[Note: Second episode, Robert Aickman's "The Trains", Aickmanesque, and Irrealism, is now up on the dedicated channel:    • Doug Talks Weird, Episode 2 - Robert ...  .]

The first episode of my hopefully biweekly series: Doug Talks Weird. This time I will combine a discussion of the Laird Barron short story, "Proboscis", with the reader/protagonist relationship and how it fits into the horror/weird genres.

Just pretend I pronounced proboscis correctly. And meninges.

I left out a bit about how Ray is humanized in part by a contrast with Cruz and Hart (and all the others), but you can just pretend it's still in there.

Version of the story being quoted from is the BaenEbooks HTML edition (http://www.baenebooks.com/p-1002-the-..., with some slight on-the-fly edits for clarity. Other editions may vary. You can find out more about "Proboscis" via The Imago Sequence's page on Goodreads:   / 911954.the_imago_sequence_and_other_stories  

Music heard at the beginning and the end is Kevin MacLeod's Ghostpocalypse 4 - The Temptress (CC-BY, incompetech.com).

References cited at the end are...
* Cohen, Jonathan. "Defining Identification: A Theoretical Look at the Identification of Audiences With Media Characters." Mass Communication & Society 4, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 245-264.
* de Graaf, Anneke. "The Effectiveness of Adaptation of the Protagonist in Narrative Impact: Similarity Influences Health Beliefs Through Self-Referencing." Human Communication Research 40, no. 1 (January 2014): 73-90.
* Fainting. TV Tropes (tvtropes.org). http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php...
* Giovannelli, Alessandro. "In Sympathy with Narrative Characters." Journal Of Aesthetics & Art Criticism 67, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 83-95.
* Proboscis. Internet Science Fiction Database (isfdb.org). http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cg...

Camera and mike are pretty old, but hopefully despite the blur and the hiss, it all makes sense.