EnCrypted: The Classic Horror Podcast

    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...

    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...