As you might have seen on my home page and all of the social posts, I have worked with my podcast partner Allie James to create a whole new type of horror fiction podcast. Although we have done four seasons of When the Night Comes Out as short horror tales, usually running from Halloween until around New Years, we have always wanted to try and tell one tale told over a longer period of time. We just never quite came across the right way to do it.
Until now.
While digging through my files, hoping to find some short story or something that we had not yet done for the podcast, I came across a file for The Hive. Now, I remembered I had done that, and that it was going to sort of be my take on a zombie tale, but I could not remember why I had abandoned it or where I had left off.
I opened the files and discovered I had broken down what I had written into "episodes." I did not remember doing that nor could I remember why I had done it, but there must have been some website I was going to publish them on in a serialized format. The light bulb went off. Hey, this is already broken into episodes. Maybe this could be the podcast.
The story is that of a giant prison built below ground. It is in a kind of descending spiral resembling some insect hives. The worst of the worst come here. However, it is so far underground, the guards and their families are also living there, in a city community outside the prison known as Hive City. The entire prison is known as The Hive.
The entire community is self-sustaining through mining operations. Prisoners work in the mines. One day, while digging a new tunnel the prisoners come across something that seems to kill dozens of them, only for them to reanimate into demonic creatures that either want to devour everyone or turn them into fellow ghouls.
I had stopped with just over 50,000 words, so I was already in novel territory. I quickly pitched this idea to Allie and she loved it. I did rewrites on the stuff already in there, and then started writing new material. By doing episodes bi-weekly, we had enough, we felt, to last almost the entire year.
So, now, as I write this, the first episode has dropped. And we currently have enough episodes to last through June and I am still writing. A novel done entirely as a podcast.
When the Night Comes Out Presents: The Hive is available on all your favorite podcast apps. Give it a listen, like, share, review and rate. Spread the word and descend into the terror of The Hive.