EnCrypted: The Classic Horror Podcast

  Montague Rhodes James' name is so synonymous with the ghost story that it is perhaps surprising we should have waited for our twelfth episode for one of his stories. Perhaps his tales are so well-known and widely adapted - this particular one most memorably as part of the BBC's Ghost Stories for Christmas - that there was less urgency. Nevertheless, it would be remiss for any series of classic horror and supernatural short stories to neglect him. One wonders, were he alive today, whether M.R. James would have gravitated towards podcasting himself. Many of  short stories were originally intended as Christmas entertainments, designed to be read aloud to friends, although they were compiled and published to enormous success . Indeed, the first of these collections, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (containing The Ash Tree ), was (and is) considered a landmark in supernatural fiction. The Ash Tree is archetypal James, possessing the triptych of elements we usually find in his st...

  Mary Cholmondeley (whose surname American readers may be surprised to learn is pronounced "Chumley") was an English novelist most famous for a religious satire called Red Pottage . I have not read Red Pottage so I can only speculate on the potential parallels between it and our current short story, Let Loose . Religion is certainly a theme in the story, which otherwise concerns an ambitious young architect who gains access to a locked crypt (in order to view a stunning fresco there) only to "let loose" a malevolent spirit.   Along the way we are treated to lengthy diatribes from the clergyman of Wet Waste-on-the-Wolds, the oddly-named parish at which the horrific events of the story occur.  First published in 1890 (I shall assume, for want of any confirmation I have so far found online, in The Graphic - a Victorian weekly paper), Let Loose is a terrifically entertaining tale, full of creeping dread and culminating in a thrilling grand guignol climax. Cholmondele...

  Although often anthologised as a such, it is questionable whether Seaton's Aunt even qualifies as a ghost story at all. Indeed, it is entirely possible to read Walter de la Mare's chronicle of the luckless Arthur Seaton and his domineering aunt as being simply a character study of a grotesque harridan and the catastrophic effect on those in her thrall. It would hold no less horror. Nevertheless, something isn't quite... right...in this story - one of de la Mare's best-known, and one which, in many ways anticipates the "strange stories" Robert Aickman (a de la Mare admirer) would be penning some forty years later.  Another fan, H.P. Lovecraft saw Seaton's Aunt as a tale of vampirism, even if its author eschews traditional blood-sucking in favour of either financial parasitism (the aunt exploiting Seaton for his inheritance) or, worse, the aunt as ghoul, feasting on poor Arthur's psychological discomfort. In short, there may not be supernatural menace...

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...

  Some writers live vicariously through their stories, others lead lives every bit as adventurous as the ones they write about. William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) definitely falls into the latter camp. Having run away from boarding school aged thirteen to become a sailor, he later took on an apprenticeship as a cabin boy. This son of an Anglican priest trained with weights and learned self-defence to hold his own against rough seamen who thought him fair game. He would go on to open a School of Physical Culture that offered regimes for personal training and, among other endeavours, made the local newspapers with a precarious bicycle stunt and national news for handcuffing Harry Houdini so securely he had trouble escaping. It is for his prolific literary output, of course, that he is chiefly remembered.  The creator of the occult detective Thomas Carnaki and pre-Lovecraftian "cosmic" stories like The House on the Borderland , much of Hodgson's work drew on his experiences at...

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...

  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...