EnCrypted: The Classic Horror Podcast

The American magazine Weird Tales , which first published in 1922, holds an unparalleled position in the history of genre fiction, having done much to popularise horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and that which we might broadly call "weird".  A platform for such legends as H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Seabury Quinn, Robert E. Howard, and (later) Ray Bradbury, it served for years as a leading purveyor of short stories.   While lengthy and illustrated page counts would go to star writers like Lovecraft, the magazine was also a treasure trove of minor gems buried between the covers, thankfully preserved for prosperity on the Internet ( here , for example, and here ).  Some of the stories, considered filler at the time, lingered in readers' minds and went on to grow in reputation.  The Night Wire by H.F. Arnold, episode 5 of the EnCrypted series , is one such story.  This - The Pale Man by Julius Long - is another. A fairly obscure literary figure, Long was a quali...

Howard Phillips Lovecraft languished in relative obscurity during his lifetime, yet the extensive body of work he left behind has inarguably had a profound and lasting influence on the horror genre with such luminaries as Stephen King crowning him as "the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale".  He was undoubtedly ahead of his time.  His brand of cosmic horror, his atheism, and his evocation of a centuries-old ancient alien mythos has little in common with the relatively polite drawing-room ghosts of the likes of E. Nesbit or M.R. James, although one can find connections between Lovecraft and the British "weird" author Arthur Machen. Pickman's Model is an unusual story in the Lovecraft canon.  Relatively compact, it is essentially a monologue (or, more accurately, two monologues) written in informal (ish) vernacular.  As such (and for those who find some of Lovecraft's prose a little on the purple side) it is one of hi...