Wide Atlantic Weird: The Cult Of The Minnesota Runestone

Wide Atlantic Weird is an ongoing series of stories that explore the folkloric and sometimes spooky side of the Irish-American connection. It's a selection of urban-legend styled stories that attempt to create that feeling you get when you come across a delicious little fragment of weirdness, a story that's so out-there it can't possibly be true, yet one which you can't dismiss out of hand. When you stumble across such a tale buried in a chapter of an old collection of 'unexplained' stories, or when you hear an unbelievable story from a listener to a podcast, that's Wide Atlantic Weird.

Book Review: The Man Who Missed The War by Dennis Wheatley (1945)

My job, for odd reasons, gives me access to untold amounts of beat-up old pulp paperbacks, which gives me no end of joy. Dennis Wheatleys are fairly common, probably because here in the UK, it seems up until some point in the 70s, every house was contractually obliged to have at least a small number of them. Despite being something of an amateur expert on Britain's 'occult uncle' (I even read the mammoth biography The Devil Is A Gentleman), I'd never heard of this week's offering, The Man Who Missed The War. That's partly because Wheatley was so damn prolific, but also because it's not one of his occult-themed books, so it has been somewhat forgotten about over time.

Book Review: The Abominable by Dan Simmons (2013)

I guess I have a complicated history with Dan Simmons now. His last mammoth, brick-like epic novel about survival in extreme cold, The Terror, stuck around my house for months haunting me before I could bring myself to crack into it. But once I did, I became consumed by its tale of the 1845 Franklin expedition and its doomed attempts to find the NorthWest passage. The book got me through a weird, lonely time in which I returned to my house one Christmas only to find that nobody else was home, and the heating was broken. I shivered through several days before either of these situations could be rectified, eating up the pages of Simmons' masterpiece, glad only that I was at least safe from the twin horrors of cannibalism and being stalked by unknowable Arctic monsters. The book even left me with a recurring fascination with polar exploration, and the Franklin expedition in particular.

Wide Atlantic Weird: The Washington Sound Map

Wide Atlantic Weird is an on-going collection of stories that comment on the connections between Ireland and America - in particular, the shared weirdness that I have found in both cultures. I was going through a fairly big Sasquatch phase when I wrote this one. I've always been fascinated by the big guy, ever since I collected potboiler books of 'the unexplained' edited by Colin Wilson when I was a kid. In college, I got to do a bit of travellling and camping in California and Oregon, and this inspired this little tale...

(Received via email, August 2018)

Hi Cian,

Call me Claire Redfield. I’m a fan of the show. I’m especially enjoying the listener-submitted stories, and I have a story myself that I think will be suitable for inclusion, if you can bring yourself to believe it.

In late August 2013, I was just out of college, and I was hiking a section of the famous Pacific Crest Trail. The year before, I had read Wild by Cheryl Strayed, and like many others, I was inspired to lace up a pair of boots and follow her out into the wilderness. Also like many others, I had never even heard of the PCT before reading the book, and I was probably a bit under-prepared for the reality of it. Especially considering I’m from Wicklow town, where the biggest wilderness I had access to was the Wicklow mountains. And while it’s just possible to get lost in the those mountains (a small number of people do every year), it’s difficult to feel that the area is big enough to hide anything from humanity.