April 2012 – Page 2

LibriVox: Moon-Face by Jack London

Aural Noir: Online Audio

There are few authors worthy of re-writing Edgar Allan Poe – few would dare – and of those few fewer still would succeed in the attempt. Jack London is one such and his short story, Moon Face, is one such success. Sometimes subtitled “A Story Of Mortal Antipathy” this story runs nearly the same length as the Poe story that I think inspired it. I’ve read one essay that argues it was inspired by The Tell Tale Heart, but I think it is another. Sure, the unnamed protagonist may be insane, but I think there’s still something to his lunacy – we can go for decades without encountering our own personal Claverhouse – then one day he will appear – and his mere presence is enough to set one’s teeth on edge.

LibriVox - Moon-Face by Jack London

Moon-Face
By Jack London; Read by Gregg Margarite
1 |MP3| – Approx. 13 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: October 01, 2009
|ETEXT|
First published in The Argonaut, July 21, 1902.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Audible.com: Carl Hiaasen talks about John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series

Aural Noir: News

Carl Hiaasen talks about John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series. Hiaasen suggests that a sense of place was central to the series.

Posted by Jesse Willis

READ: The New Mother by Lucy Clifford (it’s your homework for an upcoming SFFaudio Podcast)

SFFaudio Online Audio

We’re going to be recording a discussion for the SFFaudio Podcast this weekend. It’ll be centered around a wonderful, horrible, 19th century short story by Lucy Clifford. It’s called The New Mother.

Our narrator, Heather Ordover from the wonderful Craftlit podcast, has just sent me the file!

Happily it will be included in the podcast, along with our discussion of it, but I thought it might be interesting to share the audiobook with everyone early.

If you do download the audiobook |MP3| (which I’ll keep in my DropBox folder for the next week or so) and have a comment about the story, post it below. If it’s interesting we may refer to it in our discussion. And, for extra credit, we participants are planning on talking about The New Mother‘s relationship to Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and Philip K. Dick’s The Father Thing.

I’ve also put together a |PDF| from the original scans of The Anyhow Stories, Moral and Otherwise (1882) over on Archive.org.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Cinefantastique Spotlight Podcast: Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows

SFFaudio Online Audio

The Cinefantastique Spotlight Podcast (which is somehow connected with the Mighty Movie Podcast) had me nodding in agreement yesterday when I heard their review of Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows. Recorded last year, the show features an hour long discussion that echoed many of the thoughts I had while watching the film. I liked the movie, thought it actually improved on the previous entry in the Downey/Law Holmes/Watson film series, but wasn’t exactly sure what to make of some of the more “fantastique” elements. This podcast mostly sorted me out. Here’s the official description:

Come join Cinefantastique Online’s Steve Biodrowski, Lawrence French, and Dan Persons as they weigh the merits and demerits of this further retooling of a literary classic.

The only part that still has me scratching my head is all the military hardware that’s used in the film. The movie is set in 1891 but some of the guns are about a decade (or two, or three, or four, or five) early.

|MP3|

Posted by Jesse Willis

Audible.com: Lee Child talks about John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series

Aural Noir: News

Lee Child talks about John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series – which he argues is a series that doesn’t get worse as it goes along (perhaps because it’s about a character and not a plot).

Posted by Jesse Willis

LibriVox: The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood

SFFaudio Online Audio

Set in the Canadian wilderness, The Wendigo, one of the two very highly regarded Algernon Blackwood novellas (the other being The Willows). This story is credited as being the first major fictional work to introduce the titular creature into the public consciousness.

Having heard this audiobook version I think it would make an incredibly affective audio drama. According to my researches there actually was one, recorded for CBC Radio’s 1970s radio drama series Theatre 10:30, but I’ve not been able to track down a copy.

The audiobook narrator, Amy Gramour, does a very serviceable job telling the tale – though to my ear some of her pronunciation sounds a bit off. But, that may be simply the regional accent as Gramour reports her accent as being “Mainly a South of Boston Massachusetts accent with a Northern Maine influence.”

Here’s a turly choice line, from near the end of the story:

“The legend is picturesque enough,” observed the doctor after one of the longer pauses, speaking to break it rather than because he had anything to say, “for the Wendigo is simply the Call of the Wild personified, which some natures hear to their own destruction.”

The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood
An amazingly potent tale... H.P. Lovecraft

The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood - from Famous Fantastic Mysteries, June 1944

The above illustrations come from the June 1944 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries.

The Wendigo
By Algernon Blackwood; Read by Amy Gramour
3 Zipped MP3 Files – Approx. 2 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: May 11, 2011
|ETEXT|
A hunting party, in the Canadian wilderness, separates to track moose, and one member is abducted by the Wendigo of legend. First published in the 1910 collection The Lost Valley And Other Stories.