Episode 22: 'The Inn' by Guy Preston

 

In something of a first for the podcast, we arrive at a story where I have very little to say about the author.  Guy Preston is known to have written a handful of short stories for popular anthologies of the 1930s (namely Grim Death and Not At Night) and, as far as I can ascertain, also a "movie tie-in" for the film The Bride of Frankenstein. But, amazingly in the age of the Internet, I cannot seem to find anything else to report.

I am only even divining that the story is in the public domain because I have seen it crop up in some public domain horror collections on Amazon and because I found the text (with some errors I have hopefully corrected) available for free online. Apologies, therefore, if this is a mistake, and please feel free to alert me if this is not the case.

As for the story itself...well, it's a classic "old dark house" horror in which a stranded motorcyclist finds refuge in a creepy old inn with an even creepier landlord and landlady. And he then experiences a succession of truly awful events, each worst than the last, culminating in a final shock - all of which seem to have been calculated to leave an impression on those who would have read this in the Second Pan Book of Horror (which has become a bit of a touchstone for this podcast) at an impressionable age.

As an adult the excesses, not to mention the hackneyed plot, will raise a smirk no doubt, although I'm not sure it would have been quite so hackneyed to the 1932 reader. Indeed, revisiting this story, one gets the sense of these plot devices being minted for the first time; what we have here is an early prototype for the Hollywood slashers that came decades later.

Anyway, more stories in the pipeline.

Sign the guestbook on your way out...

Jasper

 

 

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End 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: 

"Dead or Alive" (Music provided by "Vivek Abhishek" https://www.youtube.com/user/VivEKhsi... Music used : "Dead or Alive" originally composed and produced by "Vivek Abhishek" https://youtu.be/0mDULJXm-2A Follow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VivekEKhsihbA/ Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vivek.abhis...)

Gathering Darkness by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3798-gathering-darkness
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Sound effects:

https://freesound.org/people/StoneyWaters/sounds/445459/*

https://freesound.org/people/ERH/sounds/32296/*

https://freesound.org/people/RepDac3/sounds/513607/*

https://freesound.org/people/FreqMan/sounds/88137/* 

*All used with the following license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

All other sound effects sourced at Freesound.org

The recording was created using Audacity and BandLab. Podcast hosted by Anchor.

 

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