EnCrypted: The Classic Horror Podcast

  While I work on some longer stories (involving, as you might anticipate, longer production times) I thought it prudent to put out a sort of holding episode - not to diminish this story, which is one of its author's finer later works, but to excuse its brevity. Even the narrator calls it an "ill-proportioned" tale. Yes, for this episode (19 already!!) we return to M.R. James and Rats - which, aside from the obscure Dickens quotation that opens it, is surprisingly uninfested with rodents, but does reveal something rather more awful under the bedclothes - and is a story composed by James while provost of Eton College, and, indeed, first published in the college magazine At Random . Rats cleaves to the by-then well-established Jamesian formula. Once again we have a lone male traveller on an extended sojourn in a rural and coastal location (the author's beloved Suffolk), and one whose "indefensible curiosity" leads him to uncover... Well, listen to the episode...

    Thanks to War of the Worlds , The Time Machine and The Invisible Man Herbert George (H.G.) Wells is regarded first and foremost as a pioneer of science-fiction writing. But there is a seam of horror that runs through his sci-fi, and his penchant for the macabre is felt even more strongly in his short fiction. The Cone (1895) doesn't necessarily qualify as science-fiction, conceived (according to John R. Hammond in his Preface to H.G. Wells) as "the opening chapter of a sensational novel set in the Five Towns" which the author later abandoned. Instead, we find Wells detailing a culture clash, admittedly in a fairly lurid way.  In this brutal tale of revenge, the effete Raut (whom we deduce is an artist) laments the industrialisation of the British landscape and sneers at the heartless, souless industrialists who care for nothing but progress and profit.  He is also having an affair with the wife of Horrocks, owner of a Staffordshire ironworks, who walks in on thei...

  Well...with 17 official podcast episodes plus two bonus episodes and a new channel trailer (on YouTube) the EnCrypted Classic Horror Podcast has achieved a landmark "20 individual bits and bobs" since launching in April. So, while I prepare the next few episodes, here's a short(ish) channel catch-up from me. I didn't really have much idea what to expect in terms of audience growth, and joining podcasting groups on Facebook where members boast of 1000 downloads in their first week doesn't seem particularly helpful. Nor does comparing oneself to YouTube channels making similar content, since they've usually been doing it for longer, and have far more videos driving viewers to their channels.  To be honest, I didn't really know there were quite as many people doing these "narrations" as there are.  I assumed it would be a niche thing.  Maybe it is, but it is a very well-served niche. Right now, I feel like I've been investing a lot of time an...

Another E.F. Benson story turns up for episode 17 of the podcast, and, while this has long been a favourite of mine, reading it for the podcast heightened my appreciation of Benson as a writer. Some of the writing in Negotium Perambulans is so evocative and beautiful. Evocative of a place - Benson's descriptions of the fictional Cornish fishing village of Polearn are obviously drawn from actual visits to the area and fully capture the beauty and, yes, the strangeness of out-of-the-way places. And, horror fans rest assured, this is essentially a short story about a giant slug monster, but it is also a story about what it is to grow up somewhere and collect memories, and to return, after having moved away. About this, Benson writes quite movingly. As for the giant slug business, one wonders whether H.P. Lovecraft (a Benson admirer, as well as an admirer of this particular story) drew inspiration on Negotium Perambulans for his own stories. Is Benson's drunken, corrupted artist...

Henry Kuttner deserves to be better known. A contemporary, and friend, of August Derleth, Clark Ashston-Smith, Seabury Quinn, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, and H.P. Lovecraft, he contributed stories to the Cthulu Mythos and, like many genre authors of his era, wrote copiously for Weird Tales magazine. Part of the reason he never achieved the notoriety of his peers may be owed to his habit of adopting pseudonyms (his Wikipedia entry lists sixteen known false names!) but the work he left behind, which has been much anthologised since - especially The Graveyard Rats , a black and grippingly claustrophobic shocker - has ensured him in a place in the dark hearts of vintage horror fans. I hope you dig it. Yours, Jasper   ****** Please support my work:   Like what I do? Give me the fuel I need to create :) https://www.buymeacoffee.com/encryptedpod Ko-fi.com/ https://ko-fi.com/encryptedpodcast NEW! Become a patron on Patreon! Get in touch! If yo...

  Herbert Hugh Munro's mother was killed by a cow. Not as uncommon a demise as you might think (currently deaths-by-cow average around four a year), but surely an unusual and ironical one. It's possible that Munro a.k.a. Saki's penchant for writing cynical, cutting, occasionally macabre short stories stemmed from this early tragedy (and Sredni Vashtar is by no means the only story of his to pit the brutality of nature against civilised, effete humanity; one even includes a bull attack). But, almost certainly, an austere childhood - domineered, as he was, by a pair of overbearing maiden aunt guardians - manifests itself in his work. In Sredni Vashtar , one of Saki's most famous stories, young Conradin (liked an unusual and evocative name, did Saki) is, like the author, coddled and constricted by a puritanical aunt (Mrs de Ropp) who doesn't really like him. Poorly from an unspecified illness, and predicted an untimely death, Conradin's escape is through his imag...

Not for the first time on EnCrypted: The Classic Horror Podcast we find an author primarily known for one thing moonlighting in the realm of horror.  E. Nesbit is, of course, most remembered for her enduring, and hugely influential, writing for children; The Five Children and It , The Phoenix and the Carpet , The Treasure Seekers , and The Railway Children being among her best-loved works. She wrote for adults too and, in her short fiction particularly, indulged a predilection for the supernatural. Man Size in Marble was compiled in her first collection of such (1893's Grim Tales ) although she wrote many more*. As our series of podcasts continues we begin to identify recurring themes, and it is possible to speculate on what they reveal about the (very different, but in some ways the same) times in which they were written. In the next episode, for example, we return to the subgenre I would like to call "The Terrible Aunt" (part of a broader category of vintage horror fi...

    For our thirteenth episode the Classic Horror Podcast gets truly horrific with this dark tale of revenge from Bram Stoker. And, while listeners to a horror podcast shouldn't need content advisory warnings, I will state at the outset that this is the third episode in a row featuring harm to animals. Although, this time, the animal in question can more than handle herself.  Americans (who fare even worse) should also consider themselves warned. The Squaw is a short story by Bram Stoker, first printed in 1893 in the Christmas edition of the periodical Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News - though in no way could this be considered a festive tale. It was later published in Dracula's Guest , the posthumous anthology of Stoker's short works compiled by the his widow. Though he's chiefly remembered, of course, for Dracula , Stoker was a prolific writer of novels and short stories, as well as a theatre critic, business manager of the Lyceum Theatre, and personal assista...