Strange Horizons · The Strange Horizons Editorial Collective

'BRIDE / BUTCHER / DOE' by Lowry Poletti read by Emmie Christie

April 9, 2025·51 min·4 clips

E. Genovine screams in horror upon seeing the butcher's monstrous body.

The fiction opens cold and clean. Host Michael Ireland introduces Bride Butcher Doe as a Strange Horizons story by Lowry Poletti, read by Emmie Christie. Then the knife comes out. A woman hauls a white doe from an ice room, sets it on her bench, and expects meat under that translucent skin. The story refuses to stay that simple. It keeps slipping between lab work, animal body, and romance sharpened past comfort. Ead Genovine enters as pressure, wound, and demand. She cries, pleads, lashes out, and holds on to the butcher with fear that feels staged and horribly real at the same time. Porcelain keeps turning up: the little animals above Ead Genovine's bed, the broken shard, the baked-in fingerprint. Love feels handmade here, which means it can crack. The butcher wants distance. She also wants to soothe Eadie, touch her hair, and insist hatred has not taken love's place. That split is the story's engine. Its nastiest tenderness comes from how easily care and coercion share a hand. A party waits nearby. So do a serum, a vanity, and the promise that Larkspur can be changed into someone no one will remember properly. The reading keeps the dread close to the skin. Even freedom sounds dangerous when the doe tells the butcher to run far away. The outro opens the door again, sending listeners back to the issue, the twenty-fifth-anniversary podcast project, and the volunteers who keep Strange Horizons running.

As heard by us

A dark gothic story where tenderness and horror keep pressing against each other.

"Bride Butcher Doe" starts in a butcher's laboratory, where body horror and heartbreak keep pressing into each other. A woman drags a white doe out of the ice room, expecting a clean specimen, and gets something far stranger.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want a gothic love story with blood on its hands.

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