Pleasant Evenings Book Club

Imagine a world where the state and capital have have attained so much power over our individual lives that every waking moment is surveilled and cataloged by an unthinking system, but we are only dimly aware of the problems at the edges because the burden of a meaningless life demands you find ways of floating through it all in a semi-narcotized state. Sounds bleak, but it goes down smooth in rot...

When reporter Nellie Bly successfully insinuated herself into the care of a mental institution, she encountered all the abuse and neglect (yes both) one might expect. What she wasn't prepared for was the terrifyingly inedible food! It's the finale to our two-part coverage of 10 Days in a Mad-House. A thought provoking read that we somehow manage to extrapolate modern-day doomerism out of and a sur...

So half of Nellie Bly's trailblazing piece of stunt journalism "10 Days in a Mad-House" doesn't take place in a madhouse. This week we follow Nellie Bly through a slice of New York's boarding houses, police precincts and hospitals. We get a taste of what it's like to be processed by the systems that handle those on the margins of society. Mostly we have fun with the conventions of Gilded Age Ameri...

It's a double feature! Tonight we're sitting down to watch the Soviet Folk-Horror highlight Viy (1967) and Phil Tippett's unrelenting handcrafted staring contest with the abyss, Mad God (2022). Honestly the two movies have only the most tenuous and surface-level similarities, yet the Venn Diagram charting the kinds of people into either of these movies is nearly a circle. (It's gag reflex that acc...

Some technical issues in the back half of this episode spoils what could have been our best one yet. But it's still a really good episode!   In our discussion of the latter two King in Yellow stories, we hit on all the great Carcosian themes: spiritual terror, human frailty, insanity, and a wacky book that makes all that stuff really come alive.

Have you heard of the song of the Hyades in dim Carcosa? Where black stars rise and where flap the tatters of the King in Yellow? No? Well you can read all about it in the fake play 'The King in Yellow' which seems to cause the characters in the stories from Robert Chambers' short story collection 'The King in Yellow' all kinds of troubles.   There are four stories in this collection that built th...

You've seen the video game adaptation in Top 10 lists for "MOst DISTURBING GAMES!" (maybe that's just me) but have you read the landmark 1967 short story by Harlan Ellison? It's bleak, it's unhinged, and finally, it's being covered by the only podcast on the internet devoted to having pleasant evenings, Pleasant Evenings Book Club!

Probably the most famous horror writer you can't find in an airport, Thomas Ligotti is the name to beat for cult-status in literary horror. For our first episode of Pleasant Evenings Book Club, we're diving into his Nyctalops Trilogy. Three very different stories linked by a very familiar evil at the center of the stories' point of view. We talk about the warped mind of abusers, pessimism in moder...