EnCrypted: The Classic Horror Podcast

  In something of a first for the podcast, we arrive at a story where I have very little to say about the author.  Guy Preston is known to have written a handful of short stories for popular anthologies of the 1930s (namely Grim Death and Not At Night ) and, as far as I can ascertain, also a "movie tie-in" for the film The Bride of Frankenstein . But, amazingly in the age of the Internet, I cannot seem to find anything else to report. I am only even divining that the story is in the public domain because I have seen it crop up in some public domain horror collections on Amazon and because I found the text (with some errors I have hopefully corrected) available for free online. Apologies, therefore, if this is a mistake, and please feel free to alert me if this is not the case. As for the story itself...well, it's a classic "old dark house" horror in which a stranded motorcyclist finds refuge in a creepy old inn with an even creepier landlord and landlady. And he...

  For Episode 21 we have a rollicking tale of demonic sorcery from 1887 - one that starts, mundanely enough, as a story of friendships forged in the corridors of Cambridge University and ends as full-blown gothic horror in the wilds of Scotland (with a telegram from India along the way); all in under thirty pages. By One, By Two and By Three first appeared, uncredited, in the pages of Temple Bar magazine, somehow became attached to the name of Stephen Hall (it was attributed thus in The Second Pan Book of Horror Stories ), and resurfaced in the 1970s as an episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery before it was established as the work of one Adrian Ross (itself a pseudonym of Alfred Reed Ropes). Ross/Ropes was a contemporary of M.R. James at Kings' College and a celebrated academic and librettist in his own right. Indeed, while he wrote lyrics for a string of West End smashes over the course of four decades (and was a founder of the Performing Rights Society), he does not appear ...

One of the delights in curating a podcast like EnCrypted is that, from time to time, you get to shine a light on a forgotten gem. I mined this one from a battered paperback copy of the Fourth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories , although it actually dates back to the Lady Cynthia Asquith-edited Ghost Book of 1926. That means that not one, but two of horror's pre-eminent anthologists (the Fontana collection was edited by Robert Aickman) thought this story worthy of inclusion, and it's not hard to see why. In 1926 the premise and action of Pargiton and Harby might have been quite radical (this is a psychological story as much as it is a ghost story). It may have seemed less so by 1972 (when the fourth Fontana collection was issued) but one can see why it might have appealed to Aickman; there is a strangeness in the telling, even if the nature of Pargiton's "haunting" is readily apparent from early on. That strangeness, and the suggestion of a kind of cosmic link b...

Nottingham-born A.J. Alan (real name: Leslie Harrison Lambert) like so many of the authors covered on the EnCrypted podcast led a colourful and varied life.  He was a performing magician, a radio ham, a volunteer coastguard radio operator, and later a naval intelligence officer who, by the start of World War II, was part of the vital military intelligence effort at Bletchley Park.  Somehow, between the wars, he managed to also become one the Britain's most popular radio broadcasters, telling singularly strange short stories on the wireless to the delight of listeners across the UK.  In a way he was a broadcasting pioneer for, although, like just about everyone else on the radio at the time, he spoke BBC English (Received Pronunciation), his delivery was rather less formal and rather more conversational.  His rambling shaggy-dog anecdotes were contrived to appear off-the-cuff, but were in fact meticulously scripted, and Alan laboured over each story for weeks, some...

  While I work on some longer stories (involving, as you might anticipate, longer production times) I thought it prudent to put out a sort of holding episode - not to diminish this story, which is one of its author's finer later works, but to excuse its brevity. Even the narrator calls it an "ill-proportioned" tale. Yes, for this episode (19 already!!) we return to M.R. James and Rats - which, aside from the obscure Dickens quotation that opens it, is surprisingly uninfested with rodents, but does reveal something rather more awful under the bedclothes - and is a story composed by James while provost of Eton College, and, indeed, first published in the college magazine At Random . Rats cleaves to the by-then well-established Jamesian formula. Once again we have a lone male traveller on an extended sojourn in a rural and coastal location (the author's beloved Suffolk), and one whose "indefensible curiosity" leads him to uncover... Well, listen to the episode...

    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...

  Well...with 17 official podcast episodes plus two bonus episodes and a new channel trailer (on YouTube) the EnCrypted Classic Horror Podcast has achieved a landmark "20 individual bits and bobs" since launching in April. So, while I prepare the next few episodes, here's a short(ish) channel catch-up from me. I didn't really have much idea what to expect in terms of audience growth, and joining podcasting groups on Facebook where members boast of 1000 downloads in their first week doesn't seem particularly helpful. Nor does comparing oneself to YouTube channels making similar content, since they've usually been doing it for longer, and have far more videos driving viewers to their channels.  To be honest, I didn't really know there were quite as many people doing these "narrations" as there are.  I assumed it would be a niche thing.  Maybe it is, but it is a very well-served niche. Right now, I feel like I've been investing a lot of time an...