of people from a private research facility in Tennessee really drew me in and even built up some actually scary moments. As Haddock delves deeper, it appears that there are those who want to keep the mystery a secret and that the research that went on at Limetown was of a paranormal nature. The podcast does a pretty good job maintaining the true crime feeling, and after finishing it, I decided to grab the Limetown prequel novel before I moved onto the second season.

Unfortunately, I felt that the novel didn’t add much to the story and what it did add detracted from the eerie mood that had been built over the first season. While not badly written, the novel felt redundant to what was already established in the first season, at best repetitive and at worst, adds needless plot holes. Told alternatively from the point of view of a young Lia Haddock and her mysterious uncle Emile, “the man they were all there for,” the “subject” of Limetown, I was left with more questions than answers (and not in a good way). The way more and more secrets and connections and twists were revealed brought to mind memories of the TV series Lost, which is not really what you want when putting together a mystery.

To make matters worse, I didn’t like either Lia or Emile as depicted in the novel, especially compared to Lia’s characterization in the podcast, in which she is a driven, perhaps obsessed, reporter. In the novel, she comes off as an impulsive, irresponsible rube. All in all, characters seem to act more in accordance with what the future plot requires of them, rather than what would seem to make sense at the time. Everyone talks around each other and refuses to share easy answers for some reason or ask the obvious questions.

Unfortunately, the Lost comparison felt even more apt after I completed the second season. Apparently, there’s a TV adaptation now, too, but I don’t think I need to bother.

An appropriate series to shift this article from the fictional pieces to the non-fiction, journalistic, or just conversational podcasts is Lore. I have not listened to any of the series, though from what I can tell, the selection of Lore compilations I read are transcripts of writer Aaron Mahnke’s podcast scripts.

Since childhood, I’d always been a fan of those anthologies of unexplained mysteries, real life accounts of the paranormal, and weird folktales, and, I’d wager, Aaron Mankhe was too. Authors like Daniel Cohen, Maria Leach, and many others populated the school libraries and Scholastic book club forms of my youth, purveying dozens of collections of “true” ghost stories, urban legends, cryptids, and other such believe it or not tales. I couldn’t get enough. So, in reading Mahnke’s The World of Lore: Monstrous Creatures and Dreadful Places, I was definitely hit with a certain nostalgia.

However, because of this, none of it seemed very fresh to me, either.

As someone who’s been into this stuff for a while, I could often tell where the story was going from the first paragraph or two. Mahnke writes in an extremely conversational style, but as the stories went on began to feel a little repetitive, engaging in the same turns of phrase and cliched undergrad term paper philosophizing again and again. By the end, the writing began to grate on me a bit.

Listening to the third Lore book, Dreadful Places, as an audiobook did not help this, unfortunately, though Mahnke himself reprises his narration. I guess, in that sense, it is practically like listening to the podcast itself. Mahnke reads his tales like the most unengaging ghost tour guide imaginable, going through these interesting tales with all the verve and expression of the host of a JavaScript instructional video. That’s not to say any of this is all bad, of course. I would have loved this as a kid, and as many of those dusty paperbacks I loved are now long out of print, and out of date, The World of Lore seems highly appropriate for the weirdness-curious.

I have enjoyed listening to episodes of My Favorite Murder with my partner while we take our evening walks. Like Welcome to Night Vale, this is an extremely popular podcast with tons of devoted fans, to a surprising degree. My partner was introduced to the podcast when she stumbled into a live show as a last minute friend substitution a year or so ago, and while neither of us have become super fans, I can definitely see why they have such a following, one with their own nerdy monicker even (Murderinos). Hosted by comedian Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark, they explore the perennial fascination we have towards the “true crime” genre and the darker aspects of daily life.

A lot of the appeal of the show, though, is the engaging rapport between the hosts as they discuss various aspects of their lives in public, feeling as though inviting the listeners into their dinner parties, before getting into the uncomfortable dynamics of the specific murders being discussed that day. This mix of the personal and the horrific, I think, is really appealing.

Because of this, we decided to listen to Kilgariff and Hardstack’s My Favorite Murder book together, Stay Sexy and Don’t Get Murdered, a “dual memoir” that mixes in each of the hosts’ stories, on occasion in conversation with each other.

Of all the book adaptations, I think, Stay Sexy and Don’t Get Murdered was probably the one that benefited most from an audiobook format. With both reading their own sections, and occasional live readings, it really felt like an extension of the podcast. There were definitely some harrowing personal moments, as well as relatable anecdotes of growing up and trying to make it in the world (though not all of us made it to podcast fandom fame, of course). I was not expecting it to be so “self-helpy,” I guess. If you’re interested in more descriptions of forgotten murders in history, the book may be disappointing to you, but if you’re looking for more personal stories from Karen and Georgia, this book will definitely fit the bill. Which is probably exactly what a fan of the podcast wants!

So, for The Last Book on the Left: Stories of Murder and Mayhem from History’s Most Notorious Serial Killers, I haven’t actually listened to the podcast that spun it off yet. Like with My Favorite Murder, my partner found herself randomly taking someone else’s place at a live podcast taping of the Last Podcast on the Left last year, and like with MFM, we put it on the to-listen-to list.

Seeing this book coming out, though, I checked out a copy and decided to round out this entry with a little more true crime.

The hosts of The Last Podcast of Left, Marcus Parks, Ben Kissel, and Henry Zebrowski, take a similar premise as My Favorite Murder, discussing some famous murders, mysterious crimes, or even paranormal events, and using it as a platform for jokes. There could definitely be unfortunate implications for this tact, but after reading the book, I was impressed at how they handled the tone for the most part.

With drawings by Tom Neely evoking the classic EC Comics like Tales from the Crypt, this is definitely an evocative Halloween read delving into the background and stories of nine infamous serial killers. Not being a serial killer aficionado, most of this was new to me. Like the format of the podcast, apparently, Parks puts together a social and historical profile of each killer, describing the context of their times and the extent of their crimes, while Kissel and Zebrowski attempt to lighten the mood with jokes, more or less successfully. In spite of (or perhaps, because of?) not really being into serial killers or all that gross, truly terrifying stuff (remember from the last entry, I like spoopy stuff, right?), I found the book informative and humorous, making me more interested in listening to a few episodes.

I’m feeling a little weird to be posting about this fluff considering our own historical context right now, but this will be a nice palate cleanser for my next entry, in which I will consider some of the books I’ve read over the last few years discussing the rise of fascism in the world in recent years, as well those fighting against it. In spite of any recent successes, this is a topic that will, I think, continue to be horribly relevant.