IS IT ENOUGH YET? FM CALL-IN RADIO REQUEST SHOW STORIES

In April 2025, I hosted a week-long call-in show on socials inviting people to request songs for me to twist into dark tales, just like I did with my book. It was a fun, creative and challenging writing exercise. All the stories and outlines are below.

SCORPIO LEISURE - FERAL LIFE

All the girls were disappeared from the town. The dry and dying forest had called to them first. There they became one with the wilds: leafy branches entwining with their hair, the roots of flora slinking into their veins, and fungi fusing with flesh.

While they frolicked, for a short time, nature could breathe. But it was not enough. It needed feeding and called for the boys.

By night, they followed its song in a stupor finding themselves encircled by the dancing, screaming girls who danced and stomped and howled in feral ritual, breaking flesh, crushing bones, and smashing organs until nothing but liquid meat remained.

The land drank it happily and the filthy wild girls returned home as sated as their Mother Nature.

TOWANDA - THE FUTURE

Three gorgons—Stheno, Euryale and Medusa—return for revenge. They travel through modern day Canada targeting men’s rights activist groups. Headbanging to angry femme metal, their serpentine locks tear the manosphere to shreds.

Grease 2 - Score Tonight

The guys were keeping count, but so was she. Every Saturday at 6 p.m. the boys gathered for their pre-game hype session in a deserted lot. Drinking, hooting, hollering, and spewing all kinds of crass innuendo, they’d stand attention as soon as Jonny stood up. Plucking the ratty, folded sheet of paper from his back jeans pocket that charted their ‘scores,’ he had their attention as he announced last week’s scores. The girls were graded on degrading criteria that doesn’t need repeating. The current leader receives a roaring approval from the crowd while the ‘loser’ ate boos and ridicule. That was their motivation to grab ‘quality’ tonight.

Its sickening. She chokes down the vomit. There will be enough projectile fluids. And that’s her cue. While they’ve been doing their misogynist math, she’s been doing her own calculations.

Swishing out of her hiding spot with intent, wearing little more than a naive look, they face her. She sees each of them assigning her a value. They have no value to her or society. Someday she will be thanked for the things she’s about to do: knock ‘em down one by one.

DEPECHE MODE - NEVER LET ME DOWN AGAIN

20-something male has developed an anxious attachment disorder after being betrayed by the love of his life. He thinks he will never love again despite desperate efforts. Now the lover is back and he will do anything to keep him. Drawn back into the vibrant ‘80s queer dance scene and social activism, the protagonist is high (on life and all the trendiest drugs) but begins to notice that he is being treated like an outcast while his lover flourishes. He is approached by one of their group and told he is not welcome, not after what he did to his lover. Confused, since he was the wronged party, he finds himself at home talking it out with his long-dead lover who he killed so he would never let him down again.

Annie-Claude Deschenes - Menace Minimale

Laurie likes it when they run. Even more when they hide, useless as it is. It draws out the game and their terror. She imagines the poor, pretty young man’s heart thumping in a delicious arrhythmia.

Remaining still and quiet for just long enough to make him feel a sense of safety in the dark. All the while his blood glows to her like a ray of light in the gloom.

The bait takes the bait. He moves from behind his hiding tree cautiously at first, still making a ruckus instead of a rustle in her sensitive ears. She calls, “Are you there?” stifling a giggle. He freezes hearing this and slides back behind the tree. ‘How boring,’ Laurie thinks. She wants the man running for the life that already belongs to her. She likes to play with her food, but this one’s got no game left in him. The hunger is with her, though and she strikes. There is sweet fear in his blood which delights her, but it quickly turns to a relief that it is coming to an end. He turns sour in her mouth and she drops the half-drunk sack of disappointing man to the ground.

SKYE SWEETNAM - HUMAN

A 'therapeutic' social media platform emerges, allowing you to donate your thoughts. You can purge yourself of your worst memories and erase the pain. But the space left in your brain must be filled with something by adopting the donated thoughts of someone else and risk internalizing a whole new nightmare. On the verge of collapsing because of the side effects, the platform invites in misinformation mongers and brand-supported influencers. Deemed safe again now, all that circulates is a new horror of herd mentality, everyone thinking and behaving alike in service of politics and commerce.

DAVID BOWIE - SPACE ODDITY

Recovering drug user volunteers for a lone routine docking with the space station Oddity finds himself off course, disconnected from ground control and locked in a strange orbit. Utterly isolated he finds solace and then psychogenic stimulation in the stars that are communicating a series of terrible possible futures to him.

RICK ASTLEY - NEVER GONNA GIVE YOU UP

Women had been going missing in the city for months. Their bodies would show up days or weeks later, well-groomed and seemingly well cared for apart from the strangulation—such an intimate way to kill—and the missing wedding fingers.

When Shannon woke up, drowsy and in a strange place, she knew she was the latest of the missing. She found herself in a home stuck in time, the 1980s. It was utterly tasteless but perfectly maintained.

Then she heard his voice. It was soft. He was behind her and she could no not turn to see him. Likely by design. He spoke of their love, undying commitment, and told her that he knew she would not play games like the others. All Shannon could do was nod in agreement. This seemed to please him and he stroked her face while she shivered. She heard his gentle footsteps move away and a clicking sound before Rick Astley started blaring.

It went on this way for 3 days, best she could calculate. He spoke lovingly to her and about their glorious fiction of a future. He cared for her, feeding, bathing and grooming her, all without her seeing his face and always to the same soundtrack. He gave her a wedding ring that day.

Each time the tune started, it grated on her nerves and made her scream internally behind the smile he wanted to see.

By day 12 she was at her wits end. Not only was she being held against her will by a simpering romantic but she was being Rickrolled. When he served her dinner that night and played the song for the thousandth time, she screamed, “Just kill me! Give me up! I can’t take it anymore.” He obliged, like a fucking gentleman.

STUDDED LEFT - PAMPLONA

Wearing all white to offset her read hair that aggravated the beasts, she plucked pink and yellow flowers from a pot on a neighbour’s window, weaving them into the braid crowning her head. But the beasts came too soon and in different shapes. All she knew was their shadows from the sun blinding her eyes, and the pain. Oh the pain from each of their poundings.

Breaking free, she is suddenly aware of sounds. It’s all screaming: from the festival crowd around the corner, the beasts behind her, but mostly herself. She stumbles through the an-acknowledging throng, falling at the steps of the cathedral, seeping its stones in her blood wondering if the crimson would entice the other beasts being unleashed into the tiny streets that moment.

KENNY ROGERS - THE GAMBLER

A struggling Millennial rides the train, stewing on student debt, his lack of career prospects, all while exhausted from the burnout of hustle culture. A refined elderly gentleman takes the seat beside him, skillfully spinning his sophisticated cane with surprisingly agile fingers. The older man launches into a diatribe about generational differences and starts to offer him some outdated advice embedded in a slim poker metaphor. He nods politely, but the older man’s words begin to take a strange turn. He says that he sees the young man’s struggles, offering him one round of Texas Holdem to change his fortune. What harm could entertaining this man do? Plus it would pass time on the long journey and take his mind off his worries.

He pulls a strong hand: trip Aces. Giddy on the inside, he keeps his face straight until it’s time to lay his cards down, laughing. The older man coolly places his winning Royal Flush down. The face cards begin to morph, taking demonic forms.

The young man draws back in shock, only to be further stunned by the much transformed man next to him. Long nails, dirty nails have sprouted from his finger tips, his jawline now a point so jagged it could cut like a knife, his eyes were the worst. Blood red irises with black slices for pupils gaze mercilessly at him. “I did not say I would change your fortune for the better,” the fiend growls. “Your generation just doesn’t know when to walk away.”

WEEZER - ISLAND IN THE SUN

Golden Sea Can’t Control My Brain: In a future where we can live out our fantasies in death, a man wants what he saw of a woman’s joy he once saw at the seaside. In order to make this a reality the girl must join him, willing or not. Trapped in an eternity with his romantic delusion.

GOLDFRAPP - OOH LA LA

She saw him shimmer from across the club. The poetry exuded from his body’s fluid movements on the dance floor. She had to have him, to know that body bound in exquisite rhythm with hers.

It’s no trouble getting him home. They always come (and cum.) it’s the going that’s the problem. This one she will keep. But after magnificent hours tangled together, he casually stands, pulling up his jeans with barely an excuse. When she protested, he patronized that he was just looking for a little “oh la la.” He was glitter lust and she was romance to the core, a core that had been cracked one to many times.

Thinking only that she was keeping him, she found herself holding his heavy body and a red stiletto, the heel broken into his heart. He was not going anywhere.

MITSKI - GEYSER

Something is bubbling in Harmony ever since she had her heart handed to her by her beautiful, enigmatic lead singer ex-girlfriend, Elle. Every time she hears the band on the radio or Elle's gorgeous face on the TV or in a magazine, her insides rage and rumble. Her body feels out of tune with her brain, which is consumed by sadness. Harmony can't ignore Elle's special 'coming home' show, and her gut guides her to go. When the band plays 'Geyser,' a song written for her, the internal bubbling becomes a roar. It growls and grows, pushing at her organs, pressing against her flesh until sweet, cathartic release. She expels all her pain in bloody combustion, leaving behind only her hand cupping her heart.