EnCrypted: The Classic Horror Podcast

Here is a favourite H.P. Lovecraft story of mine, one I feel happy to count among my favourites since the great Robert Aickman told the great Ramsey Campbell it was the only Lovecraft story he liked, and Lovecraft himself considered it one of his most successful stories - free from the "over-explicitness" he felt to be a flaw in some of his other works. The story is The Music of Erich Zann .  Re-reading it for the show, what impresses me is the sense of mystery that Lovecraft creates (the abiding strangeness Aickman undoubtedly gravitated towards): the gloom-shrouded, decrepit Rue D'Auseil (whose actually meaningless name might yet be pidgin-French for "money" or, better still, "at the threshold"), a vanishing enclave of a nameless French city, populated by the old and debilitated and, not least, by the "paralytic" Blandot, the nameless, melancholic, sick narrator, and the hunched, "dumb" viol player Erich Zann. As this economical s...

  First, an apology.  I had promised to record The Yellow Wallpaper episodes ago, but I've been sidetracked for a couple of reasons.  One is purely commercial.  I have learned that the YouTube audience for audio horror crave novelty and that stories that haven't been readily available online draw higher views.  As such, I've been reading widely and finding obscurities and curios - and these have jumped the queue while I try and grow the channel, diverting my attention from better-known stories.  But since the podcast is the "Classic Horror Podcast" I ought to narrate some bona fide classics every so often - and The Yellow Wallpaper is in this category. There is another reason, however, and that is that, maybe more than any other story I've so far covered, The Yellow Wallpaper is an important story, and a woman's story - and I confess to some hesitancy about whether I ought to tell it.  In the end, I felt that were I to record it I should take partic...

In my blog post for Episode 30 ( The Sea Raiders ) I said that there was little point restating what I had already found perfectly stated elsewhere. With Episode 31 I find myself in the same position. Having been referring to the Fourth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories for the text, I re-read Robert Aickman's introduction to the same volume. Stating his belief that A School Story deals with the "cosmology of the schoolboy", he expands thus: "with, that is, a world of the imagination before the prison-house has closed upon him which, if not and fostered by the grown man, brings about the man's death with its own, and be the man never so assured and apparently in social demand. To my mind, certain of M.R. James's stories contain an element of patronage: one becomes aware as one reads of the really great man, the Provost of Eton, the engineer of the inscription on the Unknown Warrior's grave, relaxing; all too consciously descending a little, to divert, ...

    I'm back from a recent trip to the south coast of England, the sand (actually shingle) still in my shoes, the salt still in my hair, and suitably inspired to narrate a classic seaside story by H.G. Wells - The Sea Raiders , replete with watery sound effects and musical seascapes. Do you ever find someone has already said the thing you were going to say so much better than you could that there's no point in you saying it?  I do. That's why I'm going to quote from the (really rather good) Oldstyle Tales Press website * for a p récis of the story: " The Sea Raiders is a grisly forbearer of The Birds : a charming coastal town is terrorized when swarms of carnivorous squid take a liking to human flesh. In a scene that resembles JAWS – and one that challenges all Victorian standards of form – they capsize a rowboat filled with women and children on a seaside holiday… and shred them to bits. This is a wonderful and compact Man vs. Nature tale that brings out Wells...

Algernon Blackwood is probably best known for two long(ish) horror stories, The Wendigo and The Willows , although his oeuvre stretched beyond horror to encompass weird fiction and fantasy, as well as stories for children. Like his contemporary Arthur Machen he was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society dedicated to the study and practice of the occult. He seemed to bristle against the religous and societal constrictions of his era, developing an interest in eastern philosophy and moving from job to job across Canada and the United States.  He was outdoorsy, an interest that found its way into his fiction. The Doll , however, a later example of Blackwood's work, finds its horror at home - with the "stirrings among the dead dry bones" hiding "behind villa walls" in sleepy English suburbs. The titular threat - the narrative suggests either an ordinary, unremarkable doll, or a particularly repulsive one; needless to say, when the story ...