FICTIONISTA
Two exes and their new girlfriends on double-date hell night at the rankest pizza dive in creation end up biting off more than they can chew. A bittersweet first-contact story best consumed nowhere near mealtime.
In print (Pulp Literature #32) and now FREE AUDIO at StarShipSofa!!! Narrated by bestselling author Alethea Kontis.
Now online: “Elephant Teeth,” a quiet little eco-rage story about animal saboteurs, elephant cults, and new beginnings. Free in audio, as read by the author.
The tail end of 2018 wriggled away from me like a tail off one of countless chameleons my sister and I spent hours chasing through our sweaty Austin childhood. I finally got a moment to listen to the Asimov’s magazine October podcast double issue, which opens with a sweet short piece by William Ledbetter, then (at precisely 8 minutes in) has my listicle story “Because Reasons” — as read by me. Relatively Texas-twang free!
permalink: https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/asimovs/episodes/2018-10-30T06_49_55-07_00
The lovely people at Tales to Terrify have released my remurder story “Redux” in audio.
Read by Nikolle Doolin and keeping company with H. P. Lovecraft’s The Cats of Ulthar: REDUX.
Kudzu has fascinated me (and freaked me out) since I saw a short documentary as a kid, footage of an abandoned farmhouse being completely overtaken by the voracious vine in a matter of weeks. Thanks to rapid time-lapse techniques and public television, I experienced the event as happening in a matter of minutes — maybe even seconds. Years later on a road trip across the south I drove through miles of back-country highway shrouded by towering strangled forest, trees dead underneath but giving the semblance of life in a weird kind of vegetal zombification process, a green and vibrant undeath.
Here’s my fiction tribute to this slow-motion strangler of the plant kingdom, now in audio over at new Canadian venture The Centropic Oracle:
An interview is up for the podcast Invaders From Planet 3, in which Robin Shantz probes me about Watership Down, Childhood’s End, A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Bionic Woman, A
rk II, and the Regencies of Georgette Heyer.
This interview took place in May 2015 in “the lair of bloginhood, located in a sub-aquatic citadel on the floor of the Bay of Fundy.”
Bonus that the lair was equipped with amazing homemade candy, too.
If you enjoy a deep eerie sadness in your dark cosmic fiction and you like free audio, give a listen to my recent reading for Issue #27 of the dark-lit magazine Three Lobed Burning Eye.
And for those so inclined, here’s a direct mp3 link to Alex reading “The Marking” by Kristi DeMeester.
I’m happy to say Toasted Cake podcast has just posted another coolio post-apoc ruins story: “Moving Away” by Evan Dicken. I love me a good mall-in-decay tale!
Here’s TOASTED CAKE #147: MOVING AWAY BY EVAN DICKEN, READ BY ALEX C. RENWICK
direct link to mp3
I’ve just completed another reading for Toasted Cake audio: “Five Things of Beauty” by Patrick Samphire, originally in print on Strange Horizons.
Once, Vaidwattie had told him, “I can make you anything with twelve folds of paper.” He hadn’t believed her. Prove it,” he had said, but she had just shaken her head and been hurt.
Direct link to the mp3: “Five Things of Beauty” by Patrick Samphire, read by Alex C. Renwick
Audio fiction fans might enjoy Caroline Yoachim’s “Pieces of My Body” over at Toasted Cake podcast #137, as read by me. An eerie and thoughtful story about both mortality and im-.
If you like that, check out Toasted Cakes #124 (“Green Future” by Deborah Walker) and #133 (“The Sending” by Darja Malcolm-Clarke). I’m particularly fascinated with my voice in “The Sending”; I was getting over a terrible sore throat and will never sound exactly like that again. It was like wearing an inadvertent disguise, and felt, in its husky other-self way, rather mysterious and spectacular.
Direct links to each story’s mp3: