Thanks for the story.

Thanks for letting me know, Art.

The accent of the reader fit the story well, bringing a more tangible feeling of ‘being from another place’ into the setting.

With out being as disturbed as I was hoping to be, I really enjoyed the story. It makes you wonder how plausible it is to actually have another you floating around out there. But the idea of people actually knowing that it’s your doppleganger.. I’m not too sure how I feel about that.

My urge to be disturbed made me come here in search for a link to Pseudopod, but to my dismay, a link isn’t here. Hopefully Google will help me out.

Keep up the good work! And, again, an awesome find on the voice!

Oh, and so I don’t break character, shit, fuck, damn it, fuckhole, shiteater, etc.

The view of from the foreigner on Japan is usually quite skewed and made too personal. This story seems quite personal, but accurate. It is a very typical story from the male perspective in Japan…sex is usually the hot topic. The horror aspect is something I’ve never heard before though, I liked that.

The story felt very hands-on….He knew things about Tokyo and Japan that only someone who has been living here would have experienced, which made the story and it’s characters even more believable.(if he hasn’t lived here, then he surely talked with someone who has…in detail…which I suppose you should do if writing a story.)

I guess I can relate to the characters a bit, being that I’m partial to the story’s setting, but I liked everything about it nonetheless. The facts, the ghosts, the author, the reader…a great story. Hope I can see some rikonbyou this Halloween, preferably not one that looks like myself…

I wasn’t entertained and didn’t find myself contemplating the story when it was over. It was over, and that was that. Usually I mull the stories over, but this one left me as soon as Daikaiju started up. The story didn’t live up to the intro.

And I’d say PG-13 at most, definitely not R.

It was a clever bit of writing the way the author introduced the past loves, but the story was too long for the punch line.

I enjoyed the peek at Japanese culture, and the Australian accent, nice switch.

On the other hand, there seems to be a long, *long* block of expository dialog at the beginning. Things pick up about 2/3 of the way through, but I’d almost lost interest by then. And when we finally get the resolution, it’s somewhat forced and stagnant.

Not bad, not great, but a decent piece for All Hallow’s Eve.

I have to admit I’ve soured a bit on the story since I first heard it; there was a kind of pandering tone when descriping the Japanese and their culture. Sometimes it was fine, but other times, it crossed the line from dispassionate description into geeky infodump. But, since it was first-person, there’s a certain latitude.

Scary story by the way.

Firstly, as a Brit, I wanted to comment on movie horror (which wasn’t your main area of discussion). British movie horror is currently in the best shape it’s been since The Wicker Man in the 70s. I’d go as far as saying it’s the best thing in our movie industry. To make my point here are a few movie names here – Sean Of The Dead, Twenty Eight Days Later, Dog Soldiers. The absolutely magnificent The Descent is among the best horror movies I have ever seen, it got me crawling out of my skin. There are enough of these movies being made that there is a second tear, with films like Severance and Creep. Unlike Hollywood most of these films come under what you called Deep Horror, with a real intent to get under your skin. From a British perspective, far from being a dead genre we are in the midst of a golden age.

Secondly, I thought you did modern horror a bit of a disservice implying it died off in the 80s. House Of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski has got to be up there as one of the most innovative horror novels ever written (he just released a follow up but it’s a road novel) and it was put out in 2000. Sadly, Z. is about as prolific as J.D Salinger so it didn’t start a trend the way King did, but if there is a better deep horror book out there, I haven’t read it. On mention of HOL I just posted a pretty substantial piece on the topic over in my blog, so please come over and take a look.

I have to admit I don’t read all that much current genre fiction – i tend to Amazon and read the classics. But thinking about my fave horror stories – HOL and I Am Legend – I can see what you mean about deep horror. IAL gets it’s fear from the paranoia of knowing every living thing out there wants to kill the hero, and they’re *vampires*, HOL gets it’s horror from the sheer unexplainable but emotionless scale of the threat – a distortion in reality. This is what horror should be, never cheap frights.

I’ll try and come back and make some comments on the story when I get around to listening to it.

I can’t recommend this on any grounds.

Oh yeah, and the outro made me giggle like a little girl. Loudly. On the bus. Yeah, I got weird looks. Totally worth it.

I think you may have overstated things in the intro, though, when you said that the story contained “explicit sexual content.” Sex was important to the story, true, but it was all implied and off-camera. This is something I’ve noticed in a lot of the old Escape Pod episodes, too — your warnings almost always make any sexual content sound like it’s more graphic than it actually is. Maybe you’re just playing it safe, but it seems like you might be scaring away a lot of potential readers who don’t mind sexuality but just want to avoid hearing pornographic content.

Oh, by the way, Steve: thanks for the BSG in-joke at the end. It was nice to have something to laugh at as I started work this morning.