Something a little bit different today, because my remote work schedule is playing havoc with my movie-watching schedule, and it occurs to me that I’ve also talked about books here, so hey, why not go for a media trifecta and talk about a podcast as well?
I’ve mentioned Old Gods Of Appalachia here before, in passing, but now’s as good a time as any to talk in more detail about exactly why I like it, because it’s really fucking good. It’s a horror anthology podcast set in an alternate-universe Appalachia, where malevolent beings have been imprisoned, deep beneath the mountains, for millennia. But time erodes everything, and their prison is not as secure as perhaps it once was.
It’s not an especially complex premise, but it doesn’t need to be, because what makes this podcast so good isn’t the complexity of its premise, it’s the execution. Horror is often - maybe not always, but often - highly reliant on mood and atmosphere, and it’s easy to forget sometimes just how well sound and sound alone - in terms of music, ambient sound, and a practiced storyteller - can evoke mood and atmosphere. It’s sort of funny - when it comes down to it, podcasts like this aren’t really that different from old-time radio plays, which can still be surprisingly effective. Sound leaves a lot to the imagination, and what we conjure in our imagination can so often be so much scarier and so much worse than any literal depiction, because we’re drawing on the things that scare US personally the most.
And this podcast definitely knows how to set a mood. The majority of it consists of a single story, told over multiple episodes, by one storyteller (there are occasionally other voice actors, but this is mostly one person doing most of the narration) who sounds like, in the words of a friend of mine, your grizzled uncle who lives back in the hills and has seen some shit. The language is restrained but evocative, tastefully supplemented by vocal effects, the narrator employs other voices to good effect but not gratuitously so, and other voice actors chime in as well. At every moment, though, the focus is on the story, on establishing a setting and illustrating vividly what is happening there. They give you just enough for your imagination to work with, and it does the rest.
And it’s in service of a really good story. Cosmic horror is one of my favorite types of horror, but as I’ve talked about in the past, it’s been sort of tainted, both by nerd-culture appropriation that reduces it basically to “tentacles and madness,” and by the really appalling beliefs of one of its most notable authors, H.P. Lovecraft. There are still good examples of it out there in film and literature (again, got to give a shout-out to The Croning by Laird Barron), but even when it avoids the racism, sexism, classism, religious intolerance, and just all-around xenophobia of Lovecraft’s cringiest moments, it’s still easy to get it wrong, to assume that all you need is some kind of cyclopean horror from beyond space and some weirdo cultists to get over, and that ain’t it. One of the things that makes this such a good, solid example of cosmic horror is that it isn't a bunch of clichés slapped down into some kind of two-dimensional hillbilly caricature.
This may be an alternate-universe Appalachia, but only in the sense that ancient monstrosities are confirmed - horribly confirmed - to exist in this world, and the locations aren’t actual places. The first series is about the mining town of Barlo, Kentucky, and what happens when the coal miners dig too deep, what comes out of the earth, and how it leads to Barlo’s ruin. Now, there is no such town as Barlo, Kentucky in our world, but there are plenty of towns just like Barlo - Appalachian coal towns where everyone gets paid in company scrip, nobody’s ever going to be able to pay back what they owe the company store, and the best you can hope for is to live long enough to retire instead of dying in a cave-in or a fire, and having some relatively good years before the black lung takes you.
That’s real, and so these are stories rooted in a real time and a real place. The people who make this podcast are from Appalachia, live and work in Appalachia, and are tied closely to the land they call home, and so not only is it treated with the respect it is due (Lovecraft’s ideas about the inhabitants of Appalachia were just as awful as his ideas about everyone else), but the horrors that emerge do so organically from this place and time. These aren’t cultists who are evil for reasons, these are coal miners, desperate for any solution to a life of grinding hardship. When evils beyond comprehension walk among these people, they do so as company men, come to tempt them with respite, or as figures of nature - stags with bloody hooves and burning amber antlers.
You get the sense that the people of these hills and hollers have settled somewhere already occupied by warring factions of beings much, much older, who see human beings as pawns or cattle. And likewise, this world is filled with witches who don’t cackle or stir cauldrons, but instead keep gardens of herbs, collect roots, and treat the people of the town and the valley when no doctor can come. Granny women are real, practitioners of country medicine, of old ways that have kept people alive in this part of the world for centuries. There are no erudite scholars here poring over ancient tomes, just people trying to stay alive and push back against things that are ancient and primal. There is a sense of an entire world, an entire secret history gradually unfolding. Not a tentacle or raving lunatic in sight. Put on some headphones, lie back, close your eyes, and listen.
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