A weird fiction podcast from John Lombard

The night in London is less dark than it once was, with gas lamps rising on street corners like phosphorescent mushrooms. Not even the dark nooks that remain are fully safe, for constables patrol until morning, their lanterns bobbing like curious fireflies. And so many of the graveyards now have tall fences - hard iron, ornate and sharp, like rows of cavaliers’ pikes. Even some of the graves are fenced, enclosed in iron cages. London is no longer a safe place for resurrection

One flash of the scalpel, and the assistant’s pinkie finger comes off. It tumbles to the floor, landing on sawdust. The assistant recoils and clutches his bleeding hand. He doubles over, clenching his teeth to block a scream. I don’t know why he bothers. His scream couldn’t be more chilling than the patient’s terrified howl. The surgeon doesn’t stop. He pushes deeper with his knife into the patient’s upper arm, pink yielding to purple. The knife jams on bone, so he tosses it

The amputation was not done with a knife. If it had been a knife, the wound would be clean, precise, smooth. And it was not made by hand. Then the trauma would be feathery, messy, erratic. No. This jagged, irregular, sawtooth edge looks like the work of blunt scissors. Someone in a hurry, a little reckless, seizing whatever tool was close. Such a shame! This would have been a nice little book… if only someone had not excised the last thirty pages The Growl Manger , by Edmund

Goro stumbled home, dreading his wife’s reception, when a paper lantern licked his face. It had been a long day at the art studio. The publisher had requested landscape prints of the post stations of the Central Mountain Route. With no budget for an excursion outside Edo, studio apprentices including Goro spent the day scouring the studio’s archive for illustrations of the specified locations. Where these could not be found, they adapted or invented as necessary, aware that g

We bound through the Galliard Smith gate, dodging the iron pickets, our feet landing hard in the park beneath the park. Thousands of...

Two hours on hold to the council and now I’ve got three kids on the driveway playing silly buggers. They’re taking turns jumping over the...