The Montauk Tapes

During the 2020 lockdown, I wrote the radio play series that would become Montauk. Only one episode was actually produced. Today I'm sharing it:

Photo by Norbert Kowalczyk on Unsplash

The Montauk Project was what kept me sane during the COVID-19 Pandemic. If you’ve read the novella version I published here on Cole’s Chapters, you may find it hard to believe that real world events had a minimal influence on the story — although some of its twists and turns wound up becoming eerily prophetic.

My real goal was to explore the long term effects of loneliness on a society, and I thought this would be an interesting, intimate way to do that. If you’ve forgotten, or simply never read Montauk: this is the gist of the setup:

• The world has been plunged into chaos by a virus that makes face-to-face interaction highly lethal

• Everyone is confined to Isolation habitats, or IsoHabs

• The population’s phones have been confiscated, and internet activity regulated to prevent the spread of panic

• A former engineer called Prometheus sets up a kind of resistance radio show, sharing tapes that are delivered by a mysterious network of truckers

Each of these tapes is a little vignette, a slice of life from someone working to survive in this brutal world. The goal was to have a bunch of self contained stories, that also trickled background information about a broader conspiracy.

Houston was originally the first episode in the series, taking place aboard a clandestine, arc-like space station tasked with rebuilding society if Montauk couldn’t be contained. My plan was to offer a super-macro view of what was happening, passing along information that someone on the ground just couldn’t reasonably ascertain. As a result, you can tell this draft is a bit heavy on exposition.

I did a table read of this episode with some friends, built a sound bed, and made an actual episode from it. The plan was always to go back, fix, and update the recordings. I think you can tell from the voice acting that this is a draft.

But still, playing it back makes me wish I could’ve done the entire project like this. It really was meant to be heard, not read. My favorite detail is the oxygen alarm, which starts intermittently and gradually becomes more frequent as the story progresses.

Paid subscribers can listen to this full episode by scrolling a little bit further.

For my free readers, I’ve included some of the tech script so you can see just how different the Montauk Novella was.