★★★★☆ 4/5

Alice Isn’t Dead” is a new serialized podcast telling the story of a lesbian truck driver on a journey across America, hunting down a lover she formerly thought dead. I’ll admit I haven’t always been a fan of the horror genre, but “Alice Isn’t Dead” has managed to catch my interest. The format, the ambient music, the sound effects, the good storytelling — everything I love, and more.

   The podcast features isolated stories that conclude within 30 minutes, but often have no satisfying resolution and leave more questions than answers. The as-of-yet unnamed narrator records herself talking, through a cassette, a voice recorder, or a similar medium, in the vein of an audio diary. She recounts the events as they happen, driving her truck across America; she muses about the nature of things; she often addresses Alice as though she were speaking to her, venting her anger and her thoughts. Jasika Nicole’s voice acting helps bring the unnamed narrator’s character to life, full of emotion and very real human reaction. The atmosphere created by her sparse, yet poetic, descriptions is supplemented by Disparition’s original music compositions.

   The first episode, titled “Omelette,” tells the story of the unnamed narrator’s encounter with a man in a restaurant; or, as the episode description puts it, “A conversation in a diner gets ugly.” Ugly, not because of anger or aggression, but because of the calm and premeditated actions that accompany the words spoken that day. There is little I may say that will not spoil the show, but I will say that it is a holistic work: Nicole’s voice acting, the order in which the narrator’s audio diary snippets are presented, the sonorous and eerie music, the excellent and abrupt usage of loud, profound silence, all build up into a crescendo of sinister, unsettling storytelling that seems to linger in the silence that comes after the episode is done.

   I do have a few complaints about this show, mainly that I feel too much time is devoted to advertising, the creator — Joseph Fink — speaking on matters not entirely related to the story, and a few minutes empty of anything but music.

   There are an abundance of things I appreciate, though — the main one being that it features a lesbian woman whose lover isn’t killed off or dead (as proclaimed in the title of this podcast). Almost every single story featuring two queer individuals in a relationship ends up with one or both of them dead, so it is promising that it is not the case here. It seems that Fink is also conscientious of his audience, too, because he issues a quick warning at the beginning of the third episode for an intense description of physical assault so his audience may brace themselves for what is coming.

   The podcast updates every other Tuesday and will continue doing so until July 12.