EnCrypted: The Classic Horror Podcast

J.D. (John Davys) Beresford (17 March 1873 – 2 February 1947) followed in the footsteps of H.G. Wells as a pioneer of science-fiction, although his body of work includes literary criticism and what, broadly speaking, we might call horror and ghost stories, but what are often psychological and philosophical interrogations. Some of them deal with the hot topic questions of his era: theology, evolution, sexual equality. Some are cosmic, dreamlike and, frankly, almost impenetrable, while anticipating the “strange” writers of the future. Young Strickland’s Career is a relatively straightforward story, and a short one, taken from his 1921 collection Signs and Wonders. But it shows Beresford once again using his fiction to deal with the notions of free will and predestination, and addressing world affairs, in this instance staring, unblinking, at the very real horrors of a grand-scale human tragedy. It’s a shocking story that arrives at its black punchline not out of callousness, but to

    A.M. Burrage, son of one Burrage-of-letters and nephew to another, was a prolific writer of everything from boys' adventure stories and romantic fiction to (as Ex-Private X) war memoir, plying his trade in comics and magazines and occasionally between hard covers, but sadly without achieving either the financial stability or literary esteem he must have sought. His later life was dogged by poor health and he died aged sixty-seven. It's hard not, then, to imagine Burrage identifying with the character of Hewson in his story The Waxwork : a sadsack unsuccessful journalist, barely scratching a living, and thinking a sensationalist piece about the "Murderers' Den" of the waxwork museum could be just the thing to turn his life around. The short story - one of the three or four classic "ghost" stories he is chiefly remembered for - certainly proved successful for Burrage, earning him a place in Dorothy L. Sayers ' Great Stories of Detection, Mystery

  Rather sooner than anticipated, we return to Frederick Cowles, the nowadays (sadly) rather unsung author of the 1936 collection Horror at Abbot's Grange . The reason for recording another of his stories so soon is that the last one (House on the Marsh ) has proved to be the most successful episode of EnCrypted yet and I wanted to capitalise on the hitherto unimagined Cowles craze!   I could have chosen any number of the stories in Horror at Abbot's Grange.  They are almost all short (to the point of bluntness) and infuse the M.R. James formula with the gruesome excesses of his pulpier imitators.  They're good fun and, while I work on some longer stories, should keep the pot boiling. I haven't managed to uncover any more biographical detail about the author since last time (his middle name was Ignatius, if I neglected to mention it before) so there is little to say here other than "Enjoy the show".   And, if you like it, consider becoming a patron on Patreon

  Doing the podcast has so far led me down many unexpected pathways. Just when I have  my next episode planned, my reading for the show throws up a story or author I have either never heard of or forgotten, and thus I am diverted! And so, for several successive episodes I have read stories from some of the more neglected and overlooked writers in the supernatural tradition. Amyas Northcote, I would say, falls into that category, although Brickett Bottom is almost certainly his most well-known tale, having been widely collected in ghost story anthologies in almost every successive decade since its first publication as part of Northcote's sole volume of supernatural fiction In Ghostly Company.   Once again, we have a writer inspired by M.R. James and writing in the Jamesian tradition, and once again, the telling of ghost stories appears to have been little more than a diversion, for Northcote was an aristocrat (seventh son of the First Earl of Iddesleigh, in case you were wondering)

  Frederick Cowles remains a somewhat overlooked figure in the realm of supernatural fiction.  A writer on folklore and history, as well as a writer of children's stories, Cowles nevertheless produced an impressive number of horror and ghost stories that were widely collected in 1930s anthologies of such, and would periodically surface in 1970s anthologies of the same.   As an author, Cowles appears to have taken a good deal of inspiration from M.R. James both in subject matter (ecclesiastical hauntings, cursed objects, black magic dabblers) and title formulation ( The Horror of Abbot's Grange can't fail to bring to mind James' Treasure of Abbot Thomas ; like James he has a story called, simply, Rats ).  In plot The House on the Marsh umistakably harkens back to James' Lost Hearts . This is merely to make an observation (of course, nearly all writers of supernatural short stories of his era were paying a debt to M.R. James!), not to disparage Cowles.  Indeed, the

  We reach the fourth in a run of relatively obscure, hard-to-find short stories with this story by Francis Stevens, the pseudonym of Gertrude Barrows Bennett. Stevens is regarded by many as a pioneer of science fiction and has been labelled "the woman who invented dark fantasy". Her work predates that of H.P. Lovecraft and it is said that he was an admirer. Like Lovecraft, she contributed to Weird Tales magazine. Indeed, this story ( Unseen - Unfeared , first published in the February People's Favorite Magazine , 1919) anticipates some of the themes and ideas that would become Lovecraftian tropes. It concerns a man who, after dining with his detective friend, has what can only be described as a "funny turn" in which he begins to find the poor residents of a predominantly immigrant neighbourhood "revolting" and frightening.  Needing a dark room to rest in, he enters a building advertising some sort of exhibition called "See the Unseen", but n