This week we turn the spotlight to the Tales of What?! podcast. Created by the multi-talented Luke Kondor, Tales of What?! recently began its second season showcasing bizarro fiction short stories by some of the great authors of the genre, including our own Amy M. Vaughn!
We asked Luke to share a bit about the podcast and how it came to be:
Blowing Brains Out & Spreading The Word Of Bizarro
Just over two years ago I picked up the Bizarro Starter Kit (Red) and it blew my brains out the back of my head. It was such a shock to the system, I could almost feel it untwining my DNA, remaking me in its own image. The genre had everything I’d been looking for in fiction. It was weird, funny, riotous, and often quite sweet.
It was so good it actually made me angry. How had I not known about the genre before? Where had it been hiding?
It was likely only ever a couple of clicks away, but I decided to make it a mission to present the genre to other people who might be similar to me, people who’d fall in love with it if they were given the chance.
I’ve been running a successful short story podcast for almost five years now. We take short horror stories, have them narrated by professional voice actors, add sound effects, music, etc. We average around 150,000 downloads a month. My plan was to try and use some of those same production methods, maybe tap into some of that same audience, and create a similar podcast but with a focus on bizarro fiction. And so, ‘Tales of What!?’ was born.
I published season 1 last year and we’re currently right in the middle of season 2, each episode oozing out of podcast apps all over the world every Monday morning. It’s slowly building up a listenership of its own, just this week hitting 15k downloads. And we’ve been lucky enough to feature a whole slew of bizarro legends and modern-day top-dogs, from D Harlan Wilson to Ben Fitts, Bradley Sands to Madeleine Swann, and so many more
If you’re a fan of bizarro, or you have a friend who you think, given the chance, would love it, my hope is they can tune into the podcast and have their own brains blown out the backs of their heads, just like I did.
This season we’ve got stories from the delightful Amy M Vaughn, the devilish Ben Fitts, the sexy Bradley Sands, the smokin’ Mr Frank, the English Leigham Shardlow, the dapper Charles Austin Muir, the effulgent Chris Kelso, and the me Luke Kondor.
Current episodes (Season Two):
S2.1 Bizarronauts – Stories by Frank Edler, Amy M. Vaughn, and Ben Fitts, narrated by Persephone Rose, Alexandra Elroy, Grant Patrizio
S2.2 The Time I Took Hamlet Right Into the Danger Zone – Story by Charles Austin Muir, narrated by Justin Fife
S2.3 The Bradley Sands Game Collection – Stories by Bradley Sands, narrated by Luke Kondor
S2.4 The Projected Man – Story by Chris Kelso, narrated by Josh Curran
You can listen to the podcast on any of your usual podcast apps:
About Luke
Luke Kondor started writing on his computer in his early teens and never looked back… and now he has very sore eyes. He has two novellas coming out in 2021 with small presses, Eraserhead Press and JournalStone Publishing. Currently he works from a dining room table in the middle of Sherwood Forest and lives with his fiancée, Cat, their pet cat, Oscar, and their larger, angrier cat, Alaska, who is actually a dog.
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