EnCrypted: The Classic Horror Podcast

  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...

  And now six episodes into our podcast series I will ask you to indulge me.  For Walter de la Mare's The Riddle is dark, certainly, and creepy, maybe, but not perhaps a "horror story" in the sense we usually mean.  Rest assured, eldritch horrors will return in the next episode with a reading from Lovecraft... Written by de la Mare in 1923 as part of a collection (for children) called The Riddle and other stories , The Riddle is best taken as a dark fairytale or possible parable.  That later purveyor of "strange stories" Robert Aickman was an admirer of de la Mare and, like much of Aickman's work, The Riddle is both straightforward and cryptic.  It is at once suffused with meaning and yet the actual meaning may remain tantalisingly beyond our grasp. Are the events in the story meant to be taken literally?  They cannot possibly be. Is the mysterious chest into which the children disappear real or metaphor?  Do the ways in which they each encounter the...

  Very little is known about H.F. Arnold, author of today's story.  He is as much a mystery as the events described in The Night Wire , his most enduring work. By way of introduction, I reproduce Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's preface (from their excellent, exhaustive collection The Weird ): H.F. Arnold (1902-1963) was an American pulp-era writer who wrote only three published stories. Despite this low output, 'The Night Wire' (1926), first published in Weird Tales , is considered the most popular story from the first golden age of that magazine. Lovecraft is said to have loved this story... Details about the writer's life are scarce, without even confirmation that 'H.F. Arnold' was his real name. Some have speculated that he must have been a journalist^. If this is your first time with The Night Wire , I will give you the headlines. Two night wire guys are receiving news reports over the wire, a job that is usually boring mechanical, when one begins typing up in...