“At its best, The Story Must Be Told evokes the best of Chuck Palahniuk and Anthony Burgess. The stories sicken, unsettle, and unhinge those who hear it.”
-Sounds Scary: the Vile Holiness of The Story Must Be Told from brightestyoungthings.com
Overview
Starting in 2016, I began writing for The Story Must Be Told. At first we published a short story a week, then every two weeks as production grew in complexity with scoring and sound design. Over seven years I wrote more than a hundred stories for podcast, and enjoyed my stories narrated by some wonderful guest readers including Joe Pera (Joe Pera Talks with You—Adult Swim; Elemental—Pixar), Marcus Parks (The Last Podcast on the Left), and Jackie Zebrowski (Last Podcast Network).
They made a strange love
Episode artwork by Andrew Short
“Piece by piece, he removed the wrapping, until he saw her face. The hair had been false—it fell away with the bandages. She was smooth, rippling, and bright. She had but the one eye. The rest of her face was scattered and uncanny, an impressionist version of what a face might be.”
A sickly, homeless alien and the man who loves her discover an abandoned wheelchair. It brings them an evening of respite and laughter before the coldest night of the year.
It was a delight to have Joe read this one. Writing it for his calming voice gave the story a unique gentleness some of the other stories don’t always have. Despite being lumped in with the horror genre, I always aspired to hit every kind of feeling and genre at least in some capacity. This was my first love story for the podcast.
It is one of our more popular episodes, played over 30,000 times.
Warmth and dissolution
“The child lay on the father’s chest. The man reclined in zero g, letting his body unfurl. His fingers drifted apart, his neck elongated, the child warm against his breast. Life without gravity stirred memories he didn’t even know he had. He could sense a darkness before birth, a hazy recollection of floating inside the warmth of his mother, a living world pulsing all around him. ”
A father and son float in an endless void after the death of humanity. Their mission is to find a new home, one only their distant ancestors will be alive to know. The father wonders what will happen to a child born without ever knowing another human soul.
I wrote this while I was spending many days alone with a toddler during the pandemic. The child was born at the height of the outbreak in NYC, and I often wondered what the lack of human contact would do to the kid’s development. Days alone with just a child for company led me to imagine a father and child alone on a space ship, trying to remember what human interaction felt like.
An Intruder Invoked
““... once a brain dies, death produces a malefactor. Waiting in the lifeless brain is a sinister agent who requires the dark urges of the cannibal to be realized. Yes—nature has her own forbidden arts.”
An aged reclusive seeks a forbidden intellect growing inside the brains of infected livestock. Using darkest science, he summons it to flesh. No one denies the call of The Intruder.
This story was inspired by a seminar I attended years ago about the prions that cause mad cow disease. I imagined a scientist hellbent on creating a brain composed entirely of the corrupted proteins.
This is a sequel to a prior story called “An Intruder Intrudes,” in which a malevolent presence hides in a brain tumor and takes over a man’s conscious will.
I’m a Bustling Beehive
“Down the tunnels of Bath & Body Works, dotted with veins of calloused flesh/
Brandon 522 floated, and truly was impressed/
Despite the grease, the digestion, the plastic, the enzymes and the acid/
The inside of god’s colon smelled like an expensive salad.
”
In the future, all humanity functions as cells of a larger creature: Bath & Body Works. One lowly cell named Brandon 522 is deemed unfit for labor, and is consumed by the enormous centipede of a corporation.
Every so often, I’m allowed to rhyme on the podcast, and this was one of those times. I wrote this pulsing ten-minute sci-fi poem and composed the score myself. I collaborated with our composer Carl Schroeder and director Adam Wirtz to set up the sound design of the post-apocalyptic world.
Thanks to my old day job in the perfume industry, I have … strong feelings on Bath & Body Works. It was an easy leap to imagine them as a miles-long leviathan devouring the world with a human army.
The First Photo of God
“God was a worm. Massive, yes, otherworldly, of course—its features rippled in Dan’s mind, sank into other neurosensations like hunger and lust. As unpleasant as it was to the eye, it curdled desire deep inside his gut, an addiction just waiting to happen. But it was a worm all the same.”
The government kidnaps a homeless man to take the first photograph of god.
I wrote an earlier version of this story for the experimental first season of the podcast. Over the course of a hundred episodes, the idea expanded in my mind. Whereas the first version was a detached account of the release of the first photo of god and all the fallout, the new version was a more dramatic telling of the actual photographing.
This story has gone down as one of our fan favorites, and a significant source of lore within the podcast universe. Elements from this episode recurred in a number of later episodes.