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Posted in: Audio Dramas, Review, TV | Tagged: Audible, Audio Drama, Bosch, Jack Quaid, Michael Connelly, stephen king, tales from the crypt, The Safe Man, Titus Welliver
The Safe Man: Bosch Creator Michael Connelly's Effective Horror Effort
Bosch creator Michael Connelly dives into the supernatural with The Safe Man, a fun, effective horror story with Titus Welliver & Jack Quaid.
Bosch creator Micheal Connelly has made his first stab at Horror with The Safe Man, an audio drama released by Audible starring Titus Welliver and Jack Quaid. Originally a short story written for an anthology in 2011, Connelly expanded it into a feature script with his friend Terrill Lee Lankford before turning it into a serialized audio drama podcast that's as serious as his crime novels, even being relatively new to the horror genre.
Horror author Paul Robinette (Welliver) hires a safecracker, Brian Holloway (Quaid), to open the mysterious safe in his old gothic house. The prickly Robinette isn't the friendliest customer Holloway has ever met, but a job's a job. Then things get weird. The moment he gets the door off the safe, Holloway meets a little girl, then gets hauled in for questioning by the cops when Robinette's teenage daughter goes missing. Robinette's daughter's shows up safe and Holloway is in the clear, except she's not the girl Holloway met, and Robinette swears there's no little girl in his house.
Robinette becomes haunted by visions and voices around the house, and he becomes convinced that Holloway's opening of the safe might have opened a kind of portal from the realm of the dead. Holloway, who's about to become a father, becomes equally haunted by the vision of the little girl, and the two men form a reluctant alliance to find out what exactly they've unleashed. The result is a ghost story very far from the world of Harry Bosch and closer to Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, and a high-end version of a Tales from the Crypt yarn with a brutal sting at the end.
Connelly is slightly tentative in his first try at a genre different from the crime universe of Harry Bosch and René Ballard as he feels his way through the unfolding strangeness of the ghost story – much in the same way that Brian Holloway slowly discovers the cosmic horror he may have unleashed. There are familiar elements from Crime, though, including Holloway's incarcerated father, Holloway's temptation of being enticed into crime after his father went to prison, and some research into the make and history of safes to create the fictional version that Holloway and Robinette have to deal with. But there's never an over-reliance, with Connelly and Lankford keeping the story going through dialogue and sound effects instead of relying too much on voiceover narration that many American audio dramas do out of fear that the listener might not be able to follow the story. Our familiarity with Welliver (who also co-directs) and Quaid keeps us grounded in ways that leave the listeners feeling that they've experienced a movie without pictures – which is essentially what audio dramas are. I was left with the feeling that they're as intrigued by the possibilities of audio drama as Connelly is. The Safe Man is streaming on Audible.
The Safe Man
8.5/10
Bosch creator Michael Connelly has made his first stab at horror with The Safe Man, an audio drama released by Audible starring Titus Welliver and Jack Quaid. Originally a short story written for an anthology in 2011, Connelly expanded it into a feature script with his friend Terrill Lee Lankford before turning it into a serialized audio drama podcast that’s as deadly serious as his crime novels.
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