REMINDER ABOUT KRIS STRAUB’S LOCAL 58: THE NEW EPISODES

Where does the time go? It was 2020 when Balladeer’s Blog first covered the ongoing masterpiece and trailblazer of Analog Horror – Local 58TV. My post yesterday about the very real Lucky 7 pirate channel from 1978 prompted me to check up on any new episodes of Kris Straub’s fictional Local 58TV.

There are FOUR new installments since 2020 – one from three years ago, one from two years ago and two from Halloween of 2024! As always, the months and sometimes years between episodes are the biggest weakness of this Straub storyline. It’s been purely on faith in his talent that so many of us are still interested after all this time. 

If you’re new to the whole Local 58TV Analog Horror series the YT Channel is HERE. You’ll get to enjoy all twelve episodes up to now without the long wait the rest of us had to endure.

My take on the four new installments: 

WHAT I DON’T LIKE – Too blatant a connection now to Straub’s long ago Candle Cove series which spawned books and a television miniseries of its own. To clarify, I had no problem with Local 58TV being set in Mason County, WV with Straub’s fictional towns of Lasker City, Ichor Falls, Broodhollow and Edenvale.

         To me that aspect was fun, like the way H.P. Lovecraft’s town of Arkham plus the Miskatonic Valley and Miskatonic University were all set in his fictional universe. Now, however, with the new episodes linking up to the Hannah Birch slaying AND the hidden Candle Cove broadcasts I lost a little bit of my enthusiasm. I was enjoying Local 58TV as something all its own, but now its world has shrunk via this tie-in.     

WHAT I DO LIKE – Pretty much everything else! Straub did his homework and correctly tied the ongoing efforts against the mysterious dark forces to the end of analog broadcasting. Very appropriate!

        I really enjoyed how the livestream for our storyteller’s NASA pastiche tied the approaching comet Eidolon to the face from one of the graves encountered by Straub’s character Cadavre (he’s French).

        Links to the real-life sleep experiments in Mammoth Cave decades ago were terrific! It put me in mind of how David Lynch’s 2017 continuation of Twin Peaks blended nuclear research with Aleister Crowley’s alleged ties to some of the scientists involved. The Mammoth Cave business puts Lasker City’s mining disaster in a sinister new light, too. 

I’m being intentionally oblique with these references to avoid spoilers for newcomers to this Analog Horror story AND in hopes that these tantalizing tidbits whet some people’s appetites for Local 58TV and get them to check it out.   

To read my 2020 post summarizing Local 58TV at length click HERE. For deeper dives, see Nexpo’s detailed examination of the mysteries of the older episodes of this series. For a detailed examination incorporating the four newer episodes into the overall storyline see the analysis by Norman’s Index.