…and we’re back, just in time for the closing stretch.

The Kid is doing fine, though things took a bit longer than expected. The same goes for getting back into my regular routine after eleven days of holding down the home front by myself while the ladies were at the hospital. At least my car got a bit of action after idling in the driveway for six months.

When in comes to such fraught moments, distractions become a greater necessity even as the act of choosing them becomes more complicated. Familiar standbys get pushed aside, lest they be permanently tainted should events take a turn for the crappy. Better to stuff oneself with “brain carbs” in bulk, which in my case was “whatever low-grade AIP drek I could find streaming somewhere.” Crab monsters and blood beasts and ghosts sporting invisible bikinis — the blessed white noise of cheap special effects and familiar character actors phoning it in for an easy paycheck.

Musically, I did fall into the familiar favorites rut by leaving Bauhaus’ Mask LP on the turntable for the duration. It’s a buffet of perfect seasonal soundscapes from a band managing to balance — if only for one darkly shining album — their goth pioneer gimmick with their unabashed Bowie fandom.

Recommended listening: Bauhaus – The Passion of Lovers (from Mask, 1981)

My plan for daily Countdown posts went into the shitter on Friday when we had to deal with the real-life nightmare of the Kid getting admitted to the hospital, where she and Maura have been since. It’s no COVID-related, but related to a preexisting condition. She’s doing okay though what happens next is still being hashed out.

Content will be thinner than usual until shit settles down.

“With a cold shiver he could not control, Polen was suddenly conscious of a single fly loose in the room, veering aimlessly for a moment, then beating strongly and reverently towards Beelzebub.”

– Isaac Asimov, “Flies” (1953)

Recommended listening: Alien Sex Fiend – Buggin’ Me (from a 1986 single)

I wish I’d held back the Wire jam for this perfect moment, but 2020 defies anticipation. Fortunately my bench of musical annotations is deep and broad.

Figure Two: And this pattern is always the same?

Figure One: [Shaking his head.] By no means. Their world is full of Maple Streets. And we’ll
go from one to the other and let them destroy themselves. One to the other…one
to the other…one to the other–

– Rod Serling, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” (1960)

Recommended listening: Tot Rocket & The Twins – Employment Line (from a 1980 EP)

You know how it works now
But you don’t care
You’re not the victim of it all
So you think it’s fair

Real-life horror storytelling at its finest. Also the closest analog to The Clash that America ever produced.

When I opened the door into the elm-arched blackness a gust of insufferably foetid wind almost flung me prostrate. I choked in nausea, and for a second scarcely saw the dwarfed, humped figure on the steps. The summons had been Edward’s, but who was this foul, stunted parody? Where had Edward had time to go? His ring had sounded only a second before the door opened.

The caller had on one of Edward’s overcoats—its bottom almost touching the ground, and its sleeves rolled back yet still covering the hands. On the head was a slouch hat pulled low, while a black silk muffler concealed the face. As I stepped unsteadily forward, the figure made a semi-liquid sound like that I had heard over the telephone—“glub . . . glub . . .”

– H.P. Lovecraft, “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1933)

Recommended listening: Finitribe – Monster in the House (from a 1990 single)

I know I run the risk of alienating some folks by leaning hard on real life political horrors this time round, but I don’t give a flying fuck.

“We tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away.”

– Albert Camus, The Plague (1947)

Some virulent flu-like disease has been my go-to Horseman of Speculated Apocalypses for a long while now. I even did a couple of flash fiction posts about it (which I should really clean-up and repost).

It has nothing to do with The Stand (which I’ve never gotten around to reading outside the spin-off story in King’s Night Shift collection), but that such and event would find ample ground to run wild in contemporary society.

Invisible, gradual, and oh so deniable up until the point where it’s too late stave off collapse — why it’s practically tailor-made to fuck with a society which prioritizes commercial abstractions over people and managerial methods which discourage “unpopular” decisive action no matter how necessary it may be.

The incremental roll-out fosters complacency and resentment against any containment measures which might upset one’s personal status quo (or bottom line). It’s all alarmist nonsense until the Reaper comes for you, at which point you’ll just become another ignorable statistic.

There’s nothing dramatic or sexy about it, just a tedium which erodes an already exhausting vigilance.

Recommended listening: Wire – I Am the Fly (from a 1978 single)

It’s always the little things.

The weekend following the arrival of my unique treasure, I experienced a particularly violent sneeze which dislodged a small fragment of tissue in my left eye, causing a half-moon shaped blind spot right in the center of my vision.

It wasn’t anything serious, but just another one of the little nightmares that become the norm once our flawed sacks of flesh hit middle age. I couldn’t do much in the way of reading or videogame playing or movie watching while I waited for the microscopic gobbet to dissolve or drift to a less intrusive part of the affected peeper, so I decided to pass time with YouTube’s extensive archive of CBS Radio Mystery Theater episodes.

The series, which ran from 1974 to 1982, was a throwback to Inner Sanctum, The Whistler and other classic spooky-suspense series from the Golden Age of Radio. (CBSRMT was the brainchild of Himan Brown, who’d created Inner Sanctum three decades prior.) Hosting duties were handled by E.G Marshall, framing the main event with a more avuncular take on Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone riffs.

The radio plays themselves? Well, they are definitive proof of Sturgeon’s Law, but sheer number of episodes — almost 1400 of them — means that the ten percent that isn’t crap offers a pretty rich vein of material to explore. There’s mystery, suspense, crime drama, psychological thrillers, Twilight Zone style “modern fantasy,” old-fashioned ghost stories, with an occasional bit of science-fiction thrown in to the mix.

I’m most partial to the direct adaptations of tales by likes of Bierce, Poe, Stevenson, Le Fanu and the rest of that old school spooky stories crew. The efforts to contemporize them were less successful, with a scfi-fi slanted take on “The Masque of Red Death” coming off as extra goofy during the present circumstances while a serial-killer noir interpretation of “The Cask of Amontillado” just feels overlong and gross.

The above doesn’t sound like a glowing endorsement, but I found it’s wiser to undersell, rather than oversell, retro entertainment artifacts. There a thick layer of not-so-finely aged cheese to the material, many of the plots are shallow reskins of familiar tales, and every female character under thirty sounds like they were voiced a chain-smoking great aunt who grew up in Toronto.

But if you have an hour to kill on either side of sunset, a comfy sofa to stretch out on, and a willingness to roll with the periodic bouts of goofiness, tuning (or rather “streaming”) into of the choicer episodes can be a sublime spooky season experience. So much so, in fact, that I’ve kept it as a Sunday afternoon tradition even after my eye problem cleared up.

Recommended listening: Peter Wolf – Lights Out (from a 1984 single)

Speaking of cheesy shit from the past I can’t help enjoying…

A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place
your sight can knock on, echoing; but here
within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze
will be absorbed and utterly disappear:

as if awakened, she turns her face to yours;
and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,
inside the golden amber of her eyeballs
suspended, like a prehistoric fly.

– Rainer Maria Rilke, “Black Cat” (1923)

Recommended listening: UK Decay – The Black Cat (from The Black 45 EP, 1980)

Meow more than ever.

“And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.” – Edgar Allan Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842)

Recommended listening: Cabaret Voltaire – Spread the Virus (from Red Mecca, 1981)

I’m not what form the Halloween Countdown will take this year.

A deadly plague is sweeping a world already pushed to the brink of hysteria. Meanwhile, your humble narrator has spent the last six months walled up in his ancient New England manse, surrounded by dusty artifacts of bygone ages. His body still suffers the lingering debilitation from the dread disease, while his overstimulated mind burns with odd and pointless manias.

I doubt Edgar Allan Poe himself could do anything with such material.

Yet custom must be observed, and so I open the doors of my vault to you poor wandering souls. I entreat you to tread lightly, for my ears are not accustomed to the noise.

Recommended listening: Beware the Dangers of a Ghost Scorpion! – Least of All Monsters (from Beware The Dangers Of A Ghost Scorpion, 2020)

A rip-rockin’ local act whose surf-horror stylings caught the attention of the macabre Maura, who added this LP to our collection of cursed discs.