Action – The Drabblecast

The Quantum Doctor is in!  …on this week’s Drabblecast.  We bring you “Fatal Conditions,” by Chris Campbell.  Read by Onicia D Mueller. Want to find more of this episode’s author Chris Campbell’s work? Find them on Bluesky : https://bsky.app/profile/chriscampbell.bsky.social or on their website: https://www.clundycampbell.com   Like many good stories, Chris Campbell’s (he/him) starts with a wrong turn, […]

The Drabblecast Weird West Event closes out this week with another original story– this time with epic train shoot-outs, centaurs, and manifest destiny! We bring you, “That Bloody Frontier” by Sasha Brown. Drabblecast Patreon Cover art by Tristan Tolhurst     That Bloody Frontier by Sasha Brown August 2, 1855 The bones of the railroad […]

The Drabblecast Weird Wild West continues, with “The Alamo” by Cedrick May. Cover art by Tristan Tolhurst The Alamo by Cedrick May The wounded man raised his hand to point, and Sam watched as blood dribbled like raindrops from the end of his finger. “Water, boy… gimme’ some of that water there…” Sam turned to […]

The Drabblecast Weird West event continues, with “Rusty Sue” by Arthur H. Manners. Cover art by Tristan Tolhurst Rusty Sue by Arthur H. Manners The last townsfolk bolted in the night, fleeing for their lives. Gen and I had watched the evacuation all day from the overlook, though I’d ordered us abed earlier. Fatigue didn’t […]

A classic Drabblecast Tim Pratt story, presented to you by Guest Host, Avery Alexander!  The apartment was a bustle of twenty other people more extroverted and festive than himself, all dressed in the requisite hideous holiday sweaters, drinking bourbon punch and rum punch and some sort of strange vegan eggnog, flirting and joking and ranting […]

This year’s Drabblecast Christmas Special brings you another original commissioned holiday story from the master of Christmas weirdness himself: Tim Pratt. Happy Holidays Weirdo’s! I was in a grubby little bar down in Florida, sitting on a stool beside a plastic palm tree decorated with Christmas lights, when I heard a cough, and smelled cold […]

This week on the Drabblecast, something a little different! “Wholesale Solution” is a full cast radio play set in a dystopic science fiction universe where nothing is as it seems. Written and produced by Fred Greenhalgh and Jack Bowman, buckle in for a ride to Europa! Story Excerpt: We are inside a holding cell containing […]

Three days left in the Drabblecast Reborn Kickstarter! You’ve still got time to get in there and get some awesome Drabblecast rewards. In this Relaunch Prelaunch episode, you’ll hear excerpts from Drabblecast resident Cryptozoologist Connor Choadsworth’s past adventures, and also about how you can help fund his next adventure by helping us reach our 45K Kickstarter […]

Women and Aliens Month slithers forward with this week’s story: “Unathi Battles the Black Hairballs” by Lauren Beukes. Lauren Beukes is an award-winning, best-selling novelist who also writes comics, screenplays, and TV shows. Her novels include The Shining Girls, Broken Monsters and Zoo City. Story Excerpt: Unathi was singing karaoke when the creature attacked Tokyo. Or […]

The squid is a solipsistic psychopathic God with a lust for submarine hull and a mandate from Ronald Reagan branded on its hunting tentacles. It sweeps east from Iceland in the cold under the thermocline, alone in the dark, solitary lord of a solitary place.         TESTIMONY BEFORE AN EMERGENCY SESSION OF […]

Rick takes the money the Mayor of Corkscrew has wired him and flies to Florida, feeling his oats, full of hope.  He’s met at the airport by one of Mayor Delameter’s staff and driven to his hotel, the old but clean and dry Swamp Hotel in downtown Corkscrew.  The next morning he’s out at the […]

This romantic comedy begins where all low-budget ’50s creature-features ended: The mutant insects born of atom-bomb radiation (or invaders from space, or monsters from the sea, or fifty-foot women) have at last been defeated and our small-town hero, with girlfriend Janie or June or Betty at his side, must now face the rest of his […]

Just as we were all getting back into the mainland domestic groove, somebody started in with dragons and crop blights from across the North Sea. We all knew who it was. A turncoat Norwegian monk named Naddod had been big medicine on the dragon-and-blight circuit for the last decade or so, and was known to […]

Looking away from the light that showed the Charles Dexter Ward was no longer entirely dead was as hard as opening a rusted zipper. But Cynthia did it, and didn’t let herself look back She pulled Hester a little further down the corridor and said, “Now we really need to know how she killed him. […]

My new occupant is larger than Carson was. I was made for her, within a certain tolerance for the inevitable changes in human specifications that come with age, changes in health, and abundance or scarcity… This episode of the Drabblecast is all about Mechs, aside from the beat poetry that it begins and ends with. […]

I take time-lapse photographs of an orange. The result is always the same. First I remove the previous orange from the spike in front of the black velvet backdrop and replace it with a new orange. I set an incandescent spotlight out of frame as a light source… Episode Sponsor: You Shall Never Know Security […]

The witness was beautiful, in a way that was almost hard to look at. His face was abstract and fashionable, all eyes and angles, with a luminous innocence too perfect to be entirely sincere…

The first sign was the chief engineers frowning and going into huddles at odd moments. And then Black Alice began to feel it herself, the way Vinnie was… she didn’t have a word for it because she’d never felt anything like it before. She would have said balky, but that couldn’t be right. It couldn’t. […]

“Wow.” Tiny Tim shakes his head slowly. Peels off his crimson domino mask and slaps it down on the meeting table. “That makes three of us.” “We’re marked men….” Dust Mite’s voice trembles. He tugs at the hood of his pale gray body suit. “Every costumed avenger with the power to shrink…”

The episode begins with a DrabbleNews segment on blow-up weaponry (it’s Nerf or Nothing!). Next, a drabble from Kelley Zanfardino. on What follows is a doubleheader from Hugo nominated, cognitive psychologist, author Lawrence M. Schoen (with author’s notes), as read by Phil Rossi. In A Fool’s Death we follow a man as he attempts a […]

Kyle lifted another lightsaber. “Want one? They’re not as random or clumsy as a flamethrower.” “Sh*t. The geek is strong in this one. Sure, Jedi me.” Kyle tossed it to her with a grin. Hang on Grandpa. We’re coming… Norm starts this week’s Drabblecast starts with a bbardle about Phantom Claus, to get us in […]

It started in the cemetery, like these things usually do. Everyone knows being in a cemetery after dark’s a bad idea, which is exactly why Kyle had begged his grandpa to take him… This episode of Drabblecast is a Halloween Special where our (g)host Norm gives us suggestions on how to simultaneously celebrate Breast Cancer […]

You couldn’t describe a rath. You couldn’t even look at one for more than a few seconds before you started getting a migraine aura. Rovers were just blots of shadow. The breeder was massive, armored, and had no recognizable features, save for its hideous, drooling, ragged edged maw. Irizarry didn’t know if it had eyes, […]

Izrael Irizarry stepped through a bright-scarred airlock onto Kadath Station, lurching a little as he adjusted to station gravity. On his shoulder, Mongoose extended her neck, her barbels flaring, flicked her tongue out to taste the air, and colored a question. Another few steps, and he smelled what Mongoose smelled, the sharp stink of toves, […]

For fourteen years the North Piscataway High School History Department, under my stewardship, has honored the tradition of Duel Day, our annual reenactment of the famous, deadly confrontation of 1804, between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. And for all fourteen of those reenactments, I, Robert Stanley, have taken the role of noble Hamilton, and Paul […]

“We’ve got one of them,” he told me gleefully. “One of what?” I asked, bewildered. “One of them,” he said, as if that explained it. “Cheeky sod from Accounts came upstairs and tried to get a coffee out of our vending machine. Can you believe it? Out of OUR vending machine!” Nothing cheekier than a […]

Overlord always goes on like this when all he really has to do is slap down a dossier with “This Guy Needs His Ass Handed to Him” stamped on the cover. I’m just cutting to the chase.

It was clown-hunting weather. It was time to gather the musty costumes, clean the slide whistles, bag up the guns, and spin the lures of cotton candy…

The Drabblecast brings you Teddy Bears and Tea Parties written by S. Boyd Taylor. It’s a heart-breaking horror story about little girls, stuffed animals, and hunger. It’s a bit of a graphic one, folks, so make sure to put the ear muffs on the kids.   Excerpt: Shadows move on the mantelpiece and the end […]

The Drabblecast continues this two-part series with “The Golden Age of Fire Escapes (Part II)” by John Aegard. If you haven’t heard Part I, you should listen to it here. We also conclude Connor Choadsworth’s adventures in “In Search of the Mongolian Death Worm.” Story Excerpt: The crowd was lined up six deep along the […]

This week The Drabblecast presents “The Golden Age of Fire Escapes” by John Aegard who lives in Seattle, Washington with his blind dog. We also meet a slew of cryptids as we continue the adventures of Connor Choadsworth in “In Search of the Mongolian Death Worm.” A festive special, to be sure! Story Excerpt: The […]

Today’s story is Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs by Leonard Richardson. It’s a story about awesome dinosaurs from Mars doing radical things! Motocross? Drag racing? Murder?! As a special treat, Norm Sherman, Sleaze Patrol and Gringo Motel write and perform all the music for this episode. Story Excerpt: “I want to buy a gun,” […]

Oh, it’s been comin’. You can hear it at night when the refugee traffic quiets down. Distant crashes, muffled thuds. Those spindly trees fall over in the front lines and advance the jungle another 15 meters. Or sometimes, it just sounds like soap bubbles fizzing down to scum…

Sam Android found Gail Galaxy skipping monopoles off the inactive accretion disk of a small black hole on the outskirts of the galaxy. Every once in a while, she shot one in at too large an angle, and it was captured by the black hole and, with a blinding burst of X-rays, swallowed up. “I […]

This week The Drabblecast brings you “Bone Sigh,” by legendary author Tim Pratt! But first we bring you the continuing adventures of cryptozoologist Connor Choadsworth: In Search of the Mongolian Death Worm: Part Three. Tim Pratt has written multiple stories for the Drabblecast and this one is quite horrific. Story Excerpt: I put the tenderizer […]

His years away from me had bled any belief he once had in the old ways. I had thought to educate him, to make him wise in the ways of science and the world. I thought after he graduated he would return and learn the way of the angatquq, the shaman, and take his place […]

Angels, fallen or otherwise, weren’t known for their appreciation of human art… On this episode of the Drabblecast, a Gaiman’esque tale of the urban supernatural from fan favorite Tim Pratt. How will a pair of fallen angels behave on a visit to New Orleans?

She sprinted along the sidewalk, the bag bouncing against her back. The sun melded into the horizon, disappeared, engulfing the city in grave dark. Blood-thirsty screams could be heard in the distance, human howls. The gangs and muties were waking, to reclaim the city in their nightly routine… This episode of the Drabblecast begins with […]

Seen from a hundred feet up–if one could see any of this meeting, which they can’t – Saint Nick and his reindeer are red and brown dots standing on a potmarked gray island spanning hundreds of feet, lapped by waves… Norm begins this Christmas episode with musical satire of the “Night Before Christmas” poem, twisting […]

They called  it “Synesthesia.”  It’s when the senses got mixed up and you started to hear colors or taste sounds… Norm begins this with a warning concerning graphic violence and gore. We return to one of the Drabblecast’s favorite topics, the Zombie Apocalypse. The theme receives a fresh airing, which is just as well, as […]

If he ain’t comfortable, he can’t sneeze proper to save his life… During the Drabble News, Norm introduces us to the cutest little tongue-biting-then-tongue-impersonating parasite that one could ever hope to meet.  The Drabblecast then ticks off another row on its scorecard for “Bodily Functions Bingo” by delivering fiction about the act of sneezing.  In […]

Snuffles’ cave was a marvelous place.  It was where his glowing rock lived… The Mega-Beast Death-Match finals are announced. Stories detail mutants and things that aren’t what they appear to be. The Drabble describes the twitchy, secret side of a husband. The feature is a story of nature in the extreme. A mutant badger? Havoc? […]

They didn’t feel things the way humans did…things like mercy…

Inside the TecknoAir factory, deep within the Earth’s core, cheap was a necessity…

Their orange gazes came from devilishly carved eyes and their vigilant stares sent a chill up Kincade’s neck.  He had never liked the gutted vegetables that people found hauntingly ornamental this time of year…

Part Three of the Black and White Animals Trilogy, Brenda and the Black and White Animals Prepare for the Final Battle with Emperor Mersatz…

With humanity’s fate at stake, Ling Ling and his Black and White followers face a new and mighty foe…

Jell, Porp and Oct decide to stick it to the man…

A man and his wife encounter a new type of road rage….

Taygath couldn’t wait – the scouts had reported that these predator specimens were truly magnificent. His pedipalps twitched with anticipation…