Ten penny words are drunken misdirection, sideburns correlate to writing prowess, whiskey that burns in a whole new way, and a GHORSE! Find out what all this jargon means, and why we almost recommended Nic Cage's magnum opus, Ghost Rider, in this hppy-go-lucky episode! Welcome to Whiskey and the Weird, a podcast exploring the British Library Tales of the Weird series! This season, we're bowing in reverence to our eighth book in the collection, ‘Holy Ghosts: Classic Tales of the Ecclesiastical Uncanny’ edited by Fiona Snailham. In this episode, our featured story is: The Sexton's Adventure by Sheridan Le Fanu.
Bar Talk (our recommendations):
Jessica is reading Where Furnaces Burn by Joel Lane; drinking a canned Spiritless Old Fashioned.
Damien is reading Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones; drinking a Redbreast 15 Single Pot Still Irish Whiskey.
Ryan is reading Red Rabbit by Alex Grecian; drinking the Lagavuhlin 16 yr old.
If you liked this week’s story, watch The Forest (2016; dir. Jason Zada)
Up next: "A Story Told In Church" by Ada Buisson
Special thank you to Dr Blake Brandes for our Whiskey and the Weird music!
Like, rate, and follow! Check us out @whiskeyandtheweird on Instagram, Threads & Facebook, and at whiskeyandtheweird.com
Ryan: [00:00:00] It even helped create the atmosphere of the story. This is a story that I want to be reading in a darkened library lit only by a couple of candles and a fireplace with a sniff of brandy.
Damien: We're not gonna be there long.
Ryan: Welcome back everybody. I'm Father Ryan Whitley.
Jess: Oh, I am the Honorable Reverend Jessica Berg,
Damien: and I'm just Damien Smith.
Ryan: And together this trinity is whiskey and the weird, the podcast that for the past seven seasons has been delivering you detailed and sometimes even correct analysis of the best spooky stories from times gone by.
Each season, we've prayed that you have been enlightened by our disputations on these themed selections from the British Library's Tales of the Weird Series. As you know, we cover one volume of these canonical [00:01:00] classics every season. And each episode we provide careful exegesis of one story. Please make sure you read the story before listening as we always give a full spoiler summary.
This season we turn to a testament of terror as we explore holy ghosts, classic tales of the ecclesiastical, uncanny, and now hark. I hear the cathedral barrels calling us to Vespers, hastened your to your re's friends. Scoop more incense on the coals and join us in the pews before the last candle.
Flickers out for tonight's reading comes from an all together different lectionary and our master story planner, Jess is here to tell us what it is.
Jess: Oh yeah. Tonight we've got the Sextons Adventure by Sheridan Lenu.
Ryan: [00:02:00] Excellent pronunciation of Lenu. I don't know if it's correct, Le excellent
Jess: fun to say.
Damien: Lenu. I bet before we get into that, you exs carefully, because if you're like, he does ex if you're gonna exe, be careful with it.
Ryan: Absolutely.
Damien: Damien, it's good to hear from you. What are you drinking tonight? Ah, it's a great question, Padre. I was down to the end of my delicious gifted bottle of red breast, single pot, still Irish whiskey.
This is the 15 year red breast. It's an Irish whiskey. It boasts stone , fruit, mingling with cracked pepper, giving way to barley and toasted wood. You know what'll agree? It's delicious. That's all I say. And it's an
Ryan: excellent choice for an Irish author.
Damien: It really is. You gotta, uh, very thematic.
When I, carefully exe, I carefully exe with , red breast, single pot, still Irish whiskey age 15 years. As far as stuff that's on the old bookshelf. So I was able to buy a copy on the day of release of Stephen Graham Jones', Buffalo Hunter, hunter. [00:03:00] Now nice. Here's the thing, I'm obviously a big SGJA fan.
I think I've recommended a number of his books through the years. Four or five years ago when I read The Only Good Indians. I said, this is the book of the year for me. And he's put out some bangers since and when I saw just the title of this one alone, I was like, eh. So I went in blind. I didn't wanna read anything about it. I didn't wanna read any arc reviews or anything like that.
So I went in blind on this, on blind faith of really loving the author and one of his best, one of his best, easily. And the reason is, is he takes his ability to explore at a level of granularity that not a lot of authors do. The. Transformation of Man to Beast and a recognizable beast at that. Because the werewolf book was very similar, right?
His werewolf novel that he was the mongrels. Correct. Yeah. He asked a lot of questions, really interesting things like, Hey, [00:04:00] if you're gonna change shape, if you're gonna, anthropomorphize or reverse that, if you're gonna wolf out as it were and you're wearing spandex or denim, like you might die because you absorb it because it melts into your skin or something.
Jess: Yeah.
Damien: Like just really, really interesting stuff. So you pair this granular analysis of what it's like to go through this transformation. You apply it to a vampire mythos and you apply that to like colonial western exploration and obviously emulation of Native American tribes by white settlers. And you get a really fantastic period piece that's written by arguably one of the best contemporary horror writers in the game right now.
I absolutely love this book. I, I gotta be honest, I'm on the last 15 pages, a couple minor snits that I have with some slow spots, some redundancy, a little bit of drag in the story, but 99% of this book is just absolutely excellent, so I can't recommend it highly enough. Again, that's Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen [00:05:00] Graham Jones.
Sweet.
Jess: Cool.
Damien: What about you, Jess?
Jess: Well, I'm continuing my sober pregnancy journey with a, can you tell how enthusiastic I am about it? This is a spiritless, old fashioned, like a little canned guy.
Damien: Oh.
Jess: It is not that bad. It is not that good, but it is not that bad. It is.
Damien: How would you describe Spiritless whiskey?
Jess: This one, I would describe it as overwhelmingly sweet because they're making it, it's like a little canned, old fashioned, so it's Sure it's pretty sweet. A little bit like, it has a little bit of smokiness to it. It has enough stuff going on in the background that it doesn't just taste like Kool-Aid, like sugar
Damien: water, like
Jess: sugar
Damien: water.
Uh,
Jess: but it is, a little eight ounce can in my ball jar, obviously. Yeah. And it's like. Too much. It's just too much sugar to finish, I [00:06:00] think. Oh, really? So we'll see. But yeah, it's not bad. It's not good. It was on sale. So here we are.
Damien: It seems like I, because I know you've had some, alcohol free beers and whatnot, and I've had a few alcohol free beers, and I know that the flavor replication is, it seems to be a lot easier with something like that.
Yes. Or if you go with a, spiritless cordial or something. Anything that's highly vegetal or herbal, that's easier to mimic. Yeah, it's easy to mimic, but whiskey seems really, really tough to kind of get the flavor notes without having that sting of booze.
Jess: We have , a bottle of just like fake whiskey and it's not very good.
Yeah. This is like a little bit more drinkable, but I think they're replacing that like you get from alcohol, like the little sting with cinnamon or something that kind of has that same on your tongue profile of a little bit sharp, a little bit shocking. So that's where this one like works a little bit better where you're not getting actual [00:07:00] whiskey flavor, but it mimics the effect of as you drink alcohol, there's that little like tingly feeling.
So they're doing it kind of with
Damien: it's
Jess: cinon. So Fireball something. It is
Damien: you drinking Fireball.
Jess: It's not, honestly, it's not, not fireball. It tastes as much like whiskey as Fireball does.
Damien: That's fair. That's not saying much, but that's fair.
Jess: But again, I appreciate that these options exist.
Our local Wegmans has like now just like a giant.
Wall of non-alcoholic beers, non-alcoholic spirits. I have tried a few non-alcoholic wines in their
Damien: Welch
Jess: there again, so little hit or miss.
Damien: They're in the kids aisle in the lunchbox snacks area. Small come to small boxes with a straw.
Jess: But yeah, if you're looking to substitute stuff, I am very appreciative that options exist.
And you can go to a restaurant and they carry a non-alcoholic beer. I'm not the biggest fan of like, oh, that's nice. The [00:08:00] athletic brand.
Damien: I think they only make one good na beer and athletic and that's,
Jess: it's the golden.
Damien: It is the golden,
Jess: yeah.
Damien: It, it's the golden.
Ryan: But to
Damien: have have
Ryan: those options available in the restaurant
Damien: is really Exactly, is huge.
It's nice. Yeah. The Guinness Zero is good. The Guinness Zero is very
Jess: good. I've heard that. I don't think I like Guinness regular as much as
Damien: Well then you will not like the Guinness Zero because
Jess: that's kind of like I, it
Damien: is almost done.
Jess: Maybe I a liquid it up
Damien: twin of regular Guinness.
Jess: Maybe I'll pick it up for next week and then I'll let you know.
Damien: Alright.
Jess: And then on one of my recent trips to the west coast, I stopped into Powells, which has a rotating another display wall of like small press publishers and there's usually like overrepresented horror authors, which is nice. So you can go in and pick and choose some stuff.
And I grabbed a book by Joel Lane. They had a whole display of, oh yeah, I think five or six of his works I picked up where Furnaces burn. Which is like, it's [00:09:00] not quite interconnected, like short stories. It's the same narrator sharing like cases from his like history as a like police officer, as a detective.
And every year he has a case that's like, they get progressively weirder. He's in a really down turned area and it'll be like, okay, is this just weird people or is it a cult? Oh, okay. Well this seems like a ghost dog. Okay. Well, I think, you know, so you just get progressively weirder and he, starts sharing a little bit more about his life.
So you get like cults and murders and the narration is like slightly funnier than you think it's gonna be. Okay. But the writing is great. It's like sparse, a little bit funny, super weird. It's one of the first authors that I've picked up in a long time where it's just like, okay, I will buy everything else that he has written and read it.
Oh, oh
Ryan: wow.
Jess: Yeah. 'cause it was just, it was really unique and cool and definitely worth picking up. So the book I picked up was Where [00:10:00] Furnaces Burn. So now I'm
Ryan: really sorry I missed it because they had a whole panel on him at the last Necronomicon and I didn't get to go to it.
Jess: Yeah. I hadn't even heard of them.
It made me feel like a.
Ryan: That title is what made me hear of him. And you're the second person
Jess: now, so
Ryan: Yeah,
Jess: it made me feel a little outta the loop. 'cause yeah, then I just did some Googling who is this author? What else did he write? And it's just has tons of fans, tons of people who are significantly more with it than I am.
So yeah, I will pick up some more of his stuff.
Ryan: Cool.
Jess: Ryan, what are you drinking?
Ryan: Well, I am drinking the Lagavulin 16.
Jess: Oh, whoa.
Ryan: Go ahead and ask me why.
Damien: Nice. Why? Yeah,
Ryan: well, because we're reading a story called the Sexton's Adventure, and my sexton gave me this bottle of Lagavulin.
Damien: Well, hello. And also I thought that was perfectly themed.
Jess: Thanks.
Damien: Sex today I learned what a sexton is.
Jess: I still don't for sure. Now he's
Damien: a purveyor of booze for all the clergy now. That's
Jess: right. [00:11:00] He's a guy who appreciates a good drink.
Ryan: No, I'll tell you a funny story about, about that. So for those of you that are not up on your ecclesiastical vocabulary, a sexton is kinda like the maintenance guy for a church.
Keeps, keeps track of the buildings and grounds, keeps things moving and running and looking nice. But when I was a kid my dad was on the church board and I would always hear snippets of conversations about how the sexton was drunk and. I knew that the sexton lived in the house that the church owned on the property.
So for the longest time as a kid, I thought that the word sexton meant the drunk guy the church took care of.
And so when I raised that point to my sexton, he goes, that's not altogether untrue.
That's
Ryan: pretty funny. So that's what I'm drinking. This is a special whiskey to me. I think it's a bottle that's a little bit more expensive than what I normally spend on a bottle of scotch. It's peay, it's smoky.
It's got a sweetness to it. I think it's pretty unique among the isle whiskeys. It's not as harsh as a lot of the other ones. It's [00:12:00] really a, it's really a well done whiskey. So highly recommend if you have the opportunity to get one. As for what I'm reading, I'm really excited to talk about this.
I just read a book called Red Rabbit by Alex Grecian. I don't know if either of you have read this.
Jess: No, but I know the cover.
Ryan: Yep. It's got the little wagon going downhill and all the people running after it. Mm-hmm. So this is a horror western and it follows a group of people around who have been tossed together by whim and fate, if you will.
Oh God. Uh, to well, I guess it's fair to say only some of them are chasing a witch. Others of them are kinda just dragged along for the ride. So it's a witch hunting story that were periodically you get a chapter that's from the perspective of the witch and she is not having it. She is not having it at all.
Jess: I get it. I would also like to be left alone,
Ryan: which don't play. And the comradery, the fun, the danger. When this book goes western it goes guns [00:13:00] blazing. And when this book goes horror, it goes hard. Oh, really? It was so fun. I loved it. I likened it to Christopher Mann's between Two Fires. Okay.
And it was a five, it was a five star read for me this year.
Damien: Wow.
Ryan: Red Rabbit by Alex Grehan. Strongly recommend it. I do believe that the sequel Rose of Jericho is coming out very soon. If it's not already out.
Jess: Are you still on your Tom Clancy? Old
Ryan: man kick. Yeah, I'm still I'm still a 40, 40 ish year old man.
Jess: Okay.
Ryan: And so I'm I'm Clancy again.
Jess: Well, because I just googled it 'cause I wanted to look at the cover again. And of course now I know that Tom Clancy also has a novel called Red Rabbit. Perhaps that's the next one you should pick up.
Ryan: That might be the next one. I'm reading Red Rising. He
Damien: absolutely. Or the wrong thing.
You know, this local bookstore,
Jess: this isn't Clancy.
Damien: When he clance with the Devils, sometimes the devil throws you for Aly. Oh
Ryan: man.
Jess: It's just
Ryan: hard right now because when I read my Clancy.
Jess: My clients.
Ryan: It's like, this is just a script for the whole world right now. We're [00:14:00] not gonna talk about this. No.
Damien: We're all thinking it, but, yeah.
Makes sense.
Ryan: Oh gosh. I'm awesome. So, well, that's gonna do it. Uh, I guess for Bar talk, I just nip that in the bud before this. Let's end on an
Jess: optimistic note.
Ryan: Right. Um, but all of that stuff sounds really, really good. I definitely am super interested in Joel Lane in learning more about him, so thanks for bringing that up, Jess.
Jess: Oh, yeah.
Ryan: Uh, well, let's get into what we're gonna talk about tonight. Uh, Mr. James, the acknowledged master of the Antiquarian English ghost story once said of Sheridan Leu, that he was quote absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories. No faint praise coming from Monty there, but who was this writer Mr.
Mr. James so carried on about, and why was he possessed of such prodigious sideburns? At least one of those questions will never be satisfied. Lafe News started growing his sideburns. IIIJ
No. Do go on?
Jess: No. [00:15:00] Oh, I'm Googling right now.
Ryan: Do we have to wait till the next
Damien: Burns dinner to get the story there
Ryan: or what? You might have to, yeah.
Damien: Right.
Ryan: Un unfortunately, perhaps we actually know far more about his biography than we do his inspirational facial hair. Leue was born on August 28th, 1814 in Dublin, Ireland.
His mother was Emma Lucrecia Dobbin, a published writer, and his father was the Reverend Thomas Philip Leue, a clergyman of the Church of Ireland, not just his mother, but many in his family were of a literary bent, so it seemed young. Sheridan was born to take up the Quill. In his early years, the family lived in the village of Zod, and I apologize if I'm not saying that correctly.
Damien: Yeah, you should.
Ryan: Where his father was, rector of St. Lawrence's Church. The village, the church, the church yard. All feature in lain used Zod trilogy of stories of which our story tonight is the central. The central one. Lehan News's Early education [00:16:00] was both formal with a tutor and informal as the boy loved combing through his dad's library.
In the 1830s, financial difficulties struck the broader region and Lehan Yu's father had to move churches several times in order to feed his family. Sadly, by the time his father died, there was no inheritance and they had to sell the vaunted contents of his library to pay off their debts.
Leifer knew, trained as a lawyer at Trinity College in Dublin, but after being called to the bar, he never practiced.
Instead, he became a journalist. In 1844, he married Susanna Bennett, with whom he had four children. In the 1850s, domestic life became complicated. Leif U had stopped going to church, which apparently precipitated a crisis of faith for Susanna. She declined in mental health quite quickly, and in 1858 had what was called quote and hysterical attack.
Jess: Sure.
Ryan: [00:17:00] Dying the following day.
Jess: Oh God,
Ryan: it was a serious one, I guess. Le you grew depressed at this, and in his journals he confessed. He felt some measure of guilt for her death. Effy knew himself died of a heart attack on February 7th, 1873, and one biographer famously claimed that he died of fright leading to all manner of superstitions and nonsensical praise for the writer of the macabre and the supernatural.
However, this does not line up with a note from Han's daughter Emma to one Lord Dufferin in which she wrote
Damien: spill it.
Ryan: He had almost got over a bad attack of bronchitis, but his strength gave way and he sank very quickly and died in his sleep. His face looked so happy with a beautiful smile on it. [00:18:00] So you judge for yourself what story is true.
The
Jess: first
Ryan: one's more
Jess: fun,
Ryan: sensationalist nonsense, or the letter from his daughter
Jess: scared to death by bronchitis.
Ryan: Lifey News Works were noted for their terrifying tone and atmosphere. His stories often could have multiple interpretations with the Supernatural only being one of them. He's a contender for having invented vampire fiction, his sic Vampire Novella.
Carmilla having been published in 18 72, 20 plus years before Dracula. One of his other major works was the Gothic mystery novel, uncle Silas. But I think if you only read one other Lein You story, it shouldn't be either one of those. And I know I might take a lot of heat 'cause Camilla's pretty good, but I think it should be Shakin The Painter, which is one of the creepiest tales I have
Damien: read.
Oh,
Ryan: it also gets a shout out in the cafe scene. I believe of John LAN's, the fisherman. There's a [00:19:00] very brief reference to a character named Shulkin who was a painter in the town. And I thought that was very clever of Mr. Langan.
Damien: Oh yeah. Shulkin the painter that tracks
Ryan: it. Does. After fan News's death, MR James said of him, quote, he succeeds in inspiring a mysterious terror better than any other writer.
And Henry James called his work quote, the ideal reading in a country house for the hours after midnight. The Sexton's Adventure was first published in the January, 1851 edition of Dublin University Magazine, which featured all of the ghost stories of Chappelle Zad, as well as an article with the Titillating title, demonic Possession, Oracles and Medical Urg in India.
Damien: Alright,
Jess: sure.
Damien: Okay.
Jess: Best
Ryan: seller. And that's gonna take us to our summary, Jess. I believe you have that for us tonight.
Jess: You know what? I sure do.
Damien: Good. That would've been awkward. Let me just load it up. [00:20:00]
Jess: I had to open it up and then I realized, let me finish
Damien: it as we speak,
Jess: that I spelled someone's name wrong and that meant I was gonna say it wrong.
Damien: Oh boy.
Jess: Am I still gonna say it wrong? Yeah. 'cause I've corrected it one time and I'm sure it's still in there, but that's okay.
Ryan: Is the guy's name Bob?
Jess: We got Bob Martin. And then we've got,
Damien: we got Bebo, we got boob
Jess: boobs in the house. Slimy. But I put Philip Stanley.
Damien: Well thanks for that.
Spoiler alert.
Jess: Yeah, just when I say it wrong later, just be like, oh yeah, obviously Phillips Stanley. Alright folks, our narrator asks, do you remember Bob?
Bob Martin, the parish Sexton. He was the scourge of truant boys who messed around in the church graveyard. He was a severe guy who wore grubby clothes and was known to enjoy an adult beverage or to, or dozen. [00:21:00] I also loved stories about ghosts and goblins and local gossip. But even if his stories were good, he was maybe more of a an acquired taste.
He was known to, yeah, I can't identify with this guy at all. Well, like Damien, he was known to invite himself over or just show up at your table at the bar, join in the drinking, maybe tell you a story, whether or not you wanted him to, and probably assume that you're gonna pick up the tab.
that's Bob. Now enter Dad, Philip Slaney an ill tempered pub owner. Philip wasn't as fond of drinking, but for some reason he did get a kick outta Bob in a way that most folks didn't, and maybe it was too much of a kick. Eventually the two hung out together so much that Philip's boozing caught up to Bob's level, and Bob became known as the man who made a drunkard of black Phil [00:22:00] Slaney.
But Phil was the one buying most nights. So the two of them led each other deeper and deeper into some boozy debauchery. Anyway, one summer morning, Phil heads into his back office and shoots himself in the head.
Ryan: Succinctly put Jess
Jess: what we're shocked and so is Bob. I've, it is written like this in the story, just to be clear.
It really is. We just go from very
Damien: immediate,
Jess: we go from drinking to shooting.
Damien: You think he's gonna check some receipts or something locks the door
Jess: and, no,
Damien: that's bad news.
Jess: Sorry. Well, that's the end of Phil. Bob is so shocked that he stops drinking mostly, even though like, honestly, that might just be due to the fact that the friend who bought all of his drinks has died.
But luckily this causes our man Bob to really turn it around. He has a wife, apparently, and she's [00:23:00] relieved, and the rest of the neighborhood is pretty thrilled that he's no longer ending up in the gutter every night. So cut to a year later, Bob is still on track and he's called in by his boss to go over details for an upcoming funeral.
The wife is a little worried because the meeting is like late at night and she's not super over the fact that up until this last year he used to disappear and drink all night. So she makes him promise that he'll keep it together and not drink and yeah, yeah, yeah, of course, of course, of course. And he leaves, so his walk takes him by a bunch of his old gross whiskey scented haunts, except the guy that he was supposed supposed to beat actually just got called away to a sick bed.
And so Bob hangs out for a while drumming his fingers until midnight. And what I had to Google is called a devil's tattoo. The devil's
Ryan: tattoo. I had to look that
Jess: up too. Yeah. Fascinating. But then he bails and heads back home 'cause it's midnight. [00:24:00] He's just been doing nothing. It's storming out. The storm is like getting progressively worse.
He's walking back home past all the bars that are now closed, and he looks for Phil's bar and sees that there's a pale light shining out of the windows, but it's highlighting a bench just outside. And on the bench is a smoking drinking man and also a horse. And Bob fix, like maybe it's a little weird to be just drinking out in the rainstorm, but obviously if anyone gets it, it's Bob.
He's been an outdoor drinking man himself. Normally he'd like walk by say something nice, but he just walks past this guy until he gets beckoned over by a shake of his whiskey bottle. Bob turns him down, keeps walking, but then the guy gets up to follow him like too closely and the horse is too close behind him and Bob feels menace.[00:25:00]
He walks faster and just randomly thinks of doing an exorcism, which I thought was funny. He yells for his wife, whose name is Molly. We have a named wife here, folks. We have a named wife. So he yells to Molly to let him in and yells to the guy with the booze to leave him alone. Leave. But the guy just keeps getting closer, closer and looks more and more menacing.
And then he throws the contents of the whiskey bottle at Bob.
Damien: This is good,
Jess: but instead of
it's
Damien: just whiskey, right, Jess? I mean, it's just whiskey. Oh,
Jess: you would think that. But instead of whiskey, flames shoot out and them both. So now there's wind, there's flames, there's a storm, and when the stranger's hat flies off, he sees that the top of this guy's head is missing.
Almost like maybe he shot himself
Ryan: almost
Jess: Bob faints through the front door as his wife lets him in. Then we transition very quickly into [00:26:00] lecture mode. Our narrator tells us that this ghostly specter comes with a lesson, and obviously is suicide sent by the devil to tempt Bob to break his promise. And if Bob had failed, then I think they would've ridden the horse back to hell together, I guess.
Uh, so there's your lesson folks, and just to prove this really happened, the tree outside has scorch marks on it, a scorched tree in a store. But now we leave Bob because our narrator is ready to tell another story In this serialized collection or however it was initially published.
Ryan: Yeah, it was initially published as three stories all altogether.
Jess: we literally end with him saying that a story needs a title and quote. We shall therefore call it dash, dash nothing. It's just the start of another different story. So we get a lecture and not [00:27:00] quite an ending. Uh, The it.
Ryan: Excellent. Wow. Well, I wanna start tonight with a question of character, which I think is what makes or breaks this story.
So what did you think about good old Bob Martin as a character? He is
Damien: great. Well, it's hard. How much character development can we have in a type 13 pages? I don't know. This was pretty good. I thought. I thought it was good because they painted him as a sympathetic anti-hero almost immediately.
Like, mm-hmm. He's just, he had some things that some people might, it might rub him the wrong way. He's a little disheveled. He was a sexton, right. Kind of grumpy at the time. It was like, he was mostly like a grave digger type. It wasn't even Absolutely general maintenance. He was out there doing the dirty work.
He came home grubby. He was called off when there was like a sick call, he's going there to pretty much haul out the person who's about to die after they can given their last rights day. Yeah. And like lug him into a hole in the ground. [00:28:00] So he's this like lovable anti-hero. Then his wife is like, please don't go drinking.
He says, okay. And then he does, and you know, and it ends up being the salvation to his soul. So I loved him as a character. I thought he was super. Like, I wanted to just grab him and hug him and squeeze him.
Ryan: I really loved him too. I thought Leif EU did such a brilliant job of drawing him as, as authentic as real.
I felt like I've, I know this guy, and I think it's his faults that yeah, that bring that out as Damien was suggesting, makes it relatable. Makes him relatable. Jess, what'd you think of Bob?
Jess: I also felt like I know this guy, but in a less pleasant way.
Ryan: I hate
Damien: this guy.
Jess: Well, it's just like the guy, like you're at a bar and you're having drinks with your friends and you look over and suddenly there's another guy there and he is like pouring himself from your picture that you just brought over and you're just like, all
Damien: right.
Gotta say, I don't know what they do in the Midwest there, but I have never encountered somebody just [00:29:00] moseying up to my table and pulling
Jess: my picture and helping themselves and just like, I just picture him drinking my beer. And he won't stop talking. And so it's like, like the way that Leue describes it is, there's at least one street that's like lined with pubs, right?
So in my imagination, if I'm going to the pub, I'm looking in the window first, and I'm gonna pick the one that Bob's not in.
Damien: It doesn't have Bob, that doesn't have a Bob. A Bob adjacent Bob.
Jess: Yeah. I'm gonna go for the quieter.
Damien: I see the level of Bob's like Patheticness as being endearing. Like he's gonna be the guy who goes to a bar on karaoke night and sings the same song and really gets into it.
And he knows. And he's
Ryan: gonna annoy you.
Damien: You're gonna, it gonna anno you miss it when
Ryan: he is not, there's
Damien: gonna, it's going to annoy you, but the day he doesn't show up. Yes. You're gonna say,
Ryan: where's
Damien: Bob? What about Bob? Yeah.
Ryan: What about Bob?
Damien: Nope. There we go. Got the reference. All right. Cool.
Ryan: I have to say I've known a character like Bob in my life, although his name [00:30:00] was a Fred, and, uh, he was a Fred.
And Fred would come over and he would drink your most expensive whiskey. Like, like my buddy who is his neighbor, would start pouring the good whiskey into the SHI bottles. It's just Oh, old college trick, huh? Yeah.
Damien: In reverse though, as opposed to mm-hmm.
Ryan: Yeah. In reverse.
Damien: Yeah. You have like the one good bottle and you're pouring the rock gut into it.
Ryan: Well, Fred was a guy that would just bend over backwards to do anything for you. He was loud, he was boisterous, he was drinking your good stuff, and if you had a flat tire, he'd be there to pull that car off the road with his own two arms to help you out.
Damien: And that's good. That's good because the last thing we need is a, was a super altruistic, a super like one-sided character.
If you have that, then you can't really empathize with him. You have someone who rides that moral gray. And the worst of their sins is that, they booze it up a little hard every once in a while. The rest of 'em are just annoyances. [00:31:00] Then that's an endearing character that's the guy missing his stapler in the in office space or whatever, you know, you're
Ryan: right.
So what about then his friendship with Black Phil Slaney? I wanna also ask about that nickname. Do you think we're supposed to feel sympathy towards them? Regardless of intent? I was endeared to their friendship, which might not have been the point. I don't know.
Jess: Like, this is to me, hearing you guys talking about like, oh yeah, I definitely hang out with Bob, old Bob.
What a guy. Like, I don't get it. And so I would be the one at the end of the bar being like, why is the bartender still serving this guy? Like, why are we. So like I understand that these friendships exist that annoying people find each other, or normal people are friends with annoying people. But like to me you're just be like, oh God stop buying him drinks.
'cause [00:32:00] then you're gonna have a drink.
Damien: I don't, I, I don't know, I, to me he was probably this weird be beacon of innocence that maybe like that, the publican, the bar owner public, what a great term. That he basically was like the one bright spot in his dower life. We don't know exactly why he went and ended it all.
We could make some assumptions, but it seemed like the fact that he kept buying this guy drinks the fact that he had some sort of kindred spirit connection with him. Like there was some joy that he was bringing to him and it could have been that he felt like he was fostering a an IMB or an infant or something.
And he was responsible for this other human being who happened to be an adult morron. Yeah. But he was entertaining and he was joyful and he was really pure. At the end of the day, he was a pure spirit, and I think we discovered that to be the truth by the end of the story. So I think he saw something.
In his companionship [00:33:00] offering some sort of like guidance or almost like a parental friendship a little bit with Bob. And so that, it didn't pay enough, but it filled disgust to some degree,
Jess: but they worse, I
Damien: don't know.
Jess: No, I know. It said in the story they made each other worse.
Phil starts drinking as much as Bob, Bob is dragging
Ryan: down to people. Molestation. Maybe, maybe, maybe. I can see, I can see Jess's point there. I'm I don't want to agree with it, but I'm almost forced to,
Jess: I don't wanna agree with her
Ryan: because like we've seen, like we've seen this happen before, like where the guy who, who doesn't do as much bad stuff starts hanging out with the guy who does, and then the neophyte can't handle it Right.
And gets sucked in and sucked under that. That happens. And I think that's what happens here. But, uh. I still thought like these were two souls that found each other and probably needed each other. What about the nickname Black Phil's Sl Slaney Sy Sy [00:34:00] Slaney
Jess: say, I put Stanley the first time, so I don't ask me.
Ryan: Uh, I don't know. What, uh, are we, is that a reference to the color of his spirits? I know there was a phrase black Irish, but I'm not sure what that means. I don't know if anybody else does.
Damien: Well, when I read Black Philip or Black Fill reminded me of the name of the goat from a bitch, and I think actually Black Philip was a standard nickname for an animal familiar of Satan's.
Ryan: Oh, okay. So
Damien: for, for Shadow, A
Ryan: nickname.
Damien: Yeah. I think that Black could have been just. Evil or dark or whatever. Not necessarily color of spirits, but I don't know, it was just referenced once and then bypassing. So I think it was intentionally ambiguous.
Jess: It was, or just it right after they were describing him as fairly ill tempered, like he was a jerk.
Yeah. Like he was in, it was a movie
Damien: all the time.
Jess: That's the case. So my, my thought was that it was related to that. He just was a unpleasant guy. Rebellious. I had to look that one up too. [00:35:00]
Ryan: That's a good one.
Jess: Ill tempered.
Ryan: Ill tempered. Yeah. There you go. So Jess. Mm-hmm. Is this whole story just temperance propaganda.
Jess: So when I had initially read this story, that's what I assumed. And then in between reading it the first time and us talking about it and reading it a couple more times, i've read a few more, like anti drinking short stories because I picked up that other anthology.
Ryan: The drunk. The drunk one.
Jess: Yes. Dead drunk. And that one had some that were like more explicitly like, here's how alcohol will ruin your life. And this was that, but was also significantly more fun instead of just like, instead of some of the other stories where it was just like, and then he drank himself to death.
Ryan: Right. ,
Jess: I'd [00:36:00] rather be chased by the ghost of my dead friend and a horse to that's a more enjoyable outcome for me than just.
Ryan: As
Jess: a reader of
Ryan: stories, we should clarify.
Jess: No, just everyday life guy with a horse shows up, throws a flaming whiskey bottle at me, big Wednesday.
Ryan: What do you think, Damien, is there more to this story than just anti drinking?
Damien: I don't know if it really came across as anti drinking. I think it came across as like, you never know the caliber of someone's character until they're put to a test.
And then that was pretty much it. I like that it was obvious, that Drake was his vice. And when they set up his character and when they set up who he was as an individual, the reason he was so identifiable is you're like, okay, this guy, I mean, he's married.
He loves Molly, his wife, it seems, and that's great, but he's got one vice and it's because the rest of his life is literally in the dirt. he enjoys a couple figures every now and then, and, that's the way it is. So at the end, it's, what is his one vice?
Let's use that against him. [00:37:00] He stands stoically. He obeys the promise, he honors the bond and the, the oath that he gave to his wife, and he ends up like salvaging his soul potentially for it and so vie I don't think it goes deeper than that. I just think it was used as a very identifiable and very easy to pin vice on someone who's a sexton of the time.
Jess: Mm-hmm. I think that's a better read than just a story about the evils of drinking.
Ryan: Yeah, I
Jess: like
Ryan: it a lot better.
Jess: If it was a story about the evils of drinking, I think it would've been his friend kills himself. He continues to drink forever. And then a man and a horse scare him sober or whatever. Mm-hmm.
But at this point, he was already, I think they say like more or less sober. And so he was more being threatened, not necessarily with alcohol, but with the breaking the promise to his wife.
Damien: Right, exactly.
Jess: Because the threat he was, yeah. The threat was [00:38:00] already that, that he would like break the promise.
Whereas like he had already walked by the alcohol and been fine. The guy's trying to give him, he was like, not tonight, Nope. I'm
Damien: good. Thank you very much. Right. Nope. Gotta get back home.
Ryan: Pretty impressive. Really.
Damien: Yeah.
Seriously.
Jess: Whereas like, I think in a less interesting story, some, like some of these other ones, it would've been, he started drinking and then his friend showed up and
Ryan: Right.
Jess: The ghost of his friend or whatever.
Ryan: The only reason I ask is because. In my research, I learned that there was in fact a Temperance movement in Ireland that kicked off in the late 1830s, uh, just a decade or two before this story took place. And I wondered, I just wondered if that had some influence on Leue as he was thinking through this.
Damien: Yeah, well, you know, two decades is a long time for periods of temperance, so I think at, at the end of that era of temperance, it probably lasted a few months. Fair point, fair point. Even a couple of years, two, two decades later is a pretty long birth. [00:39:00] Alright, well let's turn then to the ghost. Uh, what did you think of the ghost of old Phil Naggy?
He was really naggy. Yeah. I mean, you know, he was obviously mission driven as we would say in Es, right. Uh, you know, he had one goal and he when he realized he wasn't getting it with the easy dangle or jangle of the whiskey bottle that he had to pursue his charge or whatever, that, you know, he kind pulled out all the stops to the point up and to including dowsing him with flaming ether, you know?
Oh, yeah. Ethereal fire or whatever. So, um. You know, he did what he could, but I don't know. There wasn't a lot to it. It was at, you knew almost right away as the reader you knew almost right away as the ghost of Phil. And you're like, okay, I didn't, but
Ryan: I'm notoriously dumb at that.
Jess: The ghost sitting outside of Sills
Damien: bar.
He's the fact that he was wearing a hat, you know, and that it covered his face or whatever, and then you're like, oh, the hat falls off the top of his head's missing. I just don't like spoiling
Ryan: the story for myself.
Damien: Uh, [00:40:00] but that's pretty good. I mean, I don't know. It was ghost enough. It was, you know, a gnarly like demonic Poltergeist. Something that was aggravated and vengeful a little bit, I think
Ryan: was somewhat more impressed.
Jess: Yeah, I think the vengefulness of this guy who's like, he's waiting there for.
Bob smoking his cigar, he is like mad and ends up chasing him home. I think that speaks a little bit more to the fact that maybe they weren't just good buddies who liked each other and hung out. Like, I think if you're gonna try to drag your friend to hell with you, you probably feel as though he's responsible for things in life that led you to
Ryan: Right.
Jess: Shoot yourself in the head in your office.
Ryan: I thought as a ghost, he was awesome. I thought he was super creepy the way he was hanging out on that bench. The closeness with which he followed Bob Hol and then fire alcohol. How cool is that?
Jess: And a ghost, a ghost horse is pretty [00:41:00] good. I like a ghost horse.
Ryan: Yeah. Yeah. Good ghost horse. Yeah. Gotta
Damien: love a go. Yeah.
Ryan: So, so Jess, you brought up something, uh, that I thought also was interesting and I wanted to ask about. Um, and that's the measure of responsibility. That Phil feels Bob has for his demise, uh, are how are we meant to take that? Do we think that Bob is guilty of leading Phil down the path that ended his life?
Or
Jess: I think personal
Ryan: responsibility.
Jess: It seems like Phil feels like Bob is a little bit responsible.
Ryan: Yeah.
Jess: Um, and I don't know if Bob didn't feel any responsibility. He probably, you know, like would he have con like cut himself off and totally stopped drinking
Ryan: even though his wife had asked,
Jess: oh, well, for the full year before that.
So he's been sober now for like a year before he goes to this, when it was supposed to be a meeting, but then the guy left. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You know, so he's not been drinking for a year. And I feel [00:42:00] like if you had no guilt or thoughts about how. Or your role in, in what happened? You probably wouldn't be reflecting on the level of alcohol you are drinking.
Damien: I don't know. I'll be the dissenter here and that I I think it could have been that, Phil starts engaging in more alcohol and it never said that he was dry before it said he just didn't drink to the extent that he didn't drink
Jess: as much.
Yeah.
Damien: And, and then as he became closer friends with Bob, like he escalated his drinking to keep up with his bar buddy, and so I, I don't think that that eventually led to his, rueful decision to terminate his own life. I think there was probably some depth behind it that we're not privy to and.
I do think that this was more of a spiritual take, especially because of the nature of the collection that it's in. So we'll talk about does it church in just a bit? And yeah, I could foreshadow that, but I think the nature of this being the ultimate mortal sin, one of the ultimate mortal sins is that he has to come back now and [00:43:00] essentially haunt those around him who engaged in a similar practice, maybe, or who were just his close friends.
So I think it was the nature of their relationship and not the fact that Bob was a drinker that had him, like, I think the temptation would've been whatever that person's vice is. If he had a friend that the devil is sending one of his demon, armies to go back and lure into, and their vice was prostitutes or something like that.
He'd be standing there with two, bucks and prostitutes and trying to rid 'em in that way. It was just that that alcohol was their shared. Their shared vice. And so that's why it was utilized. I don't think it really goes much beyond that, but I respect your difference of opinion in thinking that was what led to that ultimate decision.
Ryan: Mm-hmm. I went back just a second ago and looked I did not see anything that precipitated Phil's decision other than it was bad weather outside.
Jess: Yeah. It was very sudden.
Ryan: Yeah. Le Leue doesn't give us anything there. No. But Leue also could have been, almost,
Damien: could've been behind his finances, could have been like, he's not paying his [00:44:00] suppliers, could have been a bunch of stuff.
There could have been a bunch of stuff. It could have had relationship issues at home. Didn't say whether he was married or not. Kids. None of that was brought up.
Ryan: Leif knew almost conspicuously doesn't use the word sin in this story. And interesting. And that, that kind of leads me to my next question that I found interesting.
Everything in this story is like church adjacent. The Sexton is most often someone who works for a church, but usually is not of it. It takes, this story takes place next to a church, but not in one. There's
Jess: not a minister. We open with a description of like a cemetery.
Ryan: Right. It it's not, there's not a minister character, non-denominational.
And there's no reference to sin in this. And of all the possibilities that exist. You certainly have drinking that you could say was a sin. And you could certainly say from cultural perspective, suicide is a sin. So, what's going on? Uh, I'm not gonna ask the question.
You think? Come on. Ask, ask.
Damien: Oh man, come
Ryan: on. Just yet. What's going on here for Leif? And you [00:45:00] is he's trying to say something about the cultural milieu? Or is this just the remembrances of a pastor's kid who was often forced to be at church when he didn't want to be
Jess: Knowing that I feel like, gives me a little bit more context.
'cause like I didn't know what a sexton was. Yeah. Good. I just assumed it was. Junior pastor related. Right? Like a guy who works in the church.
Ryan: This is, this is the janitor.
Damien: Yeah.
Jess: Right.
Ryan: This is the maintenance man. But that was somewhere housekeeper, right. Come on.
Jess: But it was
Ryan: like, it means all of those things.
Yeah. Listen, sextons are invaluable. I'm not denigrating them at all. No,
Damien: no, I get it. I get it.
Jess: But yeah, it was interesting how little religion was in this
Ryan: when it seems like it's just right there. It's so easy.
Damien: But that's an interesting observation because everything is so close to being with religious context.
Yes, yes. But not directly. Like you're mentioning the fact that it's never said a sin. And there are a lot of what, Western Catholic, [00:46:00] religious and sex would call sins. Sins. Yes. And so it's very, very interesting that you bring that up. And I think that adds another layer to this very short story about how everything is so close to being churchy.
But not outright churchy.
Ryan: But it's not, but it's, but it's not there. Yeah. Mm-hmm. It's not there. I just thought it was super interesting. And then thinking about the nature of pastor's kids, what we call pks. They're often become church adjacent people themselves.
Damien: Yeah,
Ryan: sure.
Because, the life of them as a young person is forced in many ways. They're required to be something that maybe they're not
Damien: interesting.
Ryan: Sometimes it goes the other way. Sometimes they become pastors themselves
Damien: sometimes. Is there a follow up question you'd like
Ryan: to ask about this topic?
No.
Jess: Nice.
Ryan: Alright. Well how about the writing then? What'd you think of the writing?
Jess: I could not make up my mind [00:47:00] about this writing.
Ryan: Interesting. Say more, Jess.
Jess: I, the first time I read it really liked it. Second time I read it, I was like, okay, is I, maybe it's kind of a slog, actually. Maybe like, it's just I'm, I don't often feel like I need to like, use a dictionary to look up what words, me, Uhhuh, Uhhuh, and I feel like I can figure it out from context most of the time.
But there were probably like five things in this, and I looked up where I was like, genuinely, like I do not know what this word is. And the context. The devil's tattoo. The devil's tattoo, yeah. The whatever the, however being ill tempered was described, but it wasn't described as like he was a, bilious ill tempered man.
Yes. It was just like he was bilious.
Ryan: Right.
Jess: Okay. Okay.
Ryan: Dunno what that means. Yeah.
Jess: And so like, during one of the reads, I, maybe I was like more tired or work was terrible or something. I didn't find [00:48:00] that enjoyable. But then on like, just rereading it for in the last few days to write a summary for it, I did like it more.
I really liked the opening where mm-hmm. For whatever reason we're just describing the cemetery for a while. Why I didn't know that this guy worked in the cemetery. I don't know. I just didn't put the pieces, a lovely description of the cemetery. Kind of. And it was just like, oh, because of his job, he knows a lot about like ghouls and goblins and I was like, oh yeah, like a, everyone in a church.
I don't know. I think maybe I was just like outsmarted by the story and just felt dumb in a way that I alternated between like liking and not liking. It was more challenging than some of the other stories that we've read based just like on fundamental vocabulary and like Yeah. Structure and stuff, but
Ryan: it's got, it's got like a higher bar to
Jess: start.
Yeah.
Damien: Well, I mean,
Jess: let's, it's also the oldest story in here. I think too,
Damien: let's not ignore the fact that [00:49:00] Yes, the first five pages, I was the same way. I actually thought to myself in my nain, I would have $497 US if I cashed out all the $2 words that were, I was like, this is just like an exercise. And like you imagine a kid in college who's writing a, who's writing an essay and decides to, hit up a thesaurus for everything and put in the most complex word for, there was one paragraph in particular.
I don't have the book in front of me, but it was something like, it basically broke down to. If you're poor, like, other, you don't expect like a lot of knowledgeable conversation or whatever mm-hmm. From mm-hmm. But it was like 37, words of polysyllabic like density and you're just like, come on, gimme a break.
But I would say after the first five or six, that preamble of the story as they got to the meat of the story and the action I think that started to taper out a bit and they went more to the lay people's language. Because I started thinking the same thing, Jess, I was like, you [00:50:00] gotta be kidding me.
But then I actually got more into it and was able to enjoy it more as the story went on.
Jess: Even like, it doesn't just say that he drinks like it, this
Ryan: is my favorite line.
Jess: It takes, it's my favorite
Ryan: line.
Jess: Like, it worms its way to, like, he maybe doesn't sometimes is visited by BCUs and you're just like,
Ryan: I have this highlighted for, so hit us with it.
I have to give this section this is a description of Bob the Sexton that I just was in awe over, but terrible as was the official aspect of the sexton and repugnant as his la form clothed in Rusty Sable Vestor. His, his small frosty visage, suspicious gray eyes and rusty brown scratch wig might appear to all notions of genial frailty.
It was yet true that Bob Martin's severe morality sometimes nodded, and that [00:51:00] BCUs did not always solicit him in vain,
Damien: God, wait, so like, I
Ryan: am
Damien: clapping,
Ryan: so he drank, I'm
applauding
Damien: in
Ryan: my chair, and so he drank
Damien: the guy, the guy drank from time to to time mean even
Jess: like two sentences later, they're describing his.
Storytelling and his knowledge of village history, his fund of local anecdote was copious, accurate and edifying. And you're just like, there. This
Ryan: is a guy you wanna listen to.
Jess: And it's just like, that's a very fun way to say like, this guy's got all the good gossip.
Ryan: Yep.
Jess: About who's died and what, just like it's fun and funny once you get over feeling a little bit outsmarted maybe.
Ryan: Well, I wanna say this on the airwaves. I would like someone at my funeral in a eulogy perhaps to say, and Baus did not always solicit him in
Damien: dibs. Dibs, because I'll be there. I'm not going first, Ryan. It's a race to second [00:52:00] place.
Ryan: I originally wrote down that the language was flowery, but I still loved it.
But I really like Jess's way of putting it. It's elevated. It's not necessarily just flowery. It's got this elevated.
Damien: It's not, there's no po to it. It's almost academic and it doesn't need to be
Ryan: I think it's more fun that it
Damien: is all the way through.
Ryan: Yeah. Yeah. I enjoyed it all. It added to me, it added to the atmosphere of the story.
It even helped create the atmosphere of the story. Like, this is a story that I want to be reading in a darkened library lit only by a couple of candles and a fireplace with a sniff of brandy.
Damien: We're not gonna be there long.
Ryan: I thought the writing was great. And here's the question that Damien's been wanting which I intentionally separated from the last question. Fine. Which I think, I think the last one had something important to say on its own, but Sure. Did it church?
Damien: It did not church.
Jess: Nope. It was church adjacent.
Damien: But I will say [00:53:00] this, you are pointing out that the word sin was never used. You're pointing out that, it was almost very purposeful that it took place near a church. You're pointing out the station. Mm-hmm. And unlike Jess, I actually did look up what a sexton was. 'cause I, I
Jess: was too busy looking up every other word.
'cause I'm a dumb,
Damien: I was practicing Careful exegesis. I don't, I still dunno. Perfect. Anyway, but because like, opening up the eyes to that mm-hmm. It's more churchy than I had originally give it credit for because. At full, at first blush and at at reading. I was like, this is zero out does out of, 13 churches.
Right. It is no church whatsoever.
Ryan: I gave it five outta 10 cathedral bells.
Damien: Ah.
Ryan: The reason
Damien: that's a gift.
Ryan: The reason I gave it that, because it's right in the middle. It's right next to it. It's adjacent, but it's not,
Damien: But horseshoes and hand grenades are the only things where it's close matters.
You know this, it's, you're giving five for nothing.
Ryan: Well, perhaps ethereal fire, we can add to that list.
Damien: Is that part [00:54:00] of your church? I'll start attending if that's the case.
Ryan: What about the scare? Did the scare hold up?
Damien: I was in the zone where it was too silly to be scary. I know you guys like the ghost, but to me it was a bit of a silly story, so I wasn't very scared.
Ryan: Okay. That's fair. I liked the ghost. I thought he was creepy.
Jess: I
Ryan: liked, I'd say, I'd say it held up.
Jess: Yeah. I liked the ghost. I liked how mad he was. Like he was not described as like. A fun ghost. He was like being meed by this guy who's pulling a horse behind him. And it's just like, well, that can't be good.
And I did, I was genuinely surprised when he chucked a bottle of flaming whiskey at him. That's fun.
Ryan: That
Damien: was fun. Fun type
Ryan: proof, that's all right. That's gonna take us to our whiskey ratings. This is how we rate our stories here on whiskey and the Weird From Zero Fingers of Whiskey all the way to the coveted full fist or five fingers of whiskey.
Jess, what are you giving The Sextons Adventure by God. Sheridan Le
Jess: I have oscillated on this one too, to,
I'm, I wrote down four. I'm gonna go with three [00:55:00] and a half,
Ryan: but you reserve the right to revisit that in a moment.
Jess: Well, no, I, so we didn't talk a ton about the ending, and I feel like that's what's bringing it down a half point is the. The
Ryan: continuation to the next story,
Jess: you, the continuation to the next story.
And so
Damien: it's, it's stationed as a standalone in an anthology is it
Jess: doesn't cut it
Damien: down a notch, but
Jess: even the ending of like, and folks, I hope we've all learned our lesson here.
Damien: Sure.
Jess: Like,
Damien: yeah. That was a little bothersome.
Jess: We could've just ended it,
Damien: it kind of took the wind outta the sails of the ethereal fire.
Jess: Yes. If he would've just let his wife open the door and he fainted inside. Right. And you don't know if he lived or died. I think that would've been a better ending place than, and also, here's an important afterschool message about suicide. Yeah. And now onto our next story.
Damien: Right.
Jess: So I'm gonna go through three and a half.
Ryan: All right. Fair enough. Damien.
Damien: Jess oscillated, I vacillated and I ended up at three and a half as well. And the reason [00:56:00] is, is because it was a short, easy story. It was fun, it was silly. I really identified nicely in very quick time with the characters. Mm-hmm. It was easy to empathize and sympathize with their plates.
It took you on a very short, not so steep rollercoaster of emotions in rather due time. So I appreciated that. The ending. I hated the fact that it rolled into the next story, which was not present.
Ryan: So would you have hated it as much if you were reading this all three back to back then?
Damien: I, probably not, yeah. Okay. But then it also would've been heavily influenced because of the nature of the story, the content of this story itself. Right. It would've also relied on the strength of the following story.
Ryan: Mm-hmm.
Damien: Mm-hmm. And the preceding story. So I think it brings it like, it, it was an interesting choice because it didn't church that much.
So it's placement in the anthology is, possibly intentional
Ryan: first
Damien: story. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Especially as the first story. Exactly. It was like, you're approaching the church, so you might as well get to the thing that's two concentric [00:57:00] circles, two standard deviations outside of the church. Right.
And then as you get closer, like maybe it was intentional. Great question for the editor. But I think as a whole, like the writing was effective once you got through that initial few pages of slog and the characters were super wonderfully written and surprisingly dense for the short amount of column inches that they got.
I just, yeah, the ending left a bad taste of mouse. So three and a half. What about you Ray?
Ryan: I'm coming in with a four, so I wrote it down. I'm sticking in with it. I love the story. I love the ghost. I really liked how, as we've called it, the church adjacency nature of the story. I, I really am gonna be thinking about that for a while.
I wish I could interview Lefa and ask him, like, here you had that like, served up on a platter for you to sermonize about sin and you didn't even. Say the word, so that really makes it super interesting to me. I liked Bob Martin and as you know, I adored the language, so four fingers of whiskey for [00:58:00] me.
Damien: Nice.
Ryan: Perfect. All right. That's gonna take us to our, if this then that. If you liked the Sextons Adventure by Sheridan le you, Damien, what might be something else they would enjoy?
Damien: Hey, do vengeful spirits sitting on some pretty decent horsepower with Ethereal fire. Tickle your fancy. Then 2000 seven's Ghost Rider starring Nicholas.
No, I'm just kidding. God.
This is not a ghost rider plug. There should never be a ghost rider plug. Actually we talked about a few different options for the, if this then that, because it, again, there were some pervasive themes that I think stood out. Mm-hmm. I don't think you'll find a story exactly like this anywhere, but one that I had suggested was the 2016 film, the Forest, which was a ghost horror flick directed by Jason Zada.
It starred Natalie Dormer of Game of Thrones fame. And, it centers around one of possibly the surviving twin who at last blush was told that her sister basically went to the fairly [00:59:00] famous Aoki Hara Forest near Mount Fuji in Japan, which is allegedly a very popular place for people to go when they want to die by suicide.
As a matter of fact, I, one of the Paul Brothers, the influencers got into some heat when he walked in there and like filmed corpses. He allegedly found pretty. Pretty gnarly thing to do, bro, but whatever. Anyway, so it is a real place. This movie came out. It's not a great film, but it definitely hovers around the nature of what the Japanese called.
You Rays, you raises, they're like vengeful spirits and allegedly in this forest because there's so many suicides and suicide is still culturally negatively impactful to your afterlife, that there's a good chance that you come back as eventual spirit. So this sea of trees, as it translates to, is very loaded with spirits and that plays out in this movie.
It's actually pretty interesting because you think, it's one of those PG 13 contemporary horror flicks, [01:00:00] which is always a little bit of a dice throw when it comes to whether or not it's gonna find its audience. It, it, it got panned. I didn't think it was a very good movie, but Is it unwatchable?
No, it isn't. It's
Jess: like a Sunday afternoon movie when you're on your phone.
Damien: Yeah. There's a place for
Ryan: those.
Jess: Yes.
Damien: There, there is. And plus you could probably catch it on cable. 'cause again, it's PG 13, so you're not gonna get like the fully edited cut or whatever. It can pretty much show you the whole thing.
But again, it's theming around like suicide and suicide, driven supernatural presences. Check out 20 Sixteens The Forest directed by Jason Zada.
Ryan: Well thanks for that Damien, and thanks to you for joining us for this episode of Whiskey and the weird that's gonna do it for us tonight. As always, if you enjoyed this episode, please give us a rating or a review.
Wherever you find your podcasts, we would be in your debt. We always wanna thank Dr. Blake Brandis for providing the music for whiskey and the Weird, and Damien, if they'd like to tell us about where they find vengeful drunk spirits, where can they do that? [01:01:00]
Damien: Come by my house. I guess that's, come on over.
Swing on by. Or you can find us on the interwebs. We are on the socials for everything except X. And you can find us at whiskey and the weird at whiskey and the weird on the meta property. So Instagram, Facebook. You can also find us on Blue Sky. That's at. Whiskey and the weird, we spell our whiskeys with aine.
We hope you do too. If not, we be spraying ethereal hell fire on you from an empty bottle of lave in 16 or maybe red breast 15 or maybe Spiritless old fashioned can. But yeah,
Jess: that ones's a can. It's not that one burns less. Yeah,
Damien: it burns a lot less,
Jess: less rewarding.
Ryan: Hey Jess, what are we reading next?
Jess: What a great question.
Why don't we do a story told in a church by Ada Winson
Ryan: bu saw. That's
Jess: that sounds
Ryan: matic. We got two. We got two French names in a row here. That looks [01:02:00] good.
I'm Ryan Whitley.
Jess: I'm Jessica Berg.
Ryan: And I'm Damien Smith. And together we are whiskey in the Weird, somebody send us home.
Jess: as always, keep your friends through the ages and your creeps in the pages.
Ryan: Bye-bye everybody.