Earbud Theater

Earbud Theater is a feed of full-cast audio plays, and the one constant is that the byline keeps changing. Nightmare Planet is by Shane Riches and Katie Batchelor, Dead Winds at the Rolling Donut by Nicholas Thurkettle, Tales From The Dead of Night 2 by Jared Rivet and A Haunting Beyond The Lake by Richard H Brooks. Joe Fisher is the repeat name, on both The Monster's Almanac and Midnight Burger Ep1. The crews change too. Craig Good's sound design credit turns up on several stories, while A Haunting Beyond The Lake lists its own team, with Matthew Boudreau directing. Above all, a listener gets range. The Monster's Almanac borrows the scenic narration of a nature documentary and then wrecks it: a mother leads her son, Leo, deep into the Mount Hood National Forest, where pine cones are pitched as health food and a salmon head hangs fermenting from a branch. Flies arrive, a bear named Fiona gets far too friendly, and Rick J. Glenn is credited as the Sasquatch. Dead Winds at the Rolling Donut starts with small wrongness: a coffee pot that zaps a staffer and fryer oil gone a funny color. Then a couple tell the staff about their daughter, Quinn, who died when a tornado brought down a coffee shop. Once they came to believe they could talk to her, they sold everything, bought a camper and took to the highways. The grief is played straight, even as one of the pair waves off their research as the boring part. Midnight Burger Ep1 is another diner story, opening on a job applicant who turns up for an interview nobody seems to know about. Before long there is talk of pocket dimensions, time slips and a trans-dimensional super being, and Zebulon McElwain and his wife, Effie, are heard promising to bring the holy to the holler. Tales From The Dead of Night 2 is presented by a host called Nocturna, who introduces three horror stories in a torrent of alliteration. One concerns a thing made entirely of human screams, and the rule for surviving it is simply not to scream. A Haunting Beyond The Lake is gentler and more wistful. It has dusk at a lily pond, a face beneath a willow, an argument over whether the place is an abbey or a manor house on monastery ruins, and a sunset that leaves a question unanswered. Nightmare Planet begins under the Kid Pod Theater name, with an 11-year-old named Adelaide describing dolls that call themselves terrors, led by something with spider arms and a voice like dying batteries. It then moves to a school drop-off, a teasing brother named Declan and some mortifying emojis. Stay for the credits: some end on a review request rewritten to suit the story, and one points toward sister shows Brick Moon Fiction and Kid Pod. For comedy, start with The Monster's Almanac. For a proper scare, try Nocturna's trio.