EnCrypted Episode 2: 'August Heat' by W.F. Harvey

 


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 interesting to read as I did. Bafflement is certainly the lingering effect on any reader of (or listener to) August Heat. 

Yours warmly,

Jasper

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About the episode:

"August Heat" by W.F. Harvey. First published (1909) in Midnight House and Other Stories (J.M. Dent).  Source text online.

Theme music: The Black Waltz by Scott Buckley | www.scottbuckley.com.au Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Incidental music: Tension by Komiku (courtesy of https://www.chosic.com/) (Public Domain (CC-0)

Sound effect attributions: 

https://freesound.org/people/InspectorJ/sounds/411924/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)

https://freesound.org/people/rivernile7/sounds/234244/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)

https://freesound.org/people/Benboncan/sounds/77319/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)

https://freesound.org/people/bourotte2/sounds/92656/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)

https://freesound.org/people/dobroide/sounds/4248/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)

https://freesound.org/people/tim.kahn/sounds/35829/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)

https://freesound.org/people/GlenCurtisAdams/sounds/326936/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/)

Other public domain sound effects sourced at: https://freesound.org/ 

 The recording was created using Bandlab and shared via Anchor.

 

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