“The Fifty-Nine Sound” (2018)

This story by Dan Howarth is another good one from the Trigger Warning webzine edited (full disclosure) by my old friend Eric Lindbom, with snazzy graphics by John Skewes. The story has various flavors but fits neatly with the larger Trigger Warning aesthetic: Twilight Zone intersections of crime story moods and the inexplicable. They tend to come with a certain level of built-in hysteria already in progress, a Twilight Zone staple. Here the hook is a messed-up radio station our guy is listening to on the way home from cutting out early on a dismal business conference. In his life he’s just trying to put bread on the table for his wife and kid, his true loves. Already we sense he’s a bit of a loser with no salesman instinct for closing. So he’s driving home, looking forward to being there, and he tunes in a station way at the end of the FM dial. It’s a strange station with some vibe of being pirate. It plays hits of the 2000s or older, sentimental favorites for our guy—songs by name from Ash, the National, Oasis, and others, including “The ’59 Sound” by the Gaslight Anthem. But the radio show seems to be gradually turning into something else, some kind of grand guignol audio epic, picking listeners out for death in some way that is not clear at all. This is one of those stories whose lack of explanation helps make it work. How, for example, are these listeners transported to the broadcasting studio to be tortured and contribute their terrible screams? No word. Why don’t others hear the screaming? Who knows? It just happens that way. I like the specificity of the songs mentioned. They are real. I looked them all up and added them to my playlist—many were new to me, like the Gaslight Anthem, perhaps better known in the UK, Howarth’s home. It all reminded me, of course, of my own fascinations with the radio and driving and it make me like our hapless, doomed main character more and feel like I could get to know him better as I got to know the songs better. Guys and mixtapes! What the heck. The story proceeds to its conclusions with soundtrack going all the way and thoroughly enjoyable. Trigger Warning is currently on hiatus, but in the meanwhile the fulsome archives are there to be browsed. And the stories tend to be worth it at higher rates than I’m used to in the horror story world.

Read story online.