Flannery O'Connor was a master of the Southern Gothic short story. Her characters are vivid, her turns of phrase equal parts memorable and chilling. These stories make you laugh, make you cringe, and sometimes make you wish you could forget how they end.
This week we chat about two or three collected O'Connor stories, including the renowned A Good Man is Hard to Find. Other topics include desktop deodorant, the science of smooching, the good old days, and the ultimate fate of the baby from Nevermind.
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Every once in awhile you read a character study about a character who is uniquely unpleasant to study—such is the case with John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, a thoroughly delightful book about the thoroughly repulsive Ignatius J. Reilly.
Join us for a discussion of baby birthdays, Seinfeld, dialect, jelly donuts, and solo hobbies.
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Mary Renault's The Last of the Wine depicts Ancient Greece as truthfully as possible. It is historical fiction filled with war, political intrigue, pederasty and explicit homosexual love - the likes of which were rather scandalous when she published it in the 1950s.
Her book also spawned an episode complete with discussions of Mr(s). Doubtfire, Alexander the Fine, unread text messages, and mummy libraries.
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To close out Spooktober, we thought it only appropriate that we gather around the digital campfire and swap some spooooooky stories. Tales told include the Legend of Bloody Mary, an email forward about spiders, The Hook, and a rather disturbing story about Soviet sleep science gone horribly wrong (no really this one's actually sort of graphic and gross).
We forgot the s'mores, but we didn't forget to talk about pleasing terrors, picking up mummies, haunted sandwiches, and Oklahoma ghost stories.
This week we go back to the Brontë well to read Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, the only novel she published before her untimely death at the age of 30.
Wuthering Heights is about romance, vengeance, catching cold, inheriting property, and the perils of attempting to marry above or below your station - all the hallmarks of a good 19th century novel, in other words. We also talk about Thanksgiving, spelling bees, and Muppet Babies - all the hallmarks of an Overdue episode, in other words.
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Though not conventionally spooky, Daphne du Maurier's classic novel Rebecca is a perfect fit for Spooktober. It takes place at a big creepy (but beautiful) house. There's an evil maid. And the late wife of Maxim de Winter haunts every action, every line of dialogue. Rebecca's also a powerful exploration and indictment of how women can have their identity defined for them.
Join us for a chat about terrible husbands, Halloween costumes, plagiarism, old people, and Ace Ventura.
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Spooktober rolls on this week with Jay Anson’s The Amityville Horror, a “true story” from the mid 1970s about a family that buys a haunted house and then gets chased out of it. Its spookiness rating is… pretty low.
We talk a bit about the real-life history of 112 Ocean Avenue, pig monsters, falling off of bikes, spaghetti, and ending chapters with exclamation points.
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Spooktober rolls along with another Choose Your Own Adventure: Louise Munro Foley's Ghost Train.
We make some dubious choices in this week's episode: spending a summer in Canada, fighting corporate greed, discussing cat literature, and getting to the bottom of whose sabotaging the orchards!
This week's adventure is brought to you by Blue Apron.
This week is the start of Overdue’s second-annual Spooktober spookfest, a month full of scary books that will get you in the mood for Halloween!
Our first book, brought to us by special guest host Kathryn VanArendonk, is about Deborah and James Howe’s Bunnicula. Kathryn could never finish this one as a kid, but she braved it as an adult so she could tell you about all the weird stuff that happens in it. A cat reads books. A bunny sucks the juice out of vegetables. And oh yeah, it was written by a dog.
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Andy Weir’s The Martian is about a man who gets trapped on Mars. It’s about all of the actually plausible-sounding science he uses to get himself out of one scrape after another. It’s about the efforts of people back on Earth to get him home. It’s about (we suppose) triumph in the face of adversity, and the innate goodness of humanity.
In this case, what hurts the book the most is what it isn’t: it isn’t a particularly interesting character study, since the wisecracking astronaut Mark Watney seems to sail over every obstacle the red planet throws at him without much physical or psychological damage. It isn’t a treatise on solitude (Watney rarely seems particularly affected by his loneliness in any lasting way) or on the darker side of human nature (there are no adversaries aside from Mars itself). What’s here is a breezy read that’s got some entertainment value, but it doesn’t have quite the impact it could have had, which is a shame.
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