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We're closing the door on Outside the House by Bessie Kyffin-Taylor!

Special thanks to reader and science-master MARTY JOPSON!!

Next up: The Black Stone Statue by Mary Elizabeth Counselman

Comments

Anonymous

Chris said they would assume that you are some sort of Turbo or Ozone 😆😂 were you a teen break dancer too?

Anonymous

Just started this up, and the Leslie Klinger thing is funny. All I have to say about why my handle is Shoggoth *Lord* is, next time you gents can have Patton on you should check out the Shea story "Fat Face."

Anonymous

I think it's the weird-ass indoor greenhouse that always grabbed my imagination.

Anonymous

I thought the last paragraph really ruined what would have be a great weird tale. It would have been better if the clues were scatter in the text to pick up on a seconded reading. Maybe even the one line about the family owning the mines that's in there would have been enough to put it together on rereading but the very blunt exposition steals that discovery from the reader.

The Screaming Moist

For anyone who’s interested in next week’s story, HorrorBabble has a reading up on YouTube: https://youtu.be/XdqVE-MFM0k

Anonymous

Horrorbabble is how I first heard so many stories. A plus readings.

Anonymous

I think the family is an excellent example of high context, implicit culture. There are many such cultures around the world - not necessarily defined by political boundaries - who would argue that the family is clearly and obviously all but screaming: "The garden is incredibly dangerous and the reason for that is a devastating family secret!" The humorist Dave Barry once wrote about making plans with a travel agent in Japan. He expressed to her the desire to fly from one city to the next. The agent replied that most people took the train. He thanked her for the information and explained that he would prefer to fly. She began extolling the virtues of the very fine train. Both were incredibly frustrated. He, because this travel agent couldn't get it through her thick head that he wanted to fly. She, because her customer couldn't seem to grasp that there is no flight that made a lick of sense. So I imagine some readers going through this story incredibly frustrated at the family for not being more forthcoming - even forthcoming with a lie. While other readers are just as frustrated with the protagonist for not having a modicum of sense - the locks are there for a reason, you file-mad moron.

Anonymous

This story seemed like it could have been *way weirder* than it turned out to be. If the lawn really had somehow transformed into an alien landscape in the evening, full of surreal terrain and inexplicable denizens (maybe like the underworld in Black God's Kiss, or Hodgson's House on the Borderlands) and the family had had some sort of secret about why this house connected to this strange land. Maybe sorcery of mad science, or heck, keep the mining accident idea but just introduce it earlier to make it relevant to the rest of the story. As it is, it sort of feels like Bessie Kyffin-Taylor came up with the whole "rich family with evil lawn" idea, but then couldn't figure out a reason for it to be a thing until after she'd already written the whole story, so she tacked on the mining accident bit and called it good. Also, "Kyffin" sounds like the German slang for smoking weed, so that's probably important context too.

Anonymous

What Chad said about living your life while ignoring the 400 buried people really hits home for me as a Canadian right now. With the news coming in every day, it’s hard to just live your life and not let the awfulness of that get you down. I won’t go into detail about what happened here because there’s so much of it but if you want to know, just look up ‘residential schools canada’ and you’ll see what I mean.

Anonymous

That last paragraph reminds me of a movie or something I ran across in the last decade or so. I don't recall much about it, but seems like it was a locked door mystery where the background was the same "collapsed tunnel, buried miners" thing, but where there was a tunnel connecting the mines to the house and the family heard the miners singing as they slowly starved to death because the patriarch wouldn't pay to dig them out. Ski weekend, people being picked off one by one. Don't recall if it was a movie, a podcast, or an episode of Murder She Wrote. If anyone recognizes it I'd appreciate the title

Anonymous

The internet archive has a copy of next week's story online if anyone is looking for it: https://archive.org/details/wt_1937_12/page/n37/mode/2up

Anonymous

That last paragraph reminds of a whole lot of creepy pasta. There's a real tendency to over explain at the end. There are loads of relatively creepy stories that reach the end and try to re write the Russian sleep experiment.

Anonymous

I like this one (as you guys mentioned, it’s got an E.F. Benson feel to it) but it’s a bit of a ‘Battlestar Galactica’ reboot situation - I kinda wish it had stopped just before the ending. Don’t get me started on the whole stupid ‘angels did it’ thing…

Anonymous

It feels to me like there are two good but very different stories here. Before the last paragraph and you have a good weird tale. Take the last paragraph and expand on it and you could have good ghost/gothic tale.

Anonymous

Chad! You’re moving?? That’s really going to screw up my stalking schedule. Anyways, on an unrelated note, the Lockpicking Lawyer is a favorite channel of mine. It’s taught me much, but I’m sure you know that already.

Anonymous

This was an affront to the lawns of God and humanity!

Anonymous

I'm finally caught up enough to comment on a semi-recent story! Anyway, my take on why Elsie didn't tell the narrator any specifics is A. she's REALLY young, probably 16-17. B. her whole life involved the odd rituals with the low garden, just like the other kids there. She simply had no context that this wasn't a "normal" thing to just obey, thus she never considered that an outsider might question it. She might even consider it a bit of a game, since she told him that he wasn't in any real danger. I bet some of the older kids flirted with the edges of the phenomenon, rarely pushing it as far as Bob did when he got "brain fever".

Anonymous

I'm late listening to and commenting on this story, but I wanted to discuss the awkward swerve from "the Falconers live on the edge of Fairyland," which seems to be where the story is headed, to "the Falconers are haunted by angry ghosts." In Brittany, Ireland, and the more Celtic parts of Ireland, there is folklore in which the Fae or Fair Folk are closely associated with the dead. Perhaps if the story had been more specific about the location of the Falconers' home, those beliefs could have informed the readers' understanding of this story and the ending would have felt less random. Also, why the hell did Old Falconer make continued residence in the house a condition of the inheritance? That detail felt like it was tacked on so readers wouldn't ask, "Why doesn't the family just move?"