In the novel, Mykel’s boss at the radio station, Sol Ketner, had been on a network radio show entitled Stories From the Charnel House. He not only played the narrator, Old Ichabod, the keeper of the charnel house, but occasionally other voices. The show was cancelled after they produced a version of A. E. Van Vogt’s The Black Destroyer. Mr. Ketner even provided the voice of the giant, cat-like alien Coeurl, which he described as doing “an evil meow.” What got them cancelled was complaints about the Coeurl disemboweling one of the crewmembers on the spaceship and decapitating another.
This part of the novel is reference to programs such as Arch Oboler’s Lights Out and Inner Sanctum, as well as Orson Welles famous Halloween broadcast of War of the Worlds on the Mercury Theater. The disembowelment is a reference to a Lights Out episode called “The Dark,” which features people being turned inside out by a dark fog, but also a movie which was loosely based on The Black Destroyer, Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi horror film Alien.
Here is a condensed version of the Lights Out episode.
WIP: DYNAMIC DUO OF THE OZARKS 