"A god must feed. A god must be fed. This is a fact agreed upon across every territory of the Peninsula. And so, really, the only point of difference between the people born to the water and the people born to the land...is the precise nature of the sacrifice we need to make."
"Ease away my grateful skin, Trawler-Man,
I will rejoice at skin reshaped in silt,
And my fragments will swim in the currents of the abyss.
Fill my eyes and mouth with thick and choking mud, Trawler-man;
I will exult in the death of sight, sensation, and noise.
Bear me away into black depths, Trawler-man;
I will forget my pain and the name I once wore.
Rise like a dark river in my throat, Trawler-man.
And my drowning lungs will sing of Tides and Flesh."
I will rejoice at skin reshaped in silt,
And my fragments will swim in the currents of the abyss.
Fill my eyes and mouth with thick and choking mud, Trawler-man;
I will exult in the death of sight, sensation, and noise.
Bear me away into black depths, Trawler-man;
I will forget my pain and the name I once wore.
Rise like a dark river in my throat, Trawler-man.
And my drowning lungs will sing of Tides and Flesh."
The Silt Verses is a Horror/New Weird podcast by the makers of I Am In Eskew.
Carpenter and Faulkner, two worshippers of an outlawed god called the Trawler-Man, travel up the length of their deity's great black river in search of miracles and revelations. As their pilgrimage lengthens and the river’s mysteries deepen, the two acolytes find themselves under threat from a police manhunt, but also come into conflict with the weirder gods that have flourished in these forgotten rural territories.
The show can be found on iTunes, Spotify, Acast and Sticher. A third season is currently airing, and the podcast is now hosted by the Rusty Quill Network.
This podcast contains examples of the following tropes:
- Accidental Murder: During his first experience with the Trawler-Man, Faulkner accidentally drowns one of his brothers to death to fully experience the song.
- Annoying Younger Sibling: Faulkner acts like one towards Carpenter, much to her exasperation. In Faulkner's narration we learn that he deliberately invokes it - first with his older brothers and now with Carpenter.
- Apocalypse How: Sid Wright attempts this when he turns against the Grindinglord and instead starts worshipping sleep live on-air, causing his listeners to fall asleep permanently
- Ax-Crazy: Siblings Mercer and Gage spend most of season two as this. Gage gets better, while Mercer gets worse.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Faulkner's brother Charlie asked him to keep him submerged enough to listen to the words of the Trawler-Man's music and only let him when he gave Faulkner a thumbs-up despite how much he thrashed. Read Accidental Murder above to see how it went down.
- Big Bad Wannabe: High Katabasian Roemont, in season 3, who plots to dispose of Faulkner and fancies himself a manipulative successor to Mason. Roemont makes zero effort to conceal his dislike of Faulkner, his attempt to have Faulkner killed is bungling and clumsy, and Faulkner sees right through him, effortlessly removing any of Roemont's support before having him killed by crab angels.
- Big Brother Bully: Charlie threathened to "pound the shit out of" Faulkner if he let him up from the water too soon.
- Body Horror: Anyone sufficiently touched by the various gods of the setting. Highlights include a boat that's been covered in stretched and twisted flesh, a man turned into something not unlike a worm or maggot, and various crustacean saints of the Trawler-Man described with some unsettling vestiges of their humanity.
- Broken Pedestal: Carpenter develops this for the Trawler-Man the further up the river she gets.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Carpenter. As a kid, after her grandma was killed by the police due to her faith, Carpenter was sent to a reform house for "deprogramming" while her older brother Em was sent to prison and was drowned in a flood in a solitary confinent cell after summoning the Trawler-Man.
- Double Standard: Worshippers tend to see the revelations of other gods as grotesque despite theirs being no better. For example, Carpenter and Faulkner are disgusted by the gigantic worm-like appearance of Abel that was granted as blessing by the Scrivener despite being in awe of a Body Horror flesh/boat fusion made by the Trawler-Man in the previous episode.
- Worshippers of government-sanctioned gods see worshippers of "false-faiths" as uncivilized for their use of Human Sacrifices despite doing the same thing for their own gods, but with convicts and slackers.
- Downer Ending: The first season ends with Faulkner missing and presumed dead, the Trawler-Man coming back due to Carpenter's Smite Me, O Mighty Smiter moment, Sid Wright getting gunned down during an act of rebellion (and the station putting his replacement under armed guard), Hayward promising to hunt Carpenter to the ends of the earth, Paige barely escaping the Trawler-Man's wrath with the police, and Carpenter encountering... something and mutely accepting that she'll be Eaten Alive as she dies from her wounds.
- Season two ends little better. The war between the Peninsula and the Straits that had been worried about all season finally begins as with the Peninsula commencing a full scale ground invasion. Paige and Hayward's homegrown god to steal sacrifices from the legal gods has backfired, with the effect having upset the balance of nature itself as prey kills predator, seemingly automatically. And Faulkner frames Carpenter for Mason's murder after Faulkner beats him to death for orchestrating the Drowned Church's ascent to legality.
- Dude, Where's My Respect?: In the first chapter Faulkner calls Carpenter out for constantly mocking him at his first pilgrimage.
- Fantastic Nuke: The wither mark floods a large area and warps it into a sea-themed Eldritch Location, Hallowing its inhabitants in the process.
- Folk Horror
- Genius Loci: The Amicus Hotel, AKA the Rapture-And-Bliss, is a god disguising itself as a motel to lure in victims.
- Horror Hunger: The field god Hayward encounters.
- Human Sacrifice: Required by every god in the setting. To list just a few instances:
- The Trawler-Man's ritual sacrifices are tied to stakes on the shore of the river, and either drown or are devoured by his angels.
- Sacrifices to the Slag King are drowned in the cement of the foundations of every new building. It's treated like a ground-breaking ceremony.
- As part of a rebranding effort, a marketing company decides to change patron gods. To "welcome" the new god, a few dozen underperforming employees are melted alive.
- When we meet Sid Wright, he's in the process of killing himself via overwork and sleep deprivation to honor a god of instant coffee.
- Jerkass: Carpenter. Aloof and antisocial and always ready to mock Faulkner for something.
- Knight Templar: Daigler is a devoted servant of the Cloak, willing to force a confession by any means up to and including his own personal God.
- Madness Mantra: "There's them that lead and them that chase"
- Naïve Newcomer: Faulkner is a recent convert, though what he lacks in experience he makes up for it in devotion.
- Our Angels Are Different: An angel is any non-human servant of a god. Examples include limpets and crabs for the Trawlerman, and animated electrical pylons for the Saint Electric.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Hayward, before his numerous encounters with the "false-faiths" of the Peninsula.
- Shrue tries their best to be this, speaking out agaisnt the war and in favour of sustainable sacrifice. [[Spoiler: Unfortunately they again and again are forced to either sacrifice their morals or their authority, demonstrating the futility of being a reasonable authority figure within a corrupt and exploitative system.]].
- RetGone: Val, a saint of the Last Word, wiped an entire Linger Straits town off of the face of reality just by telling it that it never existed. She’s also capable of bringing things into existence.
- Simultaneous Arcs: Season two. The four main characters are split up; Hayward and Paige are both in the CLS, and Carpenter and Faulkner have been separated by the tidal wave in the season one finale. They reunite; then, Faulkner frames Carpenter, and the two are separated again.
- Smite Me, O Mighty Smiter: Carpenter to the Trawler-Man. Unfortunately, he happened to be listening.
- Taking You with Me: What worshipers of Paige's new god, The Many Below, can do upon death, throwing a major wrench in the works of the Human Sacrifice business.
- Trademark Favorite Food: Pancakes and coffee, for Carpenter.
- Wham Episode: The season two finale. In the final minutes, Mason reveals his machinations to Faulkner, along with his plans to modernize their faith and commercialize it into legality with the help of Adjudicator Shrue, only for Faulkner to beat Mason to death in a rage, along with Mason's co-conspirator, Sister Thurrocks. Even worse, Faulkner then proceeds to frame Carpenter for Mason's death, to keep his own power in the church.
- Where It All Began: Season one begins and ends in the town of Marcel's Crossing.
