PodCastle 295: The Gunner’s Mate
Show Notes
Rated R. Really, this pretty well straddles the line of dark fantasy/horror.
Dave’s review of Gene Wolfe’s The Land Across audiobook for the AudioBookaneers!
The Gunner’s Mate
by Gene Wolfe
“There’s something about this island—“ Muriel began.
Liza shook her head. “I don’t like it either.”
“I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean that at all.” Muriel put down her piña colada. “It feels, well, welcoming. It keeps telling me I’m home, that it’s where I’m supposed to be.”
“You’d better quit drinking this pineapple stuff.”
“I’ve only had one,” Muriel protested. “This is my second. You’re on your third.”
“Kirk drank my first one. Can’t you feel the hostility? The terrible loneliness? It’s like – I don’t know. It makes me think of a haunted house fifty miles from nowhere.”
About the Author
Gene Wolfe
Gene Rodman Wolfe’s work is notable for his dense, allusive prose as well as the strong influence of his Catholic faith. He is a prolific short-story writer and novelist and has won many science fiction and fantasy literary awards.
Wolfe is most famous for The Book of the New Sun (four volumes, 1980–83), the first part of his Solar Cycle. In 1998, Locus magazine ranked it third-best fantasy novel before 1990 (after The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit) based on a poll of subscribers that considered it and several other series as single entries.
About the Narrators
C.S.E. Cooney
Her work includes Tor.com novella, Desdemona and the Deep, her short novel The Twice-Drowned Saint (found in Mythic Delirium’s most recent anthology The Sinister Quartet), and a poetry collection, How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes, featuring her Rhysling Award-winning poem, “The Sea King’s Second Bride.” Her forthcoming novel, Saint Death’s Daughter, will be out with Solaris in 2022. Cooney’s short fiction and poetry can be found in Jonathan Strahan’s Book of Dragons, Ellen Datlow’s Mad Hatters and March Hares: All-New Stories from the World of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, and elsewhere.
Dave Thompson
Dave Thompson aka the Easter Werewolf aka the California King is still uncomfortable with the notion of pumpkin beer, but don’t hold that against him. He lives outside Los Angeles with his wife and three children. Together with co-editor Anna Schwind, he ran PodCastle for five years. Dave is an Escape Artists’ Worldwalker and Storyteller, having been published in, and narrated for, all four EA podcasts.
