Imaginary Worlds - Dreaming of Coney Island's Dreamland

Episode Date: August 13, 2025

Coney Island still has the classic amusements you’d expect today like roller coasters, water slides, and carnival games. But over a century ago, it looked more like a proto–Disney World, with multiple theme parks, colossal buildings, and wildly imaginative rides. The most extravagant park along the boardwalk was Dreamland. At Dreamland, you could take a trip to Hell, experience the end of the world, ride through fake Venetian canals, or visit a city built to scale for little people. I talk with historian and novelist Kevin Baker about why Dreamland remains so intriguing and deeply problematic. We also hear voice actor Lofty Fulton read a passage from Kevin’s novel “Dreamland.” Plus, I talk with visual artist Zoe Beloff. She was fascinated that Sigmund Freud visited Dreamland in 1909. So she invented an alternative history where Freud’s disciples in Brooklyn tried to rebuild the park with overtly Freudian rides and exhibits. This week’s episode is sponsored by Hims, ShipStation and ButcherBox.  For your free online visit, Hims.com/IMAGINARY Go to shipstation.com and use code IMAGINARY to sign up for your FREE trial.  ButcherBox is offering our listeners $20 off their first box and free protein for a year. Go to ButcherBox.com/imaginary to get this limited time offer and free shipping. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinski. I am standing in a giant parking lot, which may not sound very exciting, but to my left is the New York Aquarium. And to my right is Coney Island. I'm standing practically right below the cyclone, the roller coaster. I can see the ferris wheel. I can hear the seagulls from the beach. And that's cool.

I mean, I like Coney Island. But if I was standing here on this spot 120 years ago, I would be seeing something incredible. I would be walking into Dreamland. Dreamland was this massive theme park that was built in 1904. The entrance to Dreamland was a gigantic arch, and standing in the middle of the arch was an angel who was 40 feet high,

and her wings spanned 80 feet across. Inside Dreamland, there were Venetian canals, a recreation of the destruction of Pompeii, a simulation of a submarine ride with a giant squid, a trip to hell which included a 50-foot whirlpool and a statue of Satan with giant bat wings, and they kept adding attractions too. There was a show that depicted the end of the world

in a theater that seated 1,200 people. And I haven't even gotten to the really weird aspects of Dreamland. We will get there. A lot of modern theme parks are designed for comfort, reassurance, and family-friendly fun. In the early 20th century, people definitely thought Dreamland was fun. But it was not reassuring or comforting. It was not quaint or old-timey. Some of these attractions were designed to make you feel uncomfortable.

You left with unresolved questions. And the fact that Dreamland burned down in 1911 only added to its mystique. When I first learned about Dreamland, I fell into a rabbit hole of online archives. And I discovered I am not alone. Some people have spent years, even decades, trying to understand why were these the dreams that people wanted to experience in the waking world? world. And I began to wonder, will the past always feel like a foreign country to people living today? The first student animated film I ever made was about a guy who was bald and very insecure about his lack of hair. So he buys a magic toupee that can be like a helpful life coach. It took me

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Hems.com slash imaginary. Individual results may vary based on studies of topical and oral monoxide and finasteride. Prescription required. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information. Kevin Baker is a journalist and an author. He's written non-fiction books and fiction, including a novel called Dreamland, which is set at the theme park. Later on, we'll hear the actor Lofty Fulton read an excerpt from Kevin's novel.

I talked with Kevin on our Patreon show between imaginary worlds. I want to play a section of our conversation. where we talked about Dreamland, the real Dreamland, not the one in his novel. He says Dreamland was not the only theme park on Coney Island back then. Luna Park was close by, and Luna Park had its own fantastical exhibits, like a trip to the moon, where you got to meet the man in the moon and his moon maidens. But Dreamland went even further. It was sort of the biggest and most bombastic and

most pretentious of all the parks. It was huge. It was beautiful. Everything glowing with electric lights, a million different electric light bulbs all over the park. People had never seen anything like this. Electricity had just really come in in the last generation as this wholly new thing that was transforming life. But the park was also a combination of things. It was supposed to be moral lessons. There was a certain lasciviousness underneath it all. For instance, there was an enormous statue of a kind of guardian angel with a sword, a female angel at the front of it. Of course, she was bare-chested, and apparently men used to go and gawk at her for a long time. So there was that kind of back and forth with it. But you had all kinds of different acts. You had

elephants which slid down the chute into this lagoon. You could go slide into the water yourself and the various shoot the shoots rides. But one of the things that really attracted me about it as an idea from my novel of the same name were some of the exhibitions. There were a lot of recreations of recent wars. There was something where all these foreign navies would come up and bomb a shell New York to a fairly well. And then the U.S. Navy came out and sank them all to cheers from the crowds. But others seemed more mysterious to me. Both Dreamland and Luna Park had a fighting flames exhibition

where this tenement would be set on fire. People would run out on the window ledges. and be forced to jump or dive off, and a fire department would come and put out the fire. And it baffled me at first as to why all these people who lived in tenements with a constant fear of fire, constant fear of that happening. These places were all over New York, were just fire traps. Why did they want to come out and see this? And then it finally realized, finally got through my head, they were going out to see themselves.

They were going out to see the drama of themselves in this new land, in this new world, in this land they had come to in this world of modernity in which they lived. And this was, this was exciting to them. And it meant attention was being paid. That is amazing. They're making, it's a simulation of themselves, you know. I mean, this is now kind of a common thing. But when you think about it at that time in history, that is so unusual and so American, too. went away. Oh, very much. And there were, you know, there were a lot of very lurid and terrible

shows, too. I mean, there was this kind of all little people city, all what were then called dwarves and midgets. Yeah, Lillipusian Village. Yeah, Lillipusian Village. And there were, again, ones at both Luna Park and Dreamland. And they had their own fire department and their own police department and they would come out and perform for people. And at a very poignant moment when Dreamland catches fire and burns down quite spectacularly in 1911, the Lilliputian Village Fire Department actually goes out and fights the flames alongside the New York Fire Department. You know, it was quitted themselves very well, apparently.

It reflected the rougher, you know, it was, Coney Island at this point was a fantasy, but it also reflected the rougher world all around it. I mean, it would be a tort lawyer's dream today if they wanted to get you up and moving and spending money at all times. So all of the benches were electrified. And if you were sitting there for too long, somebody would give you a little zets, keep you moving. You know, it's all in good humor. Ha, ha. A lot of these rides were designed to throw you together at a time when men and women couldn't do that respectively. You'd have things like the human roulette table that would roll you all around. Or the basis of steeplechase Park was this steeplechase. It was this ride of these mechanical horses

on this undulating track and you would get on and hold your sweetheart or maybe even someone you just met at the fair on this horse while it went around. This was very intimate and risque for the time. And then you'd get off the horse and you'd go across something called the blowhole theater, which would blow up women's skirts. And this rather mad-looking little person in a harlequin costume would hitch, would whack you with a cattle prod for the delight of your fellow New Yorkers who would just come off this and paid a penny to watch this happen. And the audience, nobody can hear it, can see the wincing on my face. but it's happening. Yeah, exactly. Oh, you win, you know, it's, uh, and, uh, yeah, and then there was this kind of trip

to hell whereby this, uh, this young woman is admiring herself in the mirror in a new hat and for her vanity. She's taken down to hell by these demons, which I don't think anybody there seeing this would have taken seriously. I mean, these are people who would have loved to have had a new hat. But it was quite amusing to see the devil's poking her with the, you know, with the pitchforks and all this sort of thing. Oh, another thing they had in a gigantic hotel in the shape of an elephant. But there was this elephant there and you'd go ahead and an observatory in the huda and shops in it.

And you can go and stay in a room. And it eventually became very much sort of a prostitute's hotel and they tore it down. But this is, you know, it was always like. the fantastic and the lurid always side by side always interacting now it's funny because if this wasn't and i know you wrote a novel but if this was a novel i mean how could this not end but dreamland burning down you know it's just like it's got this this like epic you know jungi and fordian kind of you know like everyone's passion and and and and all everyone's sins you know it's like day the locust kind of thing so but how did it actually burn down well and that's and that's what i have

when I have at the end it burned, you know, first, what it burned down was they were

getting Hellgate ready appropriately enough. And Hellgate looks really cool at least from the outside as kind of a satanic,

gigantic, satanic figure over the building. They were getting that ready and some of the pitch caught fire and it went up in this enormous

spectacular fire. And really terrible. They tried to, they got some of the animals out there are a lot of animal acts all over Coney Island, too. Terrible stuff like that.

No people died, though. The remaining two big original parks will sort of steadily decline after this. Luna Park burns down just after the World War II. So if you could go back in time and go to Dreamland, what would you, what's the thing you would want to see the most? Well, fighting flames to start with. I'd like to go and maybe ride a camel, which you could do, probably a good way to get bit, but nonetheless, and see those elephants, which is a terrible thing to do to elephants or anybody, but the idea of them going down the chute just sounds amazing, you know, on their backsides, that's, that's, the elephants are going down a shoot. Would slide down the chute into the water, yeah. You know, you had a lot of animal, you had this one-armed lion tamer, Captain Bostock, who'd lost an all.

but insisted on getting back in with his lions and tigers in this cage. That must have been a little terrifying, too. If I could go back in time and walk around Dreamland, I just want to see it with my own eyes because the scale of it looks so huge, like Disneyland huge. Nothing on Coney Island today even comes close. Although if I did get to walk around, I would want to bring a lot of hand sanitizer.

That might just be psychosomatic on my part because some aspects of Dreamland sound so disturbing that I might just feel dirty by looking at them in real life. And guess who else thought that Dreamland was kind of Freudian? Sigmund Freud. He visited the park in 1909.

This was on this trip to America, he made that was both, as he called it, a waking dream and a rather disturbing experience because he's being honored at Clark University in Worcester. At the same time, he's also traveling with Jung, who's also given an honorary degree there. Oh my God, Jung, is he in Dreamland, too? Yes, yeah. Oh, my God, that should be a play or something. And Jung and Freud in Dreamland.

From your lips to God's ears. And Jung lets Freud know on this trip that he thinks, you know, and Freud has been kind of grooming him as his successor, the guy to turn over modern psychology to. And Jung kind of lets Freud know that he's decided that there are really racial differences between psychologists. He's going to be the psychological. genius of the Gentiles who were essentially different from Jews. And this horrifies Freud. So

Freud is having this sort of terrible time in America despite all the honors. Freud's visit to Coney Island isn't a play as far as I know, but it has become the basis for another work of art. Of all the technology that I see in science fiction, there is one that I wish existed now in the real world. Teleportation. I would love to travel without needing cars, trains, or airplanes. If you run an e-commerce business, you might feel the same way about shipping packages. Ship station can give you the feeling of being. being Scotty on the enterprise. Not exactly teleportation,

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like Squarespace, Etsy, Amazon, or TikTok. When shoppers choose to buy your products, turn them into loyal customers with cheaper, faster, and better shipping. Go to shipstation.com and use the code imaginary to sign up for your free trial. There's no credit card or contract required, and you can cancel any time. That's shipstation.com code imaginary. Zoe Belloff is an artist in New York. She moved here from Scotland in 1980.

Eventually, she found herself fascinated by Coney Island in the history of Dreamland. Zoe's parents were both psychologists. So the idea that Freud visited Dreamland in 1909 captured her imagination. She wanted to do something about it artistically. I knew from very quickly that I didn't want to just illustrate. Freud's afternoon in Coney Island because it wasn't that important to his ideas or theories and that didn't make a whole lot of sense that seemed awfully literal. I wanted to see how we could think about the unconscious of the people who lived, worked and played there in the 20th century

after Freud's visit. And I just kept wishing there had been something like an amateur psychoanalytic society. If only there had been, I stuck with that for a while, like, if only, it's too bad there wasn't, then it occurred to me, as it often happens with me, if you wish something hard enough, you have to bring it into existence. So she invented a fictional group called the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society, and she invented a character named Albert Grass, who was the leader. of the group. In the 1920s, this character wanted to rebuild Dreamland as an homage to Freud, and every ride was going to be overtly Freudian. In Zoe's installation piece, we see a scale model

of the Freudian Dreamland that Albert Grass proposed, along with a few proof-of-concept pieces. And of course, Zoe had to create all of those herself, along with a fake history of the Coney Island Amateur psychoanalytic society, which supposedly met from the 1920s to the 70s. The piece was first shown at Coney Island in 2009 on the centennial of Freud's visit. It actually was shown again recently at a gallery in Soho, and it's toured elsewhere. When I talked to Zoe, she had just come back from a trip to Germany, where she did a presentation for a group of psychoanalysts there. I always worry that people like get mad because I tell them like it's a fancy.

to see at the end. I would think they could storm out or throw something at me. And they were like, oh, that was so great. Like, you encouraged us to be playful. When I first saw images of her Freudian dreamland, I found it really charming and funny. But it was also strangely earnest, as if her character, Albert Grass, really thought he was going to get investors. There was a series of pavilions linked by a little you would travel by a little train called the train of thought and it revolved around

a 50 foot high statue of the libido the model that the libido was really kind of wonderful because we found her I didn't make her can you describe her

she was a showroom mannequin for children in the 20s oh wow she was just like I found her and she was totally perfect. Like when you discover something that you dreamed about, that's really kind of lovely. So was it perfect because she had the face of the manika and the hair

had this particularly 1920s look to it? Yeah, a beautiful 1920s kind of. She was abstracted just enough that you could imagine her as a sculpture. And I had a beautiful banner made that's a dreamland that she holds. If this park had ever been made, that girl would have been as tall as a five-story building. And there was more in the scale models. There's a dream work pavilion, which if you went inside, it was like a slow motion roller coaster in which people in their nightwear would kind of dream their way through it. I love the fun house mirror that shows the ego, super ego, and id.

Tell me about that. Oh, well, that was kind of what Marcel D. Schaub calls a ready mate. I mean, there was a fun house mirror at the Coney Island Museum. All I did was make signage that said ego, super ego, and id. And so, yeah, there were sort of things that I also incorporated things that were old bits from the museum park that was in the Coney Island Museum. There's also a comic book in the exhibit that was supposedly created by Albert Grass.

My idea was that through the 20s, he really tried to get funding for the amusement park, but I guess the good people of Brooklyn were not ready for a 50-foot high libido. So by the Great Depression, the idea of building a huge amusement park just didn't really seem on. So we had this idea of,

doing a comic book in the 30s. Coming from Brooklyn, he must have been very influenced by Little Nemo in Slumberland and Little Nemo in Slumberland by Windsor McKay, who did live in Brooklyn, was very important to me.

So did you create the comic book or did you... I created the comic book, yes. People always say that, like, did you get an illustrator? I'm like, no. You're like, I am an artist. I am an artist. That was a main point.

So, yeah, he... had this idea of making a comic book about his dreams. But then I always thought it also became quite a serious, like, dream journal. But I realized the only real dreams I have access to are my own. So I would write down, the only time I've written down my own dreams, sometimes I'd go, oh, that's a really good one. And then I would just use that as a core to interpret the dream in the world of Albuquerast. In the exhibit, Zoe could have owned up to the fact that all of this work was created by her,

but it's not presented that way. You have to understand that I made this project specifically for an amusement park. And I was very aware of that I saw it as a site-specific installation. And in an amusement park, nothing is what it appears to be. I mean, that's the nature of amusement parks. Like, you know, when you looked out of the window at my exhibition, you see a big banner and it said, snake girl, 99 cents. I mean, do you believe snake girl? You believe the woman is being soared in half downstairs? I mean, it literally was upstairs from a freak show.

So everything is a bit of wish fulfillment, a bit of hucksterism. So if you came in, it said an exhibition by Zoe Bella. You can take that in different ways. It could be that I had put together the exhibition or it was my exhibition. You know, whatever you want to do with that, one of the pleasures was apparently people argued fiercely about it. Really? The manager said, and people come downstairs and voices are raised, you know, people had different theories. Like in terms of whether it was real? Yes. Yes. Some people thought apparently that because it had lasted for quite a long time from 1926 to

1972 with the scope of the exhibition that it must have been real because I used to come there like as a janitor I used to have to go and change the bulb on the projector and sweep up a bit you know wait wait you're a janitor and Connie Island well for my own exhibition because there's nobody else to do that

oh right okay but they didn't know like I was an artist so I could over hear people talking and people love to be a docent for their friends, you know, or their family. I remember one gentleman told his children that that was an amusement he saw in his childhood. Now, I had just inserted that amusement into his childhood. That's so Freudian. Do you've like done an inception or you've like created a false memory or something? Yeah, in a sweet way. I mean, 2009 was a much, innocent time than the time in which we live now.

I mean, now we are so awash in disinformation and fake news that to make something that's kind of ambiguous or imaginary like that without stating it, I wouldn't do that now. I mean, it's kind of sad because there was something kind of lovely about it and it was meant in the best possible way. I was completely fooled. In fact, the first time I contacted Zoe, I didn't realize until halfway through our phone call that she had made it all up

and that Albert Grass didn't exist. I told her, but I have so many questions to ask you about him. She said, I could still ask them. She put so much work into this character. He's real in her mind. Albert Grass was a designer of amusements in Cornel. island. And my feeling is how would a man like that have ever discovered Freud, you know, who Freud was not known. He was not part of popular culture or anything. But Albert Grass was

recruited into the Signal Corps in the First World War and fought in Europe. I thought that perhaps while visiting one of his friends who was suffering from shell shock in a hospital, he might have picked up a volume of Freud. And also, that's where Albert Grass learned to make movies. So when he came back to America, he was already steeped in Freudian theory and knew how to shoot film. Two very important things for the society.

And so it was his idea for people in the society to recreate their dreams on film and analyze them. of course these films didn't exist because the coney island amateur psychoanalytic society never existed either but zoie had the material to make the films herself she had been collecting home movies at flea markets around the city for years just because she found them fascinating and i was always interested in home movies as kind of psychoanalytic objects object but kind of reveal more than they appear to, the way Freud thought about dreams or slips of the tongue as kind of these moments when the unconscious comes to the fore. And I thought, you could

maybe really think about home movies like that. And I honestly wasn't very sure I could pull this idea off, because this was kind of central. And the first thing that I worked upon I made a database of all my collection of whole movies. I had about 300 little cans of 16 and 8mm film. And I would just go through each one. And I would write it just like literally just try and write a factual description of what was in that role of film. But somehow as I did this, stories seem to emerge. As I did that, these characters formed.

And so who else was in the story? the society? Mostly his friends. So I, you know, actually did a lot of research about who were the people who lived, worked and played in Coney Island in the 20s, 30s, 40s, and so on. The neighborhood was really mainly Jewish and Italian immigrants. And working people couldn't necessarily go to college or stuff like that. But everybody was very keen on like, school and those kind of people eager for knowledge, you know, they couldn't become like professional psychoanalysts, but they could take part in one of the great intellectual adventures as an amateur club.

I asked Zoe, what does she want people to come away thinking when they leave the exhibit? I want people to think about their inner lives in relation to their world, their prejudice, society. I mean, that's what Albert Grass was trying to do. And I'd like people to think about some of those questions in ways both serious and playful when they read about these people, you know, who were immigrants, who were refugees who had like, people didn't like their sexuality. And like, how would they, how were they creatively dealing with all these things? How long did Albugrass live? that's a really, that's a mystery.

He seems to, so far, I haven't found any trace of him beyond the early 40s in Los Angeles. So far in your mind, do you ever? Yes. I mean, like an archive, you could, you know, an archive is always open to finding more. That's true. To my knowledge, we don't know what happened to him beyond that. Summer always puts me in the mood. for a nice, juicy burger.

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Right now, Butcher Box is offering our listeners $20 off their first box and free protein for a year. Go to Butcherbox.com slash imaginary to get this limited time offer in free shipping always. That's butcherbox.com slash imaginary. Don't forget to use our link so they know that we sent you. Earlier, we heard from Kevin Baker about the history of Dreamland. Let's hear an excerpt from his novel Dreamland, read by the actor Lofty, Fulton. The novel mixes fictional characters with historical figures, and it's narrated from the perspective of several characters. One of them is a dwarf named Patrick Mahoney Jr., although

everybody calls him Trick. Trick tells us that he was working in Coney Island before they built Lilliputian Village, but the parks always had dwarves on staff. There were worse jobs on Coney Island, believe it or not, at least worse jobs for me. Over at Steeplechase Park where the paying customers came off the mechanical horses. There was another one of my kind, done up in a harlequin suit and a hat and painted face. I had watched him chasing all the flush-faced clerks and the day laborers and the factory girls with a cattle prod, driving them back across the blowholes that sent the women's skirts billowing up around their ears. I had to turn away. That was my greatest fear before.

for the construction of the little city, that I could be compelled by necessity to take such a situation. That is always the thing with depravity. Just when you think you've plumbed the very depths, there is always someplace lower to fall. I sat behind the left ear of Satan and watched the sun come up over sheep's head bay.

From where I sat I could see all the weary banalities of damnation, old Nick himself leaning spectre, speculatively over the front gate, one heavily muscled arm and his enormous hooked wings resting on the entrance. Up close you could see that Satan's nose was chipped, and the red plaster head could use a new paint job. The eyes glaring down in perpetuity at the sign strung over the front. Hellgate, ten cents. Just ten cents to go to hell. Though I knew places in this city where you could do it even cheaper. Inside was a red paper-mache underworld,

a prancing grimacing devil in red tights, a gorgeous angel. A young man was dispatched to eternal torment for a drink of whiskey, another for smoking a cigar, others for making sport on a Sunday. The most popular, though, was a young woman trying on a new hat.

She preened and primped in front of her mirror, mirror, too vain to notice the grinning devils that rose up from the floor around her. They spun the mirror around, turning it into a casket. The young lady was pushed into it screaming impressively, then pitched down a trap door billowing smoke and fire. Only the hat and a new mirror were left behind. During the day, I wandered through the dusty corridors of our museum, watching all the people I knew displayed in glass booths. The dog-faced boy and the Dahomian giant. Nearly everything was copied from Barnum, right down to the Fiji Mermaid, a dead manatee

sown into a giant fish tail. Most of the others, the workmen and the animal trainers and my fellow freaks, like to go up to the shoot the shoots at night, from where they could look down on the lake and the tower and the fall of Pompeii. They went there to drink and make love and dream after Dreamland closed for the night. Only I preferred Hellgate and Old Scratch, the whole park sleeping before me like some lost Mayan city. The only sounds the steady sweep of the ocean and the closer, quieter sweep of a hundred rooms, already preparing for the next day. Laude came to me while contemplating the dreamland imitation of Venice.

It was perfect, a trite, hermetic little city of our own, a new nation of the mad and the misshapen, conceived on top of hell, and dedicated to the proposition that all men can live in any world they please. Maddie Brankerhoff was the one to take it to, I knew. Big Tim Sullivan was the money man. Indies partners would like it well enough once the dollars began to roll in. Brinkerhof was the genius to sell it to them. I knew where I would find him, even at this hour. He would be up there now, up at the very top of the highest spot on Coney, the glowing white tower of Dreamland, just beneath

its crowning ball. The stunning gold electric elevators was shut down for the night. I had to climb the whole seven flights to his office, insufficient legs trembling with the effort. I arrived panting, open-mouthed in the incredible New York heat. Not yet dawn and already like an oven. He was just where I thought he would be, tilted back in his chair, legs propped up on the window sill. Beside him was a bottle of good gin, a glass, a pitcher of iced lemon water, when he was like this, I knew he could go on babbling all night.

They say I'm not a serious architect, but visitors to an amusement park and not in a serious mood, and they do not want to encounter seriousness. He turned to me for the first time then, but his eyes didn't see me. Even his vanilla ice cream suit and green silk bow tie drooped, matching green carnation, wilting in the lapel. Nothing here must be different from our ordinary experience. In this manufacturing age, with all the will and ingenuity we are capable of, whatever we see must have, life, action, motion, sensation, surprise, shock, speed, or at least comedy.

We must create a different world, a dream world, a nightmare world, if that's what it takes. He stopped, then, his face twisting distastefully, for that was not what Dreamland had become, and we both knew it. I was betrayed, you know. Yes, I know, but I have an idea. He cocked his head, indicating his brief desire to listen. An empire of the small, I continued, a midget metropolis just for us. The disappointment was visible in his face.

Another dwarf circus. No, something more. Everything built for us, scaled for us. The real deal. No more, little big man review. You can see that at any carnage show in the sticks. He nodded slowly. He was already pulling paper, drawing pencils, a square out of his desk.

You would need everything. Everything, absolutely everything. A real livable city built. To your scale, the architecture of the small and the low, doornobbs two feet off the ground, a miniature town hall, a precinct house, a church, a midget cathedral. A real palace I snuck in for a real king and queen. He was already mapping out the parameters of the town, bushy hair curling up demonically in the oven heat.

Yes, Apollos, he murmured. But who would we find for such a thing? Luck, King, and Queen. Don't worry about it, I told him. I have somebody in mind. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Kevin Baker, Zoe Bell.

Lof and Lofty Fulton, who did the readings. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. We have another podcast called Between Imaginary Worlds. It's a more casual chat show. It's only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon. Between Imaginary Worlds comes included with the ad-free version of the show that you can get on Patreon. You can also buy an ad-free subscription on Apple Podcasts. If you support the show on Patreon, at different levels, you get either free imaginary world stickers, a mug, or T-shirt.

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