Dragons Made Me Do It: Bonus Episode #18: “Beyond Between” (2003)

Tequila Mockingbird: And welcome to Dragons Made Me Do It, one of potentially many podcasts about Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, but the only one by us.

Lleu: I’m Lleu, and I no longer am prepared to argue that we should consider this the last Pern novel.

Tequila Mockingbird: I’m Tequila Mockingbird, and I’m here under protest. We should also warn that we are going to be discussing suicide at some length in this episode.

Lleu: So, today, we are talking about the final Pern text that McCaffrey wrote by herself, “Beyond Between.” “Beyond Between” has, as far as I know, only ever been published in Legends II, edited by Robert Silverberg, and subtitled “New Short Novels by the Masters of Modern Fantasy.” It is a weird book. All of the stories in it — and despite the title “short novels,” I don’t even know if this would meet the word count threshold for a novella, insofar as novellas exist, which they don’t — every story in the book is connected with an existing fantasy series. So, “Beyond Between” is weirdly presented because it begins with an editorial introduction that summarizes the Pern series and kind of briefly blurbs the original trilogy and mentions the Harper Hall trilogy, clearly designed to point people who have not read any Pern but are reading this story, for some reason — they picked up the book because they were interested in the Realm of the Elderlings story, or the Outlander story, or the Song of Ice and Fire story and were curious about the other series and so are reading “Beyond Between” with no context. Which would be a, frankly, insane thing to do. It would be incomprehensible.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. I don’t think the summary of Dragonquest helps.

Lleu: Yeah. So, “Beyond Between” is set during Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern. It begins from the perspective of Thaniel, who is a smallholder who raises runner beasts in Keroon, and he is the last person that Moreta visits while doing the vaccine delivery. So, Thaniel, who is late middle age but has suffered, among other things, a leg injury — which I believe makes five out of the last seven Pern texts having a character with a leg injury — and so is mostly in the Hold doing administrative stuff. His children and other dependents and presumably there are other people who are not related to him who live in the Hold are all out doing herder stuff, so Moreta arrives and he goes out to meet her, offers her some klah, and then she takes off and leaves. His runner beast screams; he’s like, “What’s up with that, Rusty?” And he goes back inside. The day goes on as normal, as far as he’s concerned. His children and dependents come back to the Hold and have dinner, and as they are finishing up dinner more dragons arrive. Kamiana, who we met in Moreta; Tyrone, the Masterharper; Desdra, who is described both as the “Masterhealer” and also as a journeyman healer, in the course of one paragraph; and a couple other people — some random green rider is there; I don’t know why — arrive and are asking Thaniel questions about Moreta, and they don’t directly tell him that this is because Moreta has died, but he overhears enough things that he’s able to kind of piece it together, and the reader obviously — well, presumably the reader has read Moreta and so knows that Moreta has died. One of the things that Thaniel noticed is that Moreta was riding Holth, and he’s like, “Huh, that’s kind of weird, because Moreta’s dragon is Orlith.” They give him a brief explanation of why this was the case,, but not in any detail. Then, Thaniel’s runner beast, Rusty, starts screaming randomly every night at around sunset, in the same way that he does when dragons are there. After several nights of this, Thaniel looks out when Rusty’s screaming and sees the silhouette of a dragon and a rider and obviously is freaked out about this.

Lleu: The story then cuts to Moreta in between, right after Moreta has just failed to visualize Fort Weyr. This is actually the third part of this story that I think is good, in addition to two others, is Moreta’s dawning realization that she fucked up and they’re dead. Except, as they’re going through between, they see in the distance a kind of grey area, and Moreta’s like, “Oh, my god, I’m having hallucinations now. Everyone knows between doesn’t have any light or texture or color.” But she enters the grey area, and another dragon and rider show up and are like, “Hey, follow us!” and lead them down through a “hole” in this grey area in between, and they land in a nice, warm, sunny place that the other rider describes as “Paradise,” or “Paradise River,” which we know from Dolphins of Pern. The rider introduces himself as Marco Galliano, presumably meant to be Marco Galliani, who we met in Dragonsdawn, who was the first dragonrider to go between, accidentally, to avoid colliding with a sled. And he explains to Moreta that he’s stuck. He can always get back to Paradise River, but that’s the only place he can get to. Other people who have gone between forever, accidentally or on purpose, can also get back to where they started and not go anywhere else, except that he sometimes sees dragons and their riders sort of flying off through the grayness to somewhere else, somewhere “beyond between.” And Moreta’s like, “None of this makes any sense.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Tequila is also like, “None of this makes any sense!”

Lleu: Moreta is like, “No, I have to get back to Fort Hold. I have to get back to Orlith,” and Holth obviously wants to get back to Leri, so Marco’s like, “Okay…” And he and Duluth lead them back into this grey space, and Moreta is able to go to the last place that she was, the place she went between from, which is Thaniel’s Hold. She spends several days attempting to get Thaniel’s attention, and finally is able to get him to look at a message that she has scratched in the dirt. He can’t fully see her, but he’s aware that she’s there, and the message is: “Get Leri. Moreta.” So Thaniel sends a message, and Leri’s like, “Aha! Okay, send a message back that I’ll be there when Orlith is ready to go, when the eggs hatch.” There’s an interesting scene at Fort Weyr where people are trying to convince Leri to stick around, and she’s like, “No. I’m done here, and Orlith is done here, and we’ll go together.” Then, when the eggs hatch, Orlith and Leri go to Keroon. They arrive at sunset, and Moreta and Holth’s ghosts(?), question mark, are there, but they can interact with each other. They each hug their respective dragons, and then they all go off between together. Thaniel’s like, “Hm, maybe there is an afterlife,” and that’s the end of the story.

Tequila Mockingbird: And this is my formal statement of protest. I can’t believe that you guys made me read this. It is so goddamn stupid. It is stupid, and it is bad, and I hate it.

Lleu: I think there’s some good things here, but not enough to outweigh the many, many, many, many bad things.

Tequila Mockingbird: So this is my formal statement of protest that I read this against my will and I am being bullied. #justiceforTequila. This is also, however, my statement of vindication, because in our very first episode, I said that this is a fantasy series, because I don’t think people are telepaths, and I was told, “No, Tequila. That’s a convention of the genre, Tequila. Everyone was a telepath in the ’80s and ’70s, Tequila. It will happen in the future, Tequila. That’s fine; it’s just aliens.” Ghosts? Ghosts, you’re telling me? From Legends of Fantasy? Hm?

Lleu: — here’s my justification. We’re explicitly told in this story that between is another dimension of spacetime.

Tequila Mockingbird: And both you and Anne McCaffrey can fuck right off with that. If you want to make me believe in stupid dragon ghosts, then this is a fantasy series. However, I will also take the compromise position that I already took: I understand that it is mostly sci-fi, and my definition is personal, and this is simply not canonical.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, and we know it’s non-canonical because they do reference a drinkable wine from Crom.

Tequila Mockingbird: And so, clearly, this cannot be considered part of the Pernese canon.

Lleu: Moreta also apparently knows what air sleds are, so I’m gonna give that a hard no. I don’t think Moreta knows what air sleds are, considering that there is disagreement, canonically, in Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern, in the Sixth Pass, about whether there was one Crossing or two. She’s the one who remembers that detail; it’s not Marco telling her that. It’s Moreta dredging up that memory:

Lleu: “‘Holth says your name is Moreta and that you’re the Fort Weyrwoman,’ he said calmly, looking at her with respect. ‘Duluth is impressed.’

Lleu: “‘I didn’t, because Duluth and I were never in a Weyr. You don’t know your dragonrider history?’ He looked disappointed.

Lleu: “Moreta, startled to be so accused, glared at him. ‘Of course I do.’

Lleu: “‘Then who,’ he asked very quietly, ‘were the first riders?’

Lleu: “She was aware that her jaw dropped as she stared up at him. She knew who the first riders were and…she tried to grasp the concept.

Lleu: “‘You and Duluth…,’ she said, dragging the facts from memory, ‘were the first pair to go between, to avoid a collision with an air sled at Paradise River Stake…’ She paused, glancing around.

Lleu: “‘Of course, the mechanics of going between safely were learned later,’ Marco went on. ‘Duluth and I just acted out of instinct.’”

Lleu: So Moreta knows the sleds, Moreta knows the name of Paradise River Stake, Moreta knows Marco Galliani’s name. Sorry, what? I don’t think so.

Tequila Mockingbird: But she doesn’t know whether or not human life began on Pern or came from somewhere else.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. ’Cause we’ve also got what felt like maybe either a clumsy attempt to set this up — I don’t think that she was thinking of this ahead of time, ’cause we have had ghosts come up before: in Skies of Pern we get what felt like a very weird retcon, where they’re like, “Oh, yeah, the annual meteor shower, the Ghosts — it’s the ghost of dragons going between.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, we’ve never heard of that before, and since when do Pernese people know what a ghost is? And then, in this text, Moreta doesn’t know what a ghost is.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. He’s like, “Oh, it’s the idea that there’s some part of you that doesn’t die when you die,” and she’s like, “What the fuck are you talking about? When you die, you’e just gone.” So then why do they apparently have a meteor shower called the “Ghosts”?

Lleu: Yeah. Obviously, this is situated in a very specific point in time — we get a date for Moreta’s death, which I don’t think we had in Moreta itself — but it has, in many ways, I feel, the same problems that “Ever the Twain” did in terms of the timeline here implied by their historical knowledge and everything else does not make sense.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And I think, more fundamentally, the problem with this story is that, to me, it really undermines the end of Moreta. Moreta’s death is a tragedy, and it doesn’t actually make it better to get a weird, cutesy little, “Oh, but it’s okay, because they’re holding hands in the other dimension!” No! You set up the ending of Moreta, and I believed you, and I was sad, and to me this feels like doing a disrespect to her readers.

Tequila Mockingbird: Why did you make me sad if now you’re gonna say, “Actually, teehee, never mind! It’ss all fine”? I want the tragedy to be sad.

Lleu: Yeah, I agree. There’s a reason I think that moment in between when we first cut to Moreta’s POV works, is because it, for me, augments the tragedy to have Moreta be aware, in this moment, that she fucked up and there’s nothing that she can do. And there is this moment where, if you don’t already know the plot arc of this story — which unfortunately I did — where you could allow yourself to think, “Oh, my god, Moreta and Holth…they’re just gonna be alone here in between.” That’s intense and strong and, for me, augments the tragedy. Unfortunately, then they immediately meet Marco, and then it’s all out the window.

Tequila Mockingbird: To me, it did feel like maybe more of the same of McCaffrey’s hesitation in writing something sad. She doesn’t really seem to be able to fully commit to it.

Tequila Mockingbird: And we talked at the time, in our episode on Moreta, that even that tragedy gets a little bit wobbly when you actually dig deeper into it and spin it out into the whole story. The “Ballad of Moreta’s Ride” is an incredible tragedy. Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern, is, I’d say, a solidly pretty good tragedy.

Lleu: Agreed. The flip side of that is that I did find the ending very affecting, but I found the ending affecting not because of Moreta but because of Leri, specifically.

Lleu: So, at the end of Moreta, Leri, who is the older, retired Weyrwoman who lent Moreta her dragon, because Orlith wouldn’t leave the eggs and Morata was the only person, apparently, who knew anything about Keroon, so they had to send Moreta to do the deliveries there. When Moreta and Holth go between and don’t come out, there’s a horrifying scene where Leri can’t breathe, because her autonomic nervous system has shut down in protest over the fact that her dragon has died, and it’s really powerful, but then, afterwards, it just fades out, and then we get, “Oh, yeah. The eggs were hatching, and no one noticed that Leri and Orlith sort of slipped off and went between until afterwards.”

Lleu: Right, this ginormous dragon who has been grieving, living only to watch her eggs hatch. No one noticed her leaving the hatching ground while this was happening. Whereas here, after Leri has recovered from the initial shock, we see people being like, “Well, Leri, stay with us!” And Leri’s like, “No, I’m done here.” And we see her take a week and put her affairs in order. She gets the news that Moreta’s ghost is there, and she’s like, “Okay.” And then she and Orlith leave, and it felt satisfying for me to see Leri and Holth reunited, in a way that I was not particularly interested in seeing Moreta and Orlith reunited.

Lleu: In part because — not that I don’t enjoy Orlith and Moreta, but Orlith’s not a character in this story, and Holth and Leri both are. Orlith is not there at all.

Lleu: So, by letting both Holth and Leri be characters, the emotion of their reunion worked for me —

Lleu: — and it gave closure to that in a way that Moreta’s story didn’t need.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And in the book Moreta Leri’s death is still about Moreta.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which, fair. And I think it reflects a meaningful shift between suicide and the right to die, if that makes sense. And that is a bigger and more complicated discussion than we are really, I think, gonna get into in a podcast episode about a bad short story from the early 2000s, for sure.

Tequila Mockingbird: But this is the first time that we’ve seen a dragonrider’s death after their dragon has died as a deliberate decision, as opposed to a moment of grief.

Lleu: Period — this is the first time we’ve ever seen a dragonrider’s death after their dragon has died.[1]

Tequila Mockingbird: Because usually they go between together, and they don’t come back, and it’s obviously sad, but it also, in some ways, works like the Disney cliff. We don’t see them die; they’re just gone.

Tequila Mockingbird: And we know that they’ve died, and it’s sad, but it elides the grief.

Tequila Mockingbird: When Lytol’s dragon dies, we don’t see his decision not to die and to stay.

Tequila Mockingbird: We just see the results, which for both of them is a fundamentally changed life.

Lleu: And Brekke doesn’t decide not to die; other people decide for Brekke that she’s not allowed to die.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. So here we have — instead of the young, healthy dragon rider cut off in tragedy, we have an elderly woman whose quality of life is not great; she’s in pretty serious, constant pain. She has arthritis that they can manage, sort of, but with what’s clearly a lot of fellis.

Tequila Mockingbird: And, even in Moreta, she’s slowing down. She’s retired as Weyroman. She’s living out her retirement happy and involved in the life of the Weyr, but she’s stepping back. And so here we have a woman saying, “Mm, my life has come to the point where it should end. I’m in my right mind. I am making this choice and asking the other members of the community to respect that.”

Tequila Mockingbird: In a way that I did think was interesting and different.

Lleu: Yeah. It’s a…very different perspective than we’ve gotten at any other point in the series on grief in general, really.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right, and as we talked about when we last talked about this topic, there’s this weird attitude in a lot of the Pern books that, if you’re not sad enough to, in a fit of emotion, go between forever and die, how sad are you really?

Tequila Mockingbird: That this wish to cease to exist is the most honorable or the most meaningful form of grief that you can perform, which is, I think, not a super healthy attitude broadly.

Tequila Mockingbird: And not one that the books are actually, meaningfully willing to engage with.

Lleu: Yeah. And I guess the question is whether we think this is a change in McCaffrey’s perspective or if this is because Leri is a sensible old woman and not an impetuous young person.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, McCaffrey wrote this in her mid-70s. She wrote this about a decade before she herself passed away, at a point where she was making the choice to step back from a lot of professional responsibility. This is the last story that she writes for Pern completely on her own.

Tequila Mockingbird: And so I think she might have had maybe a greater understanding or sympathy with Leri than she did when she wrote Moreta 20-something years before.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I think it also, in some ways, makes the horror of what happened to Marco much more frustrating and much sharper.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because, if we’re supposed to believe that all of the previous tragic death of dragonriders is fine because they just float off to fairyland, what are we supposed to think about the fact that Marco and Duluth have just been existing in limbo for 2,500 years and will continue to exist in limbo indefinitely?

Tequila Mockingbird: That’s a pretty brutal call. And especially the way it seems to be framed as “And it’s great, and it’s fine, because now he can be a psychopomp for all of the other dragonriders who are lost,” and I’m like, did he sign up for that? This is psychological horror!

Lleu: Does he not say, “We don’t know where they go; we can’t get there”?

Tequila Mockingbird: He’s not choosing to remain. He’s stuck. Anne, that’s bad!

Lleu: So, I’m reminded of when I was, like, 12. I had understood that when elves in Lord of the Rings are ready to “leave Middle-earth” —

Lleu: — quote-unquote, they get on a boat and they sail off into the sea, but I had not grasped that they were going somewhere specific.

Lleu: So I was like, oh, so the sea west of Middle-Earth is just full of dead boats full of dead elves. The vibe here is that she wanted to avoid “between is full of the bodies of dragons and their riders who failed to visualize or who have opted to go between forever for other reasons,” but she did it in a way that results in, “Okay, they go somewhere else. Except Marco and Duluth. Not them.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And I just broadly think it’s not narratively satisfying, and it’s not philosophically satisfying. I was definitely reminded of the quote from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia where they’re talking about, you know, you can just wait until the afterlife and ask Lord Byron about what he thought, instead of doing the work of literary interpretation while you’re alive. And she’s like, “Oh god,” you know, “anything but that.”

Tequila Mockingbird: “Believe in the after if you must, but not in the life.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And I do think, obviously, people have different religious and spiritual beliefs, but it is, I feel like, very frustrating to try and completely undermine the idea of the sadness of death by saying, like, “It’s all okay.”

Lleu: Well, more to the point, for me, in this story specifically and in the context of Pern more generally…since when is there an afterlife in Pern?

Lleu: — right? Like, there’s an afterlife in Pern, but only for the reader and, I guess, maybe for Thaniel.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s also…only the dragons go? Only dragonriders? Everyone else just dies?

Tequila Mockingbird: What does this actually mean? If you’re going to invent a new spiritual cosmology…have the guts to actually do it?

Lleu: This suffers not just from the kind of general problem of evading the emotional impact of death but also from specifically completely throwing everything else that we know about death, and the way that we understand people dying, in the whole rest of the series up to this point completely out of whack.

Tequila Mockingbird: But, remember, we’ve gotten past religion. We don’t need it anymore.

Tequila Mockingbird: Also, I haven’t actually had a chance to read it, but I did see, and was very intrigued by, a book called The First Ghosts, which is about the anthropological history of a belief in ghosts and looking at early burials and what they might suggest to us about prehistorical understanding of the afterlife or the soul, by Irving Finkel, and I think that might be in interesting dialogue with all of this “does Pern have superstition or not” question — the answer being, of course it does. It has to. That’s how human brains work.

Lleu: The other passage in this story that I think did work really well for me is the scene immediately after Moreta leaves, when Thaniel goes home and is thinking about the rest of the chores he has to do, and what they’re gonna do around dinnertime that night, and how they’re gonna distribute the vaccine — whether they should wait for the healer to arrive or whether he should have his one of his children do it — again, because of the dramatic irony. I think when she sets her mind to it, she can really pull it off, and for me knowing that Moreta and Holth are dead now, against the backdrop of Thaniel going through the activities of an ordinary late afternoon/evening.

Lleu: I’m sitting there waiting for…when is the other shoe gonna drop? Because something has to happen now. He’s gonna find out, and he’s gonna have to deal with the fact that he’s the last person who saw Moreta and Holth alive, which is something that preoccupies him, then, for the rest of the story.

Lleu: By the end it’s fine, I guess? Question mark? But up until the very end, it is a certain amount of, like, “Was there something I could have done?” And…yeah, was there something he could have done? Who knows? That I found very effective.

Tequila Mockingbird: I do think the implication is that Rusty is a psychic horse, yeah, to go with the psychic cats and the psychic dolphins.

Lleu: So that’s…fun. Do we think that just happened? Are there other psychic horses on Pern? Question mark?

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, to be fair, I don’t know if Rusty is the more psychic horse or if he’s just the horse who happens to be there. Many horses react badly to dragons, right? We know this; this has been canonical.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, Rusty freaking out the first time the dragons show up — that’s fine; that’s normal. Rusty freaking out when the ghost dragons show up…are there other horses nearby who aren’t freaking out?

Lleu: Rusty doesn’t just react to the ghost — Rusty also reacts when Moreta and Holth die, right? They go between and then he screams again, and Thaniel’s lie, “What?”

Tequila Mockingbird: I assumed that that was them coming back for the first time, that when they come back that first time it’s to the moment after they die.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because time in between doesn’t exist, or doesn’t exist in the same way.

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t think Rusty the dubiously psychic horse knows that Moreta and Holth have died. That’s what I’m gonna say.[2]

Lleu: “The night after Moreta disappeared, Thaniel was alone at Waterhole Hold. His children had been out vaccinating their runnerbeast stock and would be late returning home. Suddenly Rusty shrieked louder than ever. Wondering if a wherry was attacking his old runnerbeast, Thaniel cautiously drew back the curtain to look out the window. Rusty was the only beast upset; all the others were calm, although curious about Rusty’s behavior.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, I’m sorry — I think we are forced to conclude that Rusty is a uniquely psychic horse. I could perhaps attempt to say that Rusty and Thaniel have a better perception of Moreta and Holth, because they were right there when Moreta and Holth went between, than everybody else does. But we don’t get any kind of confirmation of that.

Lleu: Maybe? But that would also still imply that other horses are also psychic, which is not something that I think I’m prepared to deal with.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, maybe horses have been psychic the whole time and they just haven’t bothered to tell us.

Tequila Mockingbird: Do we have any evidence that the horses aren’t psychic?

Lleu: Some of this is mainly explainable by, runners are scared of dragons in general, but doesn’t Piemur specifically say that Stupid helps him avoid sweepriders, who are presumably not actually flying that low?

Tequila Mockingbird: Hm. I don’t remember that, but I believe you, ’cause your memory is better than mine.

Tequila Mockingbird: I think “all horses are psychic” is the conclusion that we are forced to come to here, which is yet another reason that this story is non-canonical.

Lleu: At the very least, I think it’s possible that a non-trivial subset of horses are psychic, even if not all of them are.

Tequila Mockingbird: — that was released when the colonists had to leave the Southern Continent.

Tequila Mockingbird: He’s probably spiritually supposed to be a Ruathan horse, which is why he’s more psychic than all the other horses.

Lleu: It would be in keeping with the series in general if Stupid were a many-times descendant of Sean and Sorka’s horse.

Lleu: Ugh. Anyway. Terrible. The last thing I want to talk about, since it came up in the dragon literary history episode, is Baldur’s Gate. So, I had mentioned Baldur’s Gate in that episode, because it begins with a cinematic of an alien ship being attacked by people riding on fire-breathing dragons, and I was like, “That’s just Pern.” When we recorded that episode, I thought that this was just Pern in the sense of general cultural osmosis. And then I read the beginning of this story. So, here is the beginning — after the brief summary of Pernese history that the story begins with, here is the beginning of the main narrative —

Lleu: “When the runnerbeasts first started acting up, Thaniel wasn’t paying much attention. As happened so often, he was dreaming fondly of his beloved life, gone these long Turns and still missed. The two of them had been like two halves: once united, they became a perfect whole.”

Lleu: Now, if you’ve played Baldur’s Gate 3 and I guess and done the “good” plot arc —

Tequila Mockingbird: “Good” like you’re a good guy? Or “good” like…

Lleu: You will know that there is a major plot device character in act II whose name is “Thaniel.” And, crucially, Thaniel was originally one being and has now been divided into two beings — we might say, “two halves of a whole” —

Lleu: — who have been separated for a period of time that might be described as “long Turns,” in this case, a hundred years, and must be reunited into, again, a “perfect whole.” So, when we recorded our dragon literary history episode, I was like, “Yeah, this is just general Pern influence on Baldur’s Gate.” Now that I’ve read this story, I’m like, “No, this was not general literary influence on Pern. Someone specifically pulled githyanki from D&D lore and put Thaniel’s name in this, with this specific plot arc, specifically because they’ve read this story, because they were so deep in Pern, and also, I guess, maybe thought this story was good. And they did it on purpose.” The dragonriders didn’t have to be there in Baldur’s Gate. Someone chose to integrate that bit of existing D&D lore as part of the plot.

Tequila Mockingbird: Gentle listeners, if you yourself are the Pern freak who was working on Baldur’s Gate 3 development, it’s okay. We understand. These things happen.

Lleu: I mean, you probably could have picked a better story than “Beyond Between” to inspire part of act II’s plot, but it is what it is.

Tequila Mockingbird: Please don’t read this. Really, truly pleased. I don’t want to have this on my conscience. Me having to read it was enough of a crime. Instead, read another, better ghost story.

Tequila Mockingbird: My recommendation is “Ghost Summer,” by Tananarive Due. It is a novella about a boy and his sister who are spending the summer with their grandparents in Gracetown, Florida, and he is determined to be a ghost hunter and to finally catch image of a ghost in order to, of course, make it big on YouTube and become famous, and things take some interesting turns. This is from her horror short story collection also entitled Ghost Summer. There are several other stories in there that I thought were great, but this is one of my favorites, and I think it matches the vibe the best.

Tequila Mockingbird: Thanks for listening to this episode of Dragons Made Me Do It! If you enjoyed it and want to hear more, you can follow us on tumblr at dmmdipodcast.tumblr.com for updates, or to send us questions or comments, and you can find our archive of episodes, along with transcripts, recommendations, funny memes, and more at dmmdipodcast.neocities.org.

[1] Lleu apparently forgot about T’kul…

[2] Upon reviewing the story, it appears that the entire herd reacts in the first instance, although Rusty is the only runner beast who shrieks. Subsequently only Rusty reacts.