Guest host John Darnielle presents two of his favorite weird stories. In Amparo Davila’s “Moses and Gaspar,” a grieving man has inherited two—creatures—from his dead brother. But what in the world are they? Peter Jay Fernandez reads. A slick salesman has a little something extra up his sleeve in Dennis Etchison’s “The Pitch,” read by Michael Shannon.
Guest host John Darnielle presents two of his favorite weird stories. Darnielle’s first novel, Wolf in White Van, was a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Award nominee, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction, and widely hailed as one of the best novels of the year. His second novel, Universal Harvester, was released in 2017, and listed as an NPR Best Book of the Year. He is a writer, composer, guitarist, vocalist, and occasional pianist in the band The Mountain Goats, with whom he’s toured North America, England, Ireland, Scotland, Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand numerous times.
His first pick was Amparo Dávila’s “Moses and Gaspar,” which was sent to him in galley form by the publisher and seized his imagination immediately, he says. In the story a grieving man has inherited two—creatures—from his dead brother. But what in the world are they? Amparo Dávila is a Mexican author who has been acknowledged as one of Mexico’s finest masters of the short story. The Houseguest: And Other Stories, released in 2017, is Dávila’s first collection to be published in English. She has been honored with the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize and the Medalla Bellas Artes, among other awards.
The reader is Peter Jay Fernandez. His television credits include Netflix’s Luke Cage, Superboy, Law & Order, Damages, The Good Wife,House of Cards, Gotham, Elementary, Shades of Blue, and Royal Pains. He has appeared on Broadway in Julius Caesar, Cyrano de Bergerac, Jelly’s Last Jam, and All The Way, and off-Broadway in numerous productions, most recently Red Speedo, Father Comes Home From the Wars, Seven Spots on the Sun, and Othello. Fernandez has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including John Henry Days,Juneteenth, Known and Strange Things, and numerous thrillers by James Patterson. He currently serves as co-head of the acting department at the New School’s College of Performing Arts.
For his second story, Darnielle returned to his childhood. He first read Dennis Etchison’s “The Pitch” as a teenager, and it stuck with him, as did recollections of the type of mesmerizing pitchman depicted in this little bit of grue. The slick salesman in this story has a little something extra to offer the bored housewives looking for the perfect vegetable slicer.
Etchison is a three-time winner of the British Fantasy Award for writing and editing. His works include the novels The Fog, Halloween,Videodrome, Shadowman, and California Gothic, and the short story collections Red Dreams, The Dark Country, Blood Kiss, and The Death Artist, and his stories have been featured in numerous anthologies. He edited the anthologies MetaHorror and The Museum of Horrors. In 2016, he was honored with the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Reader Michael Shannon has earned accolades for his performances on screen, stage, and television. He is known for his roles in “Revolutionary Road” and “Nocturnal Animals,” for which he was nominated for Academy Awards, “Boardwalk Empire,” for which he was nominated for three Screen Actors Guild Awards, “Take Shelter” (Saturn Award), “Elvis & Nixon,” “Man of Steel” and “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” “Loving,” “The Shape of Water,” “Waco,” and the recent version of “Fahrenheit 451,” among others. His stage credits include “Bug,” “The Killer,” and “Uncle Vanya,” the Roundabout Theatre’s production of “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” for which he received the Outer Critics Circle and Drama Desk awards, “Simpatico,” “Traitor,” and “Victims of Duty.” Recent work includes the TV miniseries “The Little Drummer Girl.”
