Full Body Chills - POE: Hop Frog (2021)

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

"Hop Frog" by Edgar Allan Poe. Adapted by Jake Weber. 2021.Intro read by Margo Seibert. Poe is an audiochuck production.Instagram: @audiochuckTwitter:  @audiochuckFacebook: /audiochuckllc

Poe is a 2021 audio chuck original made for our friends at SiriusXM. We hope you enjoy this exclusive content re-released for free on Full Body Chills. And for the best experience, we kindly recommend you listen with headphones. Laughter heals, or at least it steals, a moment from the pain. But like any remedy, comedy can be abused. And if you're always drunk on humor, you'll stumble like the fool, completely oblivious to those around you, to those you hurt, and to those who wish to see you in chains, to hang you up and watch you burn. In this story, the punchline leaves no one laughing.

That is, except for... Hop Frog. Whew. Hop Frog or the Eight Chained Orangutans by Edgar Allan Poe, adapted by Jake Weber, 2021. Jake and I hope you have enjoyed these weird, spooky 19th century stories. Today I'm going to tell you the story of Hop Frog, which is a fairy tale that is so bizarre there was no way to adapt or reimagine it in a contemporary setting. But before I do, I want to tell you a bit about Edgar Allan Poe, whose life story was as compelling and weird as his work.

He was born in Boston to actors. Poe's father abandoned the family when Poe was a toddler, and a year later his mother died of tuberculosis. Two-year-old Edgar and his brother and sister were taken in by a wealthy family but were never officially adopted. And in adolescence, Edgar got in all kinds of trouble. He liked to gamble and drink and got himself expelled from the University of Virginia. At that point, his relationship with his foster parents was in bad shape, and John Allen refused to support Edgar any longer.

Edgar bummed around for a while, doing odd jobs, and then enrolled in the army under a false name because he was broke and started writing poems and getting them published. But there was no money in writing poetry unless you were famous. Poe didn't become famous until 20 years later when he published his best known poem, The Raven. Poe eventually reconciled with his foster father and he arranged for Edgar to be discharged from the army and enroll in the officer cadet training program at the prestigious West Point. But Edgar got kicked out of West Point for disciplinary reasons, and then applied his

full attention to writing the gothic stories Jake has been reading for you. Poe then lands various jobs as an editor and literary critic and moves around to different cities with different periodicals. Art, music, and literature were the primary sources of entertainment in the 19th century. A spooky story was what a horror film is now, and Poe seemed to take delight at demolishing literary conventions. He was an iconoclast who was building a solid audience, but he kept getting in trouble and or fired for being drunk and or stoned at work.

Poe apparently also liked opium, which is basically heroin. Also, get this, he married his 13-year-old cousin when he was 26? He was a total degenerate. A gambler, a drunk with a substance use disorder, who was guilty of statutory rape and incest. But the marriage was loving, so we are meant to believe. Sounds more like Stockholm Syndrome to me. But when Virginia died of tuberculosis at 25, Poe was devastated. He spiraled out of control, drinking and drugging, and died two years later. He was found passed out in the street, beat up, drunk, and delirious, wearing someone else's clothes, and muttering the word, Reynolds.

The death certificate was never found, so no one knows exactly why he died. There was speculation that it was anything from liver failure to syphilis, and even rabies. He made several enemies and some who thought he was totally out of his mind. He lived hard and died shrouded in mystery at 40, and we are left with these wild stories from the imagination and obsessions of a very strange man. So here is the very strange story of Hopfrog. It's one of the rare Poe stories that is not told in the first person, so I'm going to tell it to you as Poe wrote it, in the third person, as if witness to the events of that gruesome night.

It's a fairy tale, and like all fairy tales, it's set in an ancient kingdom. Several of Poe's stories are like the Brothers Grimm's and Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales that feature knights and maids and supernatural elements. Hopfrog is a little person, what in Poe's time was called a dwarf. He had been kidnapped along with a neighboring child whose name was Trippetta, who was also a little person and very beautiful. The two were ripped from the loving arms of their

families by a marauding army and taken to a foreign kingdom where they were given as presents to an obese, cruel king. There they are enslaved and Hopfrog is treated terribly. His only means of survival is to amuse the court. Hopfrog is given his nickname by the king because he is crippled and moves with difficulty and pain, which the king finds hysterical. He makes Hopfrog wear garish, degrading clothes and a hat with bells. Because of his stature, appearance, and disability, he is an oddity and a joke to the court, and he is appointed as the court jester. Hopfrog doesn't move well with his legs,

but his upper body is incredibly strong, and he is also witty and whip-smart. To stay in the court's favor, so as not to end up with his head on a pike, he must constantly prove his value. This means willing to be the butt of the king and his seven henchmen's jokes and abuses. One of their preferred means of amusement is getting Hopfrog drunk and watching him

struggle to walk. It's Hopfrog's job to come up with entertainment for these cruel, whimsical people who control whether he and Trepetta live or die. Trepetta is a favorite of the king and his ministers because of her beauty, and because she is a graceful and beguiling dancer. She and Hot Frog look out for and love each other as friends. They have both been enslaved by Satis and depend on the other. One of Hot Frog's talents is ideas for masquerades, fancy costume parties where people disguise

each other. The king and his ministers can't think of an idea for a costume because they are all so obese. So the king sends for Hopfrog and Trippetta to see if they can come up with something. The king is in a foul mood and drunk, and he forces Hopfrog to drink. Hopfrog hates wine. It makes him feel like he's lost his mind. But his abhorrence of alcohol just fuels the king's sadism.

He orders Hopfrog, be merry, drink to all your long-lost friends and family. Well, today happens to be Hopfrog's birthday. He misses his family and cries into the goblet of wine. The king is tired of the usual characters at these balls and says the wine will kick in Hot Frog's imagination, but it has the opposite effect. Hot Frog is trying to think up something, but the wine is making him slow-witted. The king demands he drink more and Treppetta intervenes on Hopfrog's behalf. She cuddles up to the King and begs him not to make Hopfrog

drink more. The King then pushes Trippetta off him and throws his wine in her face. She is humiliated, but there is nothing she can do but assume a deferential posture in the face of her tormentor. No one says anything, and then something strange happens. The room is filled with a grating sound no one can identify. The King says it's coming from Hotfrog, but the others think it's coming from outside. It's actually Hotfrog's large teeth gnashing in fury at the treatment of Trippetta. Hot Frog says he will drink as much as the king wants.

The king gives Hot Frog more wine, and Hot Frog says an idea occurred to him just after the king threw wine in Trippetta's face and while that strange grinding sound was echoing in the room. His family, he says, also used to have masquerades. They were simple country folk, but one of their costumes could be recreated here and would scare the bejesus out of everyone, especially the women. It was called the Eight Chained Orangutans. Hopfrog will dress the king and his ministers as orangutans.

They will wear tight-fitting garments that Hopfrog will saturate in tar and then cover in flax, a soft hair, so they resemble apes. Then he will chain them all together. And the idea would be to rattle their chains and screech and make a lot of noise, as if they had all escaped their handlers and were now on the loose. The contrast of the well-heeled party-goers and the savage beasts who had never been seen in this part of the world will be terrifying, Hopfrog says. Everyone will freak out thinking these were escaped beasts, and then the king and his

ministers would reveal who they really are and would be the talk of the party. In the huge ballroom hung a massive candle chandelier that was raised and lowered by a heavy chain so the candles could be replaced. This was the main light source in the room because of course there was no electricity. The chandelier couldn't be used at the ball because no one wanted candle wax on their fancy costumes. And there were going to be so many invited guests, they wouldn't be able to avoid the area below the chandelier

where the wax would drip. So instead, 50 or 60 torches were placed about the ballroom to provide light. The pulley mechanism for the chandelier passed through a skylight into the voluminous ballroom to provide light. The pulley mechanism for the chandelier passed through a skylight into the voluminous ballroom and was operated from the outside. Once the chandelier itself had been removed, the hook that attached to the chandelier

would be suspended in air by a chain. When the party gets going, Hot Frog gets the king and his ministers ready. He wraps a long chain and ties it off around each of their corpulent waists. Then Hot Frog has them form a circle so they look like a troop of apes, and then passes the chain diagonally across the eight men so they are secured together. At the stroke of midnight, the group rattle and screech with savage cries and burst into

the party. Sure enough, everyone freaks out. Some of the women faint, some of the men search out their swords and knives, which the king in anticipation had them surrender at the door. And the whole place goes berserk. Guests run for the door, but the king has had them locked to make sure no one could escape and given Hot Frog the key for safekeeping. Guests run for the door, but the king has had them locked to make sure no one could escape, and given Hot Frog the key for safekeeping.

Amidst the bedlam, which is in danger of trampling panicked guests, no one notices the chain, slowly lowering from the skylight until it is just three feet from the floor. The king and his ministers are now in the center of the room and directly under the skylight. Hot Frog keeps the group there and hooks the chandelier chain onto the chain that holds the group together, just as the chain is pulled tight and the group is smushed together. Now that it looks as if the beasts have been contained, the guests calm down and approach the center of the room to get a closer look at them. Hotfrog says, I fancy I know them.

I know who. If I can only get a good look at them, I can soon tell who they are. And he leaps across the shoulders and over the backs of guests with a lit torch. He most unceremoniously uses the king's head as a perch to climb up the chandelier chain. From that vantage point, Hot Frog says he will be able to get enough light on the group to reveal who they are. Some of the partygoers are beginning to get that this is a prank, and soon everyone is laughing, including the king and his ministers,

who are still all chained together. Hopfrog whistles sharply, and the chain is raised thirty feet, suspending the king and his ministers halfway between the ceiling and the floor. Hopfrog holds onto the chain with one hand as it is raised. Averring, he will reveal who the costumed apes are as he thrusts the lit flame towards them. At this point, you could hear a penny drop. The room is dead silent. And suddenly, a low, harsh grating sound echoes about the ballroom, the same sound the king and his ministers heard after the king threw

Trippetta to the floor and his wine in her face. But now there is no question where it's coming from. It's coming from Hopfrog, who is grinding, gnashing, and foaming at the mouth in a maniacal rage at the upturned faces of the king and his seven sycophants. Aha! I see who they are now. And he comes right up to the king to examine him, and the torch catches on the flax hair and burns into the tar. And soon all eight of them are up in flames.

The party-goers are screaming, but there is nothing that they can do but watch in horror as the king and his ministers burn to an agonizing death, suspended and chained together 30 feet in the air. As they burn and the flames grow higher, Hopfrog climbs the chain, and when the men have stopped writhing and screaming and the room is stunned into silence, Hapfrog says, I see now distinctly what manner of people these maskers are. They are a great king and his seven privy counselors, a king who does not scruple to strike a defenseless girl, and his seven counselors who abet him in the outrage.

As for myself, I am simply Hotfrog, the Jester, and this is my last jest. The eight corpses swing in their chains, a blackened, hideous mess, and Hotfrog tosses his torch to the floor and climbs out the skylight. It was Trippetta who was operating the pulley that lowered and raised the chandelier, and together she and Hot Frog make their escape and the long journey home to their families. They were never seen again. If this feels like many a revenge film meted out with savage violence, it is because Poe is an iconoclast who continues to influence writers and filmmakers.

Think of the Alfred Hitchcock films of the 50s and filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and M. Night Shyamalan, whose TV series Servant feels right out of Poe. You can feel Poe's influence everywhere in popular entertainment. He wasn't the first to feature gruesome imagery. Shakespeare had the children of one character killed and baked into a meat pie and served her for dinner, but he took horror and mystery to a whole new level. There is a wickedness about him, a certain glee we can feel in the author as he knows the shock effect these stories will have on the reader.

There will always be an appetite for eerie, atmospheric, mystery, cruelty, violence, and gore, but in Poe there is a particular zeal. You can sense he really enjoys this twisted, spooky stuff. Some of these stories are still quite shocking and certainly surprising. Some of them, not so much. Some feel quaint and we haven't included those. There are a series of detective stories that feel remedial by today's standards.

For instance, one murder mystery is solved by revealing an ape was the perpetrator. This may have been juicy stuff in Poe's day when apes were creatures shrouded in mystery, but now it seems kind of silly. But the detective character in those stories was a prototype for Sherlock Holmes and many other fictional detectives since. Poe was a trailblazer. Pretty impressive from a guy who wrote 150 years ago, was drunk half the time, and strung out an opium the other.

All in all, the guy is pretty amazing. I've loved his work since I was a teenager, and I hope you've been listening to Jake's recordings of the originals. Because even with prose that is antiquated now, it's surprising how immediate that language can still feel. Poe is an audio Chuck original. This episode was read to you by Ashley Flowers. So, what do you think Chuck?

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