Posts Tagged ‘Lisa Hicks’

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Cast of Wonders 515: Little Wonders 36 – Halloween

Cast of Wonders 515: Little Wonders 36 – Halloween is a Cast of Wonders original.

Body horror, clowns, lack of acceptance

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:57 — 48.0MB)

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Show Notes

As I Wait for the Killing Blow was previously published in Fireside in June 2021

Interlude

by Christopher Hawkins

“It’s probably just a rash,” my wife said, though I could tell, even then, that she knew it wasn’t true. I could hear it in her voice, the subtle rise at the end that almost made it a question. Her eyes had gone wide, just a little, but the boy never saw it. He was looking up at me with wide eyes of his own, eyes that wanted reassurance. Below them, the tip of his nose burned an angry red, like a pale shoulder left too long in the sun, like a lobster left to boil.

“Probably, yeah,” I told him. “Just don’t scratch at it or you’ll make it worse, okay?” (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 323: “A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies” (Banned Books Week)

First published in Apex Magazine, February 2018

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 52:34 — 49.6MB)

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“A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies”

by Alix E. Harrow

GEORGE, JC—THE RUNAWAY PRINCE—J FIC GEO 1994

You’d think it would make us happy when a kid checks out the same book a zillion times in a row, but actually it just keeps us up at night.

The Runaway Prince is one of those low-budget young adult fantasies from the mid-nineties, before J.K. Rowling arrived to tell everyone that magic was cool, printed on brittle yellow paper. It’s about a lonely boy who runs away and discovers a Magical Portal into another world where he has Medieval Adventures, but honestly there are so many typos most people give up before he even finds the portal.

Not this kid, though. He pulled it off the shelf and sat cross-legged in the juvenile fiction section with his grimy red backpack clutched to his chest. He didn’t move for hours. Other patrons were forced to double-back in the aisle, shooting suspicious, you-don’t-belong-here looks behind them as if wondering what a skinny black teenager was really up to while pretending to read a fantasy book. He ignored them.

The books above him rustled and quivered; that kind of attention flatters them.
(Continue Reading…)