BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - FICTION

The Behemoth (2016)/The Behemoth 2 (2017)   Scotch (2016) Is There Anybody Out There (2018) Pixie (2018) In the relatively early days of the podcast boom, Rick Coste Productions produced some above average short 'weird fiction' narrative series geared largely to younger audiences but which are listenable for anyone else. The wierdness is often, although not always, explained in more realistic ways than usual but every series has been well written enough to carry that off. The Behemoth is the single voice (mostly) story of an unusual and weird road trip. A 'monster' (a mysterious stone man) arises out of the sea at Cape Cod and walks in a straight line across the United States. A lonely teenage girl, Maddy, makes her way to him and decides to walk with him. In the event she is a protective force for her silent friend as the usual suspects in a disturbed society insist on seeing the 'monster' as a problem rather than as a natural force to be respected and

The Deep Vault (2016) Life After/The Message (2016) The Blood Drawn Chronicles (2016-2018) The Switchboard (2017)   The London Necropolis Railway (2018)    The Echo Protocol (2019)     Arca-45672 (2019)   Confessions from the Nocturne Nebula (2019)     The Deep Vault is rollicking dystopian science fiction. A band of youngsters escaping some unknown apocalypse find themselves navigating a bunker that appears to include a government project that breeds monsters and has two squabbling competing computer systems as well as a mad scientist. This is the excuse for some gruesome body horror as well as a move through levels that will be familiar to any games player. It is dark but fun stuff, the darkness alleviated by the mildly comic and satirical treatment of the leading characters.  Life After and its sequel The Message adopt a method that is usually tiresome and has become hackneyed already in the fictional podcast space - the dependence of narrative on the detritus of technology (usuall