{"id":222,"date":"2019-10-07T22:19:51","date_gmt":"2019-10-08T05:19:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mattpoland.net\/sherlockpod\/?p=222"},"modified":"2020-10-10T17:21:28","modified_gmt":"2020-10-11T00:21:28","slug":"alice-isnt-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mattpoland.net\/sherlockpod\/2019\/10\/07\/alice-isnt-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"Alice Isn&#8217;t Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em>Alice Isn\u2019t Dead<\/em> is a fictional podcast following the accounts of a truck driver in the form of audio diaries as she searches for her presumably dead wife; whom she expects to still be alive. The first episode, titled, <em>Omelete<\/em>, details an encounter the truck driver has at a truck stop diner with a suspicious man. Upon sitting down, the protagonist, an unnamed female truck driver, notices a man eating an omelette in a gruesome manner, making her uneasy. The man, noticing her staring, approaches her, telling her how the surrounding roads were dangerous. The truck driver does nothing to provoke the man further, hoping to end her encounter with him then and there, but then the man walks up another truck driver who he calls by name, Earl, grabs him by the neck and walks him over to her, the man taking a bite out of Earl\u2019s neck. Mortified, the truck driver dashes for her truck and leaves the establishment hastily. Throughout the audio diary, the truck driver reports various sightings of the thistled man as shes calls him, due to his skeletal appearance, noting that he has been following her from stop to stop as she commutes through Arizona to deliver her cargo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The narration is done in first-person by the protagonist, as she records logs into an audio diary being addressed to Alice, her wife. Occasionally, microphone feedback plays, as though she is speaking into a walkie-talkie. The feedback serves not only to create the immersion that the audience is listening to a pre-recorded message, but also as transitions between story beats or to enhance action in scenes. The passages switch between past and present; through passages set in the past, the truck driver mentions how she is transporting travel-size deodorants. Through the encounter with the man, past-passages detail his appearance; an older individual with a \u201cthistled\u201d appearance, dressed in dishevelled clothes, bits of egg on his lips, and as having translucent, yellow-stained nails. Most notably, the truck driver addresses Alice directly, asking questions (possibly rhetorical) as to why she \u201cleft her\u201d and how there were times she \u201chated her more than anything\u201d, providing context to a greater, overarching plot regarding the relationship between the truck driver and her wife,its status evolving through subsequent context clues in the form of recordings.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Background music plays throughout the entire episode, primarily with an eerie and unsettling tone, its pitch and tempo rising during tense scenes such as when the truck driver dashes for her truck after the thistled man murders Earl. Occasionally, moments of silence compliment the truck driver\u2019s narration, sometimes to supplement moments of clarity or peace as she recalls past events or memories with Alice, or moments of impending doom, such as right after Earl is bitten into and the truck driver narrates the shocked, lifeless expression on his face as he realizes he is soon to die.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p> The summation of first-person narration, sound effects, pauses, and ambient music compliment one another in <em>Alice Isn\u2019t Dead<\/em> to not only serve the narrative of the story, but to enhance it as well. Some scenes felt almost surreal due to how they were being described and the action taking place, making it difficult to really be aware of what was truly going on within the reality of the story, yet all of the components combined help to create an underlying picture of the scene to understand how it was playing out, however morbid or grotesque it may be.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Word count: 580<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Alice Isn\u2019t Dead is a fictional podcast following the accounts of a truck driver in the form of audio diaries as she searches for her presumably dead wife; whom she expects to still be alive&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[23],"class_list":["post-222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-engl200c"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mattpoland.net\/sherlockpod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mattpoland.net\/sherlockpod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mattpoland.net\/sherlockpod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mattpoland.net\/sherlockpod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mattpoland.net\/sherlockpod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/mattpoland.net\/sherlockpod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":223,"href":"http:\/\/mattpoland.net\/sherlockpod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222\/revisions\/223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mattpoland.net\/sherlockpod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mattpoland.net\/sherlockpod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mattpoland.net\/sherlockpod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}