Hitchhiker Horror

Hitchhiker Horror is psychological horror fiction told one voice at a time. Each episode has a different narrator, and each narrator speaks in the first person to a 'you' they appear to have only just met. That setup drives the show. A confession to a stranger has its own charge, and the honeymooner in 'Episode 37: Disconnect' says so outright, admitting 'you're the first person I've told about that' after describing an old man scratching at the glass of a balcony several floors up, a woman's whisper, and then a balcony with nobody on it. The settings keep changing. In 'Episode 39: Badlands', a traveler camps in Theodore Roosevelt National Park as a bison herd wanders past, then describes the open country as a place that seemed to watch them, indifferently. 'Episode 36: Ascent' belongs to a narrator from a small island, speaking in careful, old-fashioned phrasing, who thanks the listener for passage inland and then finds a letter dated three years ago, though they left home only that morning. 'Episode 35: Missing' is told by someone whose license to practice medicine was revoked after a machine anomaly struck twice in two days, and whose account turns toward grief over a child seen but never met. 'Episode 40: Terminus' moves from a bargain sealed over drinks with a man in the finest suit, with cuff-linked teeth and a thin mustache, to a rail car, a disappearing carnival and a concrete hallway under flickering fluorescent bulbs. The dread is rarely loud. It builds from details that are slightly wrong: a door's creak that arrives late, as if played from somewhere else, a leak that drips in silence, a date on a page that cannot be right. Not every voice is grim, either. The narrator of 'Episode 38: Bad Luck Sally' traces a lifetime of rotten luck back to a dog that really did eat the homework, then ends up riding in an ambulance with an injured stranger and telling it all in a wry, rambling register. Elsewhere a voice gives bowling advice that runs straight through food poisoning. That odd humor sits right next to the fear. What a listener gets is character study with an uncanny edge: ordinary people explaining the moment their lives stopped making sense, to whoever happens to be there. The stories are written and performed by R. Andrew Puckett, with music by Julie Puckett. Each episode signs off with the same line: 'Thanks for listening. Until we meet again.' To choose a first story, pick a setting. The cruise balcony of 'Episode 37: Disconnect' and the North Dakota plains of 'Episode 39: Badlands' are both easy ways in.