The Lobster Dance

Although I’ve been focusing a lot on film this Halloween season, let’s shift gears today to horror audio fiction. Alice Isn’t Dead is a serial horror/suspense podcast by Joseph Fink, co-creator of Welcome to Night Vale. Deliciously creepy, Alice Isn’t Dead is the story of a truck driver searching for her not-dead wife, the titular Alice, on a surreal road trip through the U.S.

Image: Logo for Alice Isn’t Dead: a design of a truck with the mirror image of a stylized skull driving on a black road with an orange sky and yellow sun behind the truck”

A truck driver searches across America for the wife she had long assumed was dead. In the course of her search, she will encounter not-quite-human serial murderers, towns literally lost in time, and a conspiracy that goes way beyond one missing woman.

The Narrator (Jasika Nicole) records her story as a broadcast from her radio to Alice in a similar fashion to Dale Cooper recording his experiences in Twin Peaks for Diane. In a diner, she encounters The Thistle Man, a repulsive “always hungry, like a machine made just to eat.”

The Narrator, in addition to being a queer woman of color voiced by a queer woman of color, also suffers from a severe anxiety disorder. However, her anxiety isn’t treated as a joke or a means of making her an victim, as discussed in two excellent pieces from Lady Geek Girl and Friends: “Alice Isn’t Dead: A Queer Disabled Character” and “In Brightest Day: Alice Isn’t Dead& How Disability Isn’t Only a Weakness or Superpower.”

We see the narrator struggling with severe anxiety and we even get a description of what it was like for her to have a panic attack, and we see how difficult it can be for people with these mental disorders to be able to function when things get particularly bad. The narrator also discusses how her anxiety disorder could be affected by her wife and heavily implies that that anxiety was at least part of what pushed her to search for Alice after she discovered that Alice was alive and simply left her. She explains how Alice disappeared for a long time on the road trip, causing the narrator to have another panic attack.

Listen here or iTunes. Anxiety bros?

Contains creepiness; physical violence (thank you for the trigger warning in ep. 3, Joseph Fink); surreal; toxic relationships; anxiety/mental illness/disability; stalking; descriptions of panic attacks.