Podcast S01E02 ~ Chapter 2: A Town With Dark Secrets

Chapter 2: A Town With Dark Secrets

…in which Carrie gets a job…

Coastal towns around the country had their fair share of deprivation and economic problems, but Carrie had thought Pagham-on-Sea was a quaint commuter town, a dreary middle-class hideaway off-season and in the summer, all fish ‘n’ chips and Union Jacks. In London, she had run the gauntlet of human misery in the few hundred yards between her office and the tube station, but here, no one slept in doorways. She had thought that was a good thing, at first. Now she was thinking about what Rachel had said, wondering about the rumours about the Sauvants, the dead girl in the chimney. She remembered Joe Lin’s cryptic comment about Redditch Lane – the Bermuda Triangle of Sussex, where people went missing.

The town seemed more furtive than before, the huddles of its buildings conspiring against her and all those who fell through the social cracks.

C. M. Rosens, The Crows, p. 34

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The Town With Dark Secrets is one of my favourite settings/tropes. I wrote a post on the trope of a place with dark secrets (it isn’t always a town!) here. This came up in the Left Page Podcast interview I did with Frank R. Lopes, where we discussed the town of Pagham-on-Sea in detail and my world building processes. Pagham-on-Sea is a town full of different communities and individuals, some more supernatural or eldritch than others, and we’ll be exploring it in more detail on this podcast too through the bonus episodes.

Look out for the Bonus episode coming soon where I chat to you about the history and folklore of the town, and read you two extracts from the 99p companion short, The Folklore of Pagham-on-Sea Vol. I, as reviewed by the Folklore Podcast. We’ve also got a fun episode coming in April, where the elusive Guillaume Velde is coming on the show to chat about Pagham-on-Sea’s museum collections, as he did in this guest post.

Where it comes to the episode itself, I tried to do some effects and I don’t know if they worked ok – sorry if not! The tricky part of representing Fairwood’s ‘thoughts’ is that on the page they look like this:

…Right aligned and in italics.

I tried to do some background noise to set the scene like with the background rain in Ch 1 – this one has a supermarket scene. I also tried to do pub noises to get the impression of her zoning in and out during that scene, which I think worked ok, but might be a bit distracting… I hope not. This is super early days for me with this and I’m not pretending it’s a pro job. It is me, recording on my phone, popping stuff on Audacity (free software) and trying things out. I hope this doesn’t detract from the enjoyment!

Enjoy the episode, and if you want to read ahead (or read along!) you can buy the book!