EnCrypted Episode 5: 'The Night Wire' by H.F. Arnold

 


Very little is known about H.F. Arnold, author of today's story.  He is as much a mystery as the events described in The Night Wire, his most enduring work. By way of introduction, I reproduce Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's preface (from their excellent, exhaustive collection The Weird):

H.F. Arnold (1902-1963) was an American pulp-era writer who wrote only three published stories. Despite this low output, 'The Night Wire' (1926), first published in Weird Tales, is considered the most popular story from the first golden age of that magazine. Lovecraft is said to have loved this story... Details about the writer's life are scarce, without even confirmation that 'H.F. Arnold' was his real name. Some have speculated that he must have been a journalist^.

If this is your first time with The Night Wire, I will give you the headlines. Two night wire guys are receiving news reports over the wire, a job that is usually boring mechanical, when one begins typing up increasingly desperate reports of strange (and possibly apocalyptic) events in an obscure town.

What happens next? Listen to the latest episode to find out...

Nighty-night,

Jasper  

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About the episode:

"The Night Wire" by H.F. Arnold was first published in Weird Tales magazine (1926). 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/ 


Other music sourced at: https://www.chosic.com/ 

Sound effect attributions: 

https://freesound.org/people/Omar%20Alvarado/sounds/96533/*

https://freesound.org/people/uair01/sounds/89288/*

https://freesound.org/people/CadereSounds/sounds/239969/*

https://freesound.org/people/julius_galla/sounds/322296/*

https://freesound.org/people/InspectorJ/sounds/413150/*

https://freesound.org/people/waxsocks/sounds/500375/*

*https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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

The recording was created using Bandlab and shared via Anchor.

The YouTube video art by Pete at Pixabay.

^Extract from The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories
edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Published by Tor Books, 2012.

 

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