Waiting For October

Plot Summary

Karo is from October, a world where monsters are real and stories hold great weight and power. Wanting to share their life with their partner, they bring Yvonne, a librarian from our world, for a visit among October's pumpkin patches and endless forests. Surrounded by new creatures and immense beings, Yvonne is both entranced and cautious about what moves about the night. Waiting for October is a story about the power of stories and why we tell them. The podcast alternates between the continued storyline of Karo and Yvonne with mini episodes of each monster providing a monologue with their backstory. 

Critical Evaluation

Waiting For October starts off with some heavy-handed dialogue and rough voice acting that blooms into an enthralling experience once they enter that world of October. Each episode improves in quality in terms of the script, the voice acting, and especially the sound design. The sound design, in particular, is incredible as the animal calls, rustling of leaves, and waves on the shore help to immerse the listener into this supernatural world. 

Along with the sound design, Waiting For October does a great job of providing queer and disability representation. Karo and Yvonne are in a queer relationship, and Karo uses they/them pronouns. They are not even the only genderqueer character, as many of the monsters and beings that inhabit the world do not fit within our world’s gender binary. Auncle Lantern, for example, uses the neopronouns of xe/xir. I usually have difficulty with neopronouns, but I found that listening to them was far easier to process than reading them, so this format is perfect for an introduction to this concept. It also works well because, to the dismay of people who use neopronouns, it’s much easier for people to understand a creature made of pumpkins and twigs to not be male or female-coded than a human. 

Yvonne is also disabled in some way. It’s part of her character and adds to the tension of the story in a natural way. She uses a mobility aid and cannot keep up with Karo when they hurry off in a panic. The writing never treats her as a burden, though, and instead shows her disability as her lived reality. She is also not left out of the adventure when her disability prevents her from moving any further. As this is a world where stories are embodied, the stories find her where she’s at. This audio drama provides a good representation in the midst of its fantasy setting, allowing listeners to see themselves reflected without all of the conflict and struggles stemming from their queer identities. This is just how the characters exist in their world, so it adds to their characterization without becoming their entire beings. 

Creative Use for a Library Program

It would be fun to have an oral storytelling-themed program. As the oldest method of sharing stories and histories, oral storytelling still has an important place in many cultures today. It would be great to either bring in a storyteller or to have teens create their own stories. For the latter example, there could be sessions where they work on and develop short stories, learning techniques for lengthening or shortening key moments and creating characters that are believable and evocative. This would then culminate in a poetry-slam style session where the teens get a chance to share their stories with others. They would have to keep the narratives short, but it would still give the teens an opportunity to create and share their hard work with others.

Potential Challenge Issues and Defense Preparation

This podcast contains many queer characters and queer culture references including nonbinary people, transgender people, homosexual relationships, and neopronouns. These are all topics that regularly get challenged for their inclusion in collections that teens have access to. My general defense to this is that queer teens exist and have the right to find media that reflects their realities. For this podcast, I would also argue that the depiction of queerness is useful and necessary to the story itself, showing monsters and creatures that exist outside of our world and, therefore, exist beyond normalized conceptions of gender and sexuality. None of the depictions are obscene, but just show queer people living their life within a fantasy world.

Reason for Inclusion

I am not a podcast listener. Despite watching video essays all the time, I usually can’t justify just listening to people talk for an hour, regardless of how much of an expert they are. When frantically trying to find a podcast to listen to and review, I learned about audio dramas, and Waiting For October seemed right up my alley. After hearing from other librarians that horror is very popular with teens right now, I figured that a podcast featuring monsters and the entire month of October would fit right into place. While not containing any explicit horror elements, the podcast still has the aesthetic and feeling of an autumnal day that can draw in any listener.