CryptoBiography

CryptoBiography is a fiction podcast built around one writer, Brandon Starr, reading stories he has written. It did not start that way. By his own account, the early episodes were conversations with other people, talk about himself and other things, and the turn to fiction came early in the run. The stories are serialized. 'The Spotter' reaches its conclusion in part six, and finished stories return as single compilations, such as 'The Lines, complete story' and 'The Bite Before Christmas, full story', the latter first released around Christmas a few years earlier. The fiction leans toward horror and the uncanny, with ordinary places knocked off balance. In 'The Bite Before Christmas', residents of the Willow Glen neighborhood hunker indoors while zombies shamble across their lawns, and a pair of survivors siphons gasoline so the one vehicle able to go off-road has a full tank. The dread there is practical: no destination, poor odds, and the knowledge that one day they will have to drive off and hope. 'The Lines' is narrated by someone who notices colored streams moving between people at lunch, a sight a companion named Tim cannot see. Later that ability is pressed into service, with dark lines bristling from a man whose dented pickup shows no paint transfer. 'The Spotter' works on a smaller scale, as a woman who suspects a man named Guy of having heat vision tests him with a cup of coffee. Afterward, Starr steps outside the story to say it belongs to a continuity he calls Connections, and to another continuity as well. Not every episode is a story. In 'Political Catch-Up', he revisits his political views and argues that the second No Kings rally, peaceful as it was, made no demands, and that Democrats are not pushing back in any serious way. 'New Computer' stands in for a story he had not finished: part status report on a new machine with liquid cooling, part test run of the setup. These talking episodes are loose and plainspoken, with the host thinking out loud rather than performing. That candor is sharpest in 'Wrapping Up'. There, he says he had hoped the podcast would help him write more and write better, that the numbers have not been good, and that with his heart no longer in it he thinks he is going to stop. Episodes close on the same credit, with words and music copyright Brandon Starr and a note that characters and events are fictional, fictionalized or satirical. He reads that disclaimer even on non-fiction episodes, sometimes with a wry aside. What a listener gets is genre fiction with its author audibly present, doubts included.