The City In The Sea by Edgar Allan Poe

SFFaudio Online Audio

The City In The Sea

The City in the Sea by Edgar Allan Poe

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.

No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently-
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free-
Up domes- up spires- up kingly halls-
Up fanes- up Babylon-like walls-
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers-
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol’s diamond eye-
Not the gaily-jewelled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass-
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea-
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene.

But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave- there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide-
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow-
The hours are breathing faint and low-
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.

Here’s the audio, as narrated by Mister Jim Moon:

The City In The Sea was published in this form in the Broadway Journal, August 30, 1845:

The City In The Sea: A Prophecy by Edgar Allan Poe

The City In The Sea

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #164 – READALONG: The House On The Borderland by William Hope Hodgson

Podcast

The SFFaudio PodcastThe SFFaudio Podcast #164 – Jesse, Wayne June and Mirko Stauch talk about The House On the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson.

Talked about on today’s show:
Wayne undersold the novel, it’s shockingly interesting, you can really see the influence on Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror In Literature by H.P. Lovecraft, blasphemous hybrid anomalies, “a classic of the first water”, the framing sequence, The Willows by Algernon Blackwood, description of sense experience, the best you can expect from the universe is indifference, cosmic horror, Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker, Last And First Men, reading in translation, Chad Pfifer, the readalong concept, getting into the book, Under The Knife by H.G. Wells, the swine beasts, the sister – “she knows he’s fucking nuts”, there’s a lot of going to bed in this book, a very relatable character, Arthur C. Clarke, one of the finest works of Science Fiction ever written, marking the transition from Gothic horror to cosmic horror, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the cover art, the Corben comic book cover, the town (or street) that can’t be found, it’s a kind of haunted house story, compression of time, Einsteinian relativity, Pepper is dead and dust, Brian Stableford, Camille Flammarion, The Night Lands by William Hope Hodgson, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Percival Lowell, S.T. Joshi, parallel development, authors write cosmic horror in cosmic horror time, astronomy,

“In the future, when the end of things will arrive on this earth, the event will then pass completely unperceived in the universe. The stars will continue to shine after the extinction of our sun, as they already shone before our existence.”

Enlightenment thinking and the decline of religion – tying your own shoes for eternity, The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe, you can’t love anything in this universe, the jade house in the arena, mythological creatures, Kalpas (is Sanskrit for aeons), it’s meta, before this book we’re living in a world run by God and after this book were living in a post God world, deep time, the recluse, are the swine people are the villagers, what book is the recluse reading?, two incommensurable realities, Messrs Tonnison and Berreggnog, haunting, Clarke’s third law, Poltergeist, the door inward, the start as poets but they don’t end that way, the unnamed lover (let’s call her Lenore), The Crawling Chaos (SFFaudio Podcast #138), The Conqueror Worm by Edgar Allan Poe, The House Of Usher, Roger Caillois: “The fantastic is always a break in the acknowledged order, an irruption of the inadmissible within the changeless everyday legality” (from Au Coeur Du Fantastique), reading old literature, C.S. Lewis, a passion for commas, a gripping book (while the character’s mind wanders), a pregnant book.

Ed Emshwiller painting for The House On The Borderland by William Hope Hodgson

Vertigo Richard Corben -The House On The Borderland

William Hope Hodgson's The House On The Borderland

The House On The Borderland by William Hope Hodgson - illustration by Ian Miller

Freeway Press - The House On The Borderland by William Hope Hodgson

The House On The Borderland by William Hope Hodgson - dustjacket

The House On The Borderland - illustration by Peter Manesis

PANTHER - The House On The Borderland by William Hope Hodgson

Posted by Jesse Willis

3D Horror Fi

SFFaudio News

Audio dramatist Marty Ross recommends we check out a new audio drama producer called 3D Horror Fi. Sez Marty:

I’m a professional writer of audio drama, specializing in the genres of SF and horror. Much of this has been for BBC Radio (the serials GHOST ZONE and CATCH MY BREATH, the anthology series THE DARKER SIDE OF THE BORDER.) Most recently, I’ve had a couple of Doctor Who audio books produced by Big Finish, NIGHT’S BLACK AGENTS and Lurkers At Sunlight’s Edge (which is basically Doctor Who meets H.P. Lovecraft!). But what I’m really seeking to plug here is my play BLOOD & STONE, which has recently been produced by 3DHorrorFi, a new web-based company specializing in horror and SF audio, using seriously state of the art technology. My play for them is gothic horror: you may be acquainted with the true story of Elizabeth Báthory, the Hungarian ‘bloody countess’ who bathed in the blood of innumerable servant girls to preserve her own beauty and was then punished by being locked away in a tower of her own castle. Well, my play imagines what would have happened if she had escaped, after convincing a seemingly naive servant girl of her innocence. I think it’s really good and this company deserves all the encouragement they can get – they’re just starting out, but with a little help, they could become major producers in the horror/SF field. If you check their website, www.3Dhorrorfi.com you could investigate what they offer: their other plays (not written by me) are good too, including the best adaptation of The Cask of Amontillado I’ve ever heard.

Thanks Marty! Yep, that sounds like some stuff we are interested in!

Posted by Jesse Willis

Review of Earthbound by Richard Matheson

SFFaudio Review

Blackstone Audio - Earthbound by Richard MathesonEarthbound
By Richard Matheson; Read by Bronson Pinchot
6 CDs – Approx. 6.5 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: September 2010
ISBN: 1441756886
Themes: / Fantasy / Horror / Gothic Horror / Haunted House / Ghosts / Succubi / Marriage / Sex /

David and Ellen Cooper came to the lonely beach-side cottage in hopes of rekindling their troubled marriage. Yet they are not alone on their second honeymoon. Marianna, a beautiful and enigmatic stranger, comes to visit David whenever Ellen is away. Who is Marianna, and where has she come from? Even as he succumbs to her seductive charms, David realizes that Marianna is far more than a threat to his marriage, for her secrets lie deep in the past and beyond the grave. And her unholy desires endanger the life and soul of everyone she touches.

TV writer David Cooper is trying to revitalize his shaky marriage by returning with his wife to their original honeymoon location. While the Coopers do end up in the same sea-side resort, they find their original digs are unavailable and have to stay in a disused beach cottage. There, every time Ellen steps out, or goes to sleep, a sexy woman named Marianna appears and quickly seduces David. She fucks him harder than he’s ever been fucked and that’s the entirety of Earthbound‘s simple setup. The plot from there is but a dance between David’s realization of it and his doing something.

There are essentially four characters in Earthbound. Approximately ninety-five percent of the novel is set within the confines of the haunted cottage. It’s all told in a tight third person, over the shoulder perspective. We get the thoughts of David’s mind in elaborate detail and hear the other two characters exclusively from his POV. It becomes immediately clear to the reader that Marianna is not only a ghost but also a quasi-succubus. Matheson never actually names the marriage-ruining ghost as a sexual vampire, instead the characters only describe Marianna as simply the ghost of a depraved woman. It takes nearly a half-dozen sex sessions with the vitality draining Marianna, and several visits from a helpful neighbor (who lives just up the beach) to point this out to David. It then takes several more for him to actually believe what he’s being told and experiencing. David wants to believe he’s just been cheating on his wife with a mysterious stranger – but the evidence he’s been presented with is fairly convincing. In the meantime David gets into several, what I would call, disappointment swaps with Ellen, they go out to dinner once and have some unsatisfying sex. About half way through the book I began expecting that Ellen’s many convenient absences would be explained by her being haunted by an incubus – I was wrong on that score.

I don’t think this book is really all that horrible. The storytelling flows quite smoothly and likely achieves the purpose intended. Unfortunately it carries no lasting impression. Being a confirmed bachelor, I guess I just don’t want to read about people fixing their marriages at haunted seaside cottages. And, as for it being one of the gothic novels of psychology, I far prefer the depths of ambiguity in Henry James’ The Turn Of The Screw to the shallows of Earthbound. This is the fourth Matheson novel I’ve read, the first being I Am Legend |READ OUR REVIEW| and the second being The Incredible Shrinking Man |READ OUR REVIEW|. Like the former, Earthbound lacks the one thing I really cared about: a haunting message to go with its competent psychological character study. Like the second, The Incredible Shrinking Man, I came away from Earthbound thinking it was absolutely the kind of book I never need read again, a story premise with a character who was too wrapped up in his own psychology for me to care what was happening to him. I guess I just want some ideas to go with my characters and not to simply see them interacting or responding to a set of unusual circumstances. Earthbound, therefore, is most similar to the third Matheson novel I read, A Stir Of Echoes |READ OUR REVIEW|. If you liked A Stir Of Echoes I suspect you will enjoy Earthbound. Myself, I can only recommend the earth-shatteringly good I Am Legend and Matheson’s truly amazing short story Born Of Man And Woman.

Speaking of short stories, when Earthbound was first published (by Playboy Paperbacks in 1982) Richard Matheson used a pseudonym, “Logan Swanson.” Reading around the internet, I got the impression that he’d balked at some editorial changes in the Playboy Paperbacks edition – and so declined to have his real name put on the cover. But, the story is probably a little more complicated than that. After doing some more digging I noted that one Amazon reviewer had this to say: “…not a lot of people realize this, but this book started out as a short story written very early in Matheson’s career.” Noting that the succubi in fiction article on Wikipedia includes one Matheson story, called The Likeness Of Julie. I dug up my copy of Shock II (it’s also collected in Hot Blood: Tales Of Erotic Horror) and read it. The Likeness Of Julie, which is just 9 or 10 pages, has a bit more of a punch than Earthbound, and is clearly the predecessor to a novelized re-working. Interestingly, it too was first published “as written by Logan Swanson” in a 1962 anthology called Alone By Night. And the pseudonym there was not likely due to a protest, but rather the fact that there was another story by Matheson in the collection. In any case, this Blackstone Audio edition uses the author’s full text version of Earthbound.

Bronson Pinchot, has been recording up a storm for Blackstone Audio of late (there are currently 44 titles with him as a narrator). For Earthbound he does little extraordinary other than voicing three females, two carnal women and one ethereal succubus. Surprisingly, he doesn’t have to stretch very much for in this small scale novel; he pretty much makes himself invisible in the text. I’d like to see him tackle some more meaty material.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Tantor Media: FREE AUDIOBOOK: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, as read by Simon Vance

SFFaudio Online Audio

Tantor MediaTantor Media, one of the coolest of the big audiobook companies, is offering a FREE MP3 DOWLOAD, complete and unabridged, of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus. It’s read by the excellent Simon Vance!

Details are as follows:

“The free download is for personal use only and is not for commercial distribution. Limit one download per customer. Offer ends 10/31/2010.”

As with last time, this might take a little hoop jumping. I had a lot of difficulty getting access to my account. After going through the recovery process, to reset my password, I found I couldn’t enter my name in the “Full Name” field. So, I used another email address and made a new account. That solved it!

TANTOR MEDIA - Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus by Mary ShelleyFrankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus
By Mary Shelley; Read by Simon Vance
DOWNLOAD – Approx. 8 Hours 30 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Tantor Media
Published: March 2008
Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein when she was only eighteen. At once a Gothic thriller, a passionate romance, and a cautionary tale about the dangers of science, Frankenstein tells the story of committed science student Victor Frankenstein. Obsessed with discovering “the cause of generation and life” and “bestowing animation upon lifeless matter,” Frankenstein assembles a human being from stolen body parts. However, upon bringing it to life, he recoils in horror at the creature’s hideousness. Tormented by isolation and loneliness, the once-innocent creature turns to evil and unleashes a campaign of murderous revenge against his creator, Frankenstein. Frankenstein, an instant bestseller and an important ancestor of both the horror and science fiction genres, not only tells a terrifying story but also raises profound, disturbing questions about the very nature of life and the place of humankind within the cosmos: What does it mean to be human? What responsibilities do we have to each other? And how far can we go in tampering with Nature?

Tantor Halloween 2010 - FREE Mary Shelley's Frankenstein AUDIOBOOK

Posted by Jesse Willis

Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson

SFFaudio Online Audio

William Coon, who appeared on SFFaudio Podcast #063, has a terrific sounding UNABRIDGED recording of Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson over on LibriVox. Here’s what one of the proofers said about Bill’s narration:

“[Markheim] is GREAT! You’ve got just the right balance of shrewdness and madness and you really bring it off well. I listened to it over and over, catching new things every time. Thanks for several wonderful days of listening!”

Myself I’ve also been enjoying this narration as well as an abridged reading I found over on RadioArchive.cc (Markheim was also recorded for the first episode of a four part BBC Radio 7 Drama series entitled Short History of Gothic).

In a strange way Markheim is a kind of hardboiled/noir version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Like Scrooge, Markheim is a sinner who at Christmas, finds himself confronted by the consequences of his sin. But whereas 19th century miserliness is Scrooge’s big problem, Markheim’s issue is of a more alarming type. His petty crimes have slowly accelerated from his youth, until now, when he finds himself, in this tale, a bloody-handed murderer. But like A Christmas Carol, both characters (Scrooge and Markheim) find their hinge points only when confronted by a visit from the supernatural.

Markheim as illustrated by Michael Lark

Illustration by Michael Lark, found in The Essential Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde – The Definitive Annotated Edition.

LibriVoxMarkheim
By Robert Louis Stevenson; Read by William Coon
1 |MP3| – Approx. 44 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: 2006
|ETEXT|

BBC Radio 7 - BBC7A Short History Of Gothic – Markheim
By Robert Louis Stevenson; Read by Hugh Bonneville
1 Broadcast – Approx. 30 Minutes [ABRIDGED]
Broadcaster: BBC Radio 7
Broadcast: December 12, 2009
Provider: RadioArchive.cc
“Hugh Bonneville reads Robert Louis Stevenson’s macabre tale charting one man’s rapid fall from grace.”

The Weird CircleWeird Circle – Markheim
Based on the short story by Robert Louis Stevenson; Performed by a full cast
1 |MP3| – Approx. 25 Minutes [RADIO DRAMA]
Broadcaster: MBS, NBC, ABC
Broadcast: May 20, 1945
Provider: Archive.org
This is a radical adaptation, set in a contemporary (to 1945) setting, and providing much of the presumed back-story (stuff that isn’t actually in the text of Stevenson’s original tale).

Here are a couple more Markheim illustrations [this time by Lynd Ward – found in The Haunted Omnibus (1937)]

Robert Louis Stevenson's Markheim as illustrated by Lynd Ward - from The Haunted Omnibus (1937)

Robert Louis Stevenson's Markheim as illustrated by Lynd Ward - from The Haunted Omnibus (1937)

[also via Golden Age Comic Book Stories]

Posted by Jesse Willis