Review: Tumble by Trent Jamieson (Podcast)

Online at Pseudopod 74 25th January, 2008

I’m a big fan of podcasts, especially literary ones. I wack them on my ipod, then go for a walk around the burbs for an hour or two and come back well exercised and a little bit happier for having achieved two things at once. So when I discovered Pseudopod – a free horror podcaster – I thought I’d give it a try.

Horror is a genre I approach with trepidation. I’ve got to be in the mood to willingly stick with a character who, by dint of some twisted literary convention, is doomed. If I’m tempted to read horror, I look for stories that promise more than a vicarious shudder.

After listening to the first paragraph of Trent Jamieson’s Tumble with its juxtaposition of the fantastic and the believable (tiny cockroaches hissing in Mother Beet’s eyeball, perhaps irritated by the smoke of her cigarello) I knew I'd found something worth reading (or more accurately, listening to). The language is mature and convincing enough to give me more than one “aha” moment. When the narrator, Grieve, waxed philosophical, I knew exactly what he was on about, despite having been dropped into his strange and frightening world only minutes before.

Mother Beet is a scary crone in a world where demons run riot, where cities outside the main city (named Wish) are falling to ruin. Mother Beet’s son, Daniel, is even worse, a cold blooded murderer who has been known to eat the still-beating hearts of his victims. Grieve is ordered by Wish to eliminate Daniel and, although Grieve is no lawman at heart, he’s addicted to Wish and cannot refuse.

I found this story interesting because the horror works on two levels. In the big picture, there’s this science fictional world where people are literally addicted to a city that both nurtures and controls them. This is a neat statement about the way today’s city dwellers are addicted to and controlled by consumerism. It not only provides an unusual backdrop to the story, but also adds to the inevitable horror at the story’s conclusion.

On the second, more personal level, we have Grieve who is street-wise and driven, but terrified of the evil he chases. He must face it head on, no hesitation, no backing down. Even so, his success is not guaranteed even after the battle is over. That’s the trouble with evil. By the time I neared the end I was hoping that maybe, just maybe, things would work out for Grieve. But this is horror, right? Things do work out in horror, but not how you want.

Fortunately (for me) the gory bits are not overdone. Some is told with minimalist precision, enough to make me shudder but not enough to make me want to switch my ipod over to something a little less confronting. Other bits are told by evading the usual signifiers of violence and referring instead to peripheral happenings or memory. I found myself shocked by Mother Beet’s murder (told in flashback) almost as much as if I’d been shown it all in stream-of-consciousness detail.

Reading horror is one thing, listening to it is another. You absorb the words at a slower pace. There’s time to let them marinate and work up a stew of emotions. There’s inflexions and emphases that only a speaker can impart. Cheynne Wright’s voice is decidedly creepy in this podcast, and certainly adds a dark tone to an already dark story. After listening to the story twice (I walked 9 km during that time), I switched off and, for a few moments, felt a tad disorientated as if I'd returned from somewhere else. Suddenly, the Perth city skyline looked really pretty in sunlight.