The Boss in the Wall

A Treatise on the House Devil

By: Avram Davidson, Grania Davis, Peter S. Beagle - introduction, Michael Swanwick - introduction

Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki, Jim Meskimen

Professor Vlad Smith is on a terrifying quest, one that will take him from the halls of our most hallowed institutions to the most rundown of old houses in blighted neighborhoods. A mysterious committee, shredded yellowed newspapers, a daguerreotype of a Confederate soldier, a headless corpse, and a corpseless head....

These are the clues that Smith must piece together to save his sanity and his daughter and uncover the terrible secret of the Boss in the Wall.

©2020 Skyboat Media, Inc. (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing

From the seed, grows the oak.

Thank you, Peter S Beagle. Loyalty to your friend is rewarded. Your secret is safe with me. Not. I sing the body electric. I proclaim this Avram Davidson.

Great, but maybe best on the page.

A fine story, carefully constructed, built around an eerie concept that is well executed, and as dense as a novel at least twice its length. The narrator has a good voice, well-suited for the genre, but the prose is such that this might be better read and heard in the mind, with its specificity of language and subtle variations in narratorial (author's, not voice actor's) style. My 4/5 stars for narration is what I mentioned, a bit that might have been solved by more narrators or even a narrator with a bit more range. I will be reading more of Davidson and listening to more from Rudnicki, but maybe not the two together.

Quit partway in

Just too much negative stuff - maybe I just don’t like horror.
And I don’t need to read a modern version of a racist past - I can read Mark Twain or All the Kings Men for a literary example of what the world was like. I don’t think this story brings much to the party as far as that’s concerned.