EnCrypted: The Classic Horror Podcast

  W.W. Jacobs (William and Wymark, if you're wondering) wrote a great many short stories, novels and plays, most often of the humorous variety, but it is The Monkey's Paw for which he is best-remembered today. It is not hard to see why. Though it is well-established in the pantheon of supernatural literature, it also functions as a short-and-to-the-point cautionary tale. Often filmed and staged, it remains the benchmark for a small horror subgenre we might call the "be careful what you wish for" story. Stephen King would, much later, take nearly 400 pages to tell much the same tale as Jacobs covers in a brisk 4000 words. It is a favourite of mine and I have no reticence in resurrecting this old classic for the umpteenth time and letting it live again. Your grave correspondent Jasper Please support my work:   https://www.buymeacoffee.com/encryptedpod Ko-fi.com/ encryptedpodcast Listen to the EnCrypted podcast on: Spotify Amazon Mus...

  E.F. Benson, brother of R.H. (novelist and Roman Catholic apologist), A.C. (author of 'Land of Hope and Glory') and Maggie (author and Egyptologist), was a prolific writer of novels and short stories, as well as a talented figure skater. Arguably better remembered today for his witty Mapp and Lucia books, Benson also had a taste for 'weird fiction', or 'spook stories' as he called them. Indeed, he was a friend of M.R. James and had even attended some of James' infamous readings which perhaps explains how he came to take on the mantle of being one of England's foremost writers of supernatural short stories. But where James often preferred to shy away from overt and gruesome horror, Benson seemed drawn to it. One only has to call to mind such tales as Caterpillars with its writhing, wriggling mass of ghastly pincered larvae, or the hideous giant worm of Negotium Perambulans , to get the measure of Benson's lurid imagination. Mrs Amworth - one of hi...

  William Fryer Harvey is probably best known for the stories The Beast with Five Fingers and this one ( August Heat ), although he wrote dozens, most notably in the "weird" tradition. A Quaker, trained in medicine, he was dogged by poor health, later sustaining lung damage while serving as a surgeon-lieutenant in the Royal Navy during the First World War. One is tempted to speculate whether the trauma of war and his persistent health travails stimulated Harvey's interest in the macabre. By all accounts, and like many Quakers, he was a good-natured cove who sought out the good in people. Yet his best stories have a dark edge and his oft-anthologised story August Heat remains unusual, and memorable, precisely because of its apparent randomness : a sense of dreadful things happening to seemingly decent people, and for no good reason. I chanced upon a nice blog post about Harvey's work here (on a site called "Recurring Bafflement") which you may find as int...

Gabriel-Ernest is a delicious little tale by Hector Hugh Munro, the author more commonly known as Saki. Written in 1909, actually not too long before Saki's demise, like much of his ouevre the story is an acute satire of Edwardian society as much as a work of horror fiction, although it has been regularly anthologised as the latter ever since it was first published. The story concerns an amateur naturalist (or rather a slightly pompous hobbyist), Van Cheele, who encounters a strange and shockingly naked teenage boy when on a woodland stroll.  The beastly nature of the boy, once revealed, is unlikely to shock the modern listener; I'm not sure that was Saki's intention anyway. Instead, the blackly comic joy of 'Gabriel-Ernest' is that the horrific events are played as farce and, while the story's denouement is suitably grim, Saki is also subtly savage in the skewering of his characters' pretensions. For more on Saki, try this article by Christopher Hitchens ....

I enjoy stories - lean or shaggy, long or short - and, even better, tall and short. If you have an appetite for what people variously call macabre, spooky, spine-tingling, weird or, even better, eldritch ... then my new series EnCrypted: The Classic Horror Podcast could be just the ticket. As a grown-up child of ___- _____ I find a story read aloud to be the perfect thing to coerce one into slumber. And the choice of story, when filled with supernatural horror and creeping dread, can induce the most delicious nightmares, which is why all bad physicians recommend EnCrypted for a good night's sleep. I started the podcast because, when I was prowling the internet in search of short story audio I discovered that I could often find the story I was after, but not the voice. Too many times a classic by Poe, Lovecraft or Bierce would be let down by a flat reading or a muffled recording. Not every narrator can tell a horror story with the gravitas of Christopher Lee or Vincent Price (and ...