Podcast reviews
Star of stage and screen Denis O’Hare has also written a new podcast
Tony award winning stage and screen actor (and Irish passport holder) Denis O’Hare (denisohare.com) is perhaps best known for American Horror Story (back when it was good), and has had supporting roles in Dallas Buyers Club and Big Little Lies.
He once wrote and performed a one-man adaptation of Homer’s Iliad and has now written (and stars in) A House Divided, a soon-launching dystopian fiction series set after the partition of America. The year is 2041 and in Blue Utopia there’s universal health care and income, but at a price: residents are microchipped and have their salaries docked if they so much as consume one calorie over their monthly quota.
Meanwhile the Federated States is the wild west, with deregulation facilitating total freedoms – so long as you’re white, heterosexual and your mandatory DNA test doesn’t show “foreign” bodies. We see this new regime/cautionary tale through the eyes of the Paxton family which straddles both sides of the rift. O’Hare’s prescient world building, even in the trailer, is chilling, his voice is always a pleasure to listen to.
And from American Horror Story to American horror stories… Grim Death and Bill the Electrocuted Criminal (Apple, Pocket Casts, Spotify) is ideal for long winter’s nights, such is its creepy content and immersive sound design. It’s a supernatural investigative thriller from comic book writer/artist Mike Mignola (Hellboy) and author Thomas E Sniegoski who collaborated on the 2017 graphic novel of the same name.
Think 1930s-pulp-style yarn, as a reclusive Bentley Hawthorne is revealed to be an avenging agent (not a spoiler) who joins forces with his childhood friend, plucky journalist Gwendolyn (voiced by Emmy awardee Merritt Wever). Throw in devilish pacts, a deceased trapeze artist, a kooky scientist and the aforementioned ex-con Bill, and you’ve a dry black comedy splattered with blood.
“My name is Mal Fleming, I’m here to assist in your passage. Can you remember your name and the circumstances of your death?” That’s the killer opener for each episode of Conversations with Ghosts (Apple, Pocket Casts, Spotify), in which Mal, a mausoleum attendant, tries to convince residents of a New York cemetery to move on to the next phase in their afterlife.
More counsellor than exorcist, he coaxes out intimate portraits of a life, a death, the reason why each spirit is “stuck”, and the wistful memories that linger long in the grave.