horror – Page 37

New Releases: Eloquent Voice: A World Of Talent and Other Stories by Philip K. Dick

Tuesday, August 28, 2012 Jesse Willis

New Releases

Here’s William Coon’s fourth collection of Philip K. Dick short stories and novellas. It’s available via Amazon, Audible, Audiobooks Online, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, BooksOnBoard, Read Without Paper, Waterstone’s.

These stories are Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror.

And three of the five stories have never been audiobooked before!

“A novelist carries with him constantly what most women carry in large purses: much that is useless, a few absolutely essential items, and then, for good measure, a great number of things that fall in between. But the novelist does not transport them physically because his trove of possessions is mental. Now and then he adds a new and entirely useless idea; now and then he reluctantly cleans out the trash – the obviously worthless ideas – and with a few sentimental tears sheds them. Once in a great while, however, he happens by chance onto a thoroughly stunning idea new to him that he hopes will turn out to be new to everyone else. It is this final category that dignifies his existence. But such truly priceless ideas… perhaps during his entire lifetime he may, at best, acquire only a meager few. But that is enough; he has, through them, justified his existence to himself and to his God.”
– Philip K. Dick, 1977

A World of Talent and Other Stories
By Philip K. Dick; Read by William Coon
Audible Download – Approx. 4 Hours 14 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Eloquent Voice, LLC
Published: August 17, 2012
In this collection of five stories, all first published in the 1950s, Dick justified his existence by exploring a number of truly interesting ideas. In “Small Town” a man creates a perfect scale model of his own town, as a means of escaping his unbearable reality. In “Human Is” the wife of a scientist notices that her husband has returned from a scientific expedition a changed man, but she’s not complaining. In “Foster, You’re Dead” a father’s unwillingness to participate in his country’s preparations for a war that never happens, leads to unexpected consequences for his family. In “The Hanging Stranger” a man is unable to convince his fellow townspeople that something terribly wrong is happening to them all. Finally, in “A World of Talent“, society’s reactions against those who have unusual talents have pushed the situation to the brink of interplanetary war.

Sample |MP3|

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #175 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Outsider by H.P. Lovecraft

Podcast

The SFFaudio Podcast #175 – The Outsider by H.P. Lovecraft, read by Wayne June. This is a complete and unabridged reading of the short story (19 minutes) followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Julie Hoverson and Fred Godsmark of Audio Realms.

Talked about on today’s show:
the greatest audiobook narrator of H.P. Lovecraft stories ever (Wayne June), you fall in love with this story in high school, it blew Julie’s mind, Fred read The Outsider early, Algernon Blackwood, horror, re-read or re-listen, Julie’s oblique audio drama adaptation, is the main character female?, we’re all outsiders, filming The Outsider, The View From Within, The Lovecraft Five (includes Richard Pickman and C. Auguste Dupin), born and raised in a tomb, zombie or revenant or disfigured person, he’s a rotty person in need of love, Edgar Allan Poe, how could you film it?, The Sixth Sense, the wonderful ambiguity, The Temple by H.P. Lovecraft, “Castle Arrgh”, The Dark Worlds Of H.P. Lovecraft, Volume 3, The Horror At Red Hook, Herbert West: Re-Animator, The Statement Of Randolph Carter, the comedic musical stage play of Herbert West: Re-Animator, Evil Dead: The Musical, Evil Dead 2, Wayne June is a treasure, Michael Moorcock, Blood Memories, Gene Simmons, The Dunwich Horror and The Call Of Cthulhu, Johnny Winter, Ghoul by Brian Keene, AudioRealms.com, Castaways, The Rising, Darkness On The Edge Of Town, Gathering Of Crows, Roanoke, “CROATOAN”, the incredibly reader Jenny Colvin, long staircases in The Outsider go up and the The Rats In The Walls they go down, a metaphorical reading, The Crawling Chaos, The Evil Clergyman (aka The Wicked Clergyman), engagement with the imagination, T.E.D. Klein, S.T. Joshi, we’re not in the know, 4 track recorder, Fred fell into the audio business, amateur vs. professional, reverb diaper pail, toilet echo, spoken word LPs, Caedmon, David McCallum, growing up vs. growing old, YouTube is incredible, Julie’s adaptation of The Temple, paranormal romance, The Dunwich Horror, Dean Stockwell, Lavinia’s not crazy, fathering the child of an elder god may or may not drive you crazy, “oh no I’ve discovered I’m related to fish-men”, The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society adaptation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, Robert E. Howard, Lair Of The White Worm by Bram Stoker, The Dark Worlds Of H.P. Lovecraft, Volume 1 is a consistent best seller, The Double Shadow by Clark Ashton Smith, The Empty House, The Whisperer In Darkness, August Derleth, People Of The Dark, The Haunter Of The Ring, DarkRealmsAudio.com, Twitter, an hour per minute of finished audio, recording in your living-room, Dracula, Donald Pickering, Jack London, adding hiss, room tone, put noise in?, The Yellow Wallpaper.

The Outsider by H.P. Lovecraft - Weird Tales, April 1926

The Outsider by H.P. Lovecraft - from Famous Fantastic Mysteries

The Outsider - illustrated by Alva Rogers from The Acolyte, Issue11, Summer 1945

H.P. Lovecraft's The Outsider illustrated by Pete Von Sholly

Illustration for H.P. Lovecraft's The Outsider - from Crypt Of Cthulhu, 49

Posted by Jesse Willis

The Boarded Window by Ambrose Bierce

Saturday, August 25, 2012Sunday, August 26, 2012 Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

I could be wrong but I bet The Boarded Window is the second most popular Ambrose Bierce short story assigned in American schools (with the first being An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge).

The Boarded Window is super short (less than 2,000 words), leaves out the usual controversial themes Bierce went for, and is a good ghost story too.

The Boarded Window
By Ambrose Bierce; Read by Joseph Langley
1 |MP3| – Approx. 13 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: January 28, 2009
First published in the San Francisco Examiner, July 14, 1889.

Here’s a “Special English” adaptation. Designed for ESL students this version is read at a slower pace, with a simplified vocabulary.

The Boarded Window
Adapted by Lawan Davis from the story by Ambrose Bierce; Read by Shep O’Neal
1 |MP3| – Approx. 16 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Voice Of America
Published: 2009
“A man in the deep woods deals with the death of his wife.”

Here’s a |PDF|.

And finally here’s an 1978 video adaptation for the International Instructional Television Cooperative:

Posted by Jesse Willis

19 Nocturne Boulevard: H.P. Lovecraft’s The Temple AUDIO DRAMA

Friday, August 24, 2012 Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

Discussed in our latest podcast, and one of the best adaptations of a Lovecraft story I have heard, here is Julie Hoverson’s audio drama of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Temple.

19 Nocturne Boulevard - The Temple 19 Nocturne Boulevard – The Temple
By Julie Hoverson; Adapted from the story by H.P. Lovecraft; Performed by a full cast
1 |MP3| – Approx. 34 Minutes [AUDIO DRAMA]
Podcaster: 19 Nocturne Boulevard
Podcast: April 19, 2011
The crew of a WWI U-boat finds that some danger runs…. very deep. First published in Weird Tales, September 1925.

Cast:
Cap. Karl Heinrich … Rick Lewis
Lt. Keinze … Julie Hoverson
Shawn Connor … crewman
Bryan Hendricksen … crewman

Music by Kevin MacLeod
Cover by Brett Coulstock

Posted by Jesse Willis

Recent Arrivals: AudioGo: H.P. Lovecraft’s Book Of The Supernatural edited by Stephen Jones

Thursday, August 23, 2012Thursday, August 23, 2012 Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Recent Arrivals

Recently arrived, and currently being soaked in through my skin and ears, is this giant collection of weird fiction. Assembled from a list of stories found in H.P. Lovecraft’s essay Supernatural Horror In Literature, it is a collection of well known and obscure classics by authors that H.P. Lovecraft loved.

Looking at the table of contents I noted that I’d already read several of the stories in this collection – including The Turn Of The Screw (we did a podcast about that one), the engimatic Christmas horror Markheim, the scientific ghost tale What Was It?, the unutterably creepy and horrific The Voice In The Night very recently, and many years ago, perhaps in high school, The Yellow Wallpaper. But even though I’ve read some of these stories already I’m still very excited. Each of the stories seems to be preceded by some relevant words by Lovecraft himself – and at the very least I will be listening to the mini-introductions to those stories I am well familiar with.

Until then I will content myself in listening to the unknown ones. For example, the frightful first person narrative of Who Knows? by Guy de Maupassant is thrilling and wondering me in the exact same way The Horla almost exactly one year ago. It’s wonderful!

H.P. Lovecraft’s Book Of The Supernatural
Edited by Stephen Jones; Read by Bronson Pinchot, Stephen Crossley, Davina Porter, Madeleine Lambert, Mark Peckham
MP3 DOWNLOAD – Approx. 16 Hours 44 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: AudioGo
Published: August 1, 2012
Written by arguably the most important horror writer of the twentieth century, H.P. Lovecraft’s 1927 essay Supernatural Horror in Literature traces the evolution of the genre from the early Gothic novels to the work of contemporary American and British authors. Throughout, Lovecraft acknowledges those authors and stories that he feels are the very finest the horror field has to offer: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, Guy de Maupassant, Ambrose Bierce, and Arthur Conan Doyle, each prefaced by Lovecraft’s own opinions and insights in their work. This chilling collection also contains Henry James’ wonderfully atmospheric short novel…The Turn of the Screw. For every fan of modern horror, here is an opportunity to rediscover the origins of the genre with some of most terrifying stories ever imagined.

Here’s the table of contents:
Introduction by editor Stephen Jones – Approx. 7 Minutes
Notes on Writing Weird Fiction By H.P. Lovecraft – Approx. 11 Minutes
The Tale of the German Student by Washington Irving – Approx. 14 Minutes
Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson – Approx. 49 Minutes
Who Knows? by Guy de Maupassant – Approx. 34 Minutes
The Invisible Eye by Erckmann-Chatrian – Approx. 41 Minutes
The Torture by Hope by Villiers de l’Isle Adam – Approx. 15 Minutes
Ms. Found in a Bottle by Edgar Allan Poe – Approx. 29 Minutes
What Was It? by Fitz-James O’Brien – Approx. 34 Minutes
The Middle Toe of the Right Foot by Ambrose Bierce – Approx. 24 Minutes
The Turn Of The Screw by Henry James – Approx. 4 Hours 52 Minutes
The Dead Smile by F. Marion Crawford – Approx. 57 Minutes
The Wind In The Rose-Bush by Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman – Approx. 38 Minutes
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman – Approx. 36 Minutes
The Recrudescence of Imray by Rudyard Kipling – Approx. 30 Minutes
The Hands Of Karma (Ingwa-banashi) by Lafcadio Hearn – Approx. 11 Minutes
The Burial Of The Rats by Bram Stoker – Approx. 1 Hour 7 Minutes
The Red Lodge by H.R. Wakefield – Approx. 35 Minutes
The Captain Of The Pole-Star by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Approx. 1 Hour 6 Minutes
The Villa Desiree by May Sinclair – Approx. 28 Minutes
The Voice In The Night by William Hope Hodgson – Approx. 36 Minutes
Novel of the White Powder by Arthur Machen – Approx. 48 Minutes

Posted by Jesse Willis

Review of Joe Ledger: The Missing Files by Jonathan Maberry

Wednesday, August 22, 2012 Julie

SFFaudio Review

Joe Ledger: The Missing Files
By Jonathan Maberry; Read by Ray Porter
4 Hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: 2012
Themes: / Short Stories / Supernatural / Horror / Bio-engineering /

The description for this brief collection of short stories says “… author Jonathan Maberry fills in the blanks in his action-thriller ‘Joe Ledger’ novels.”

This isn’t something I’d have picked up myself and, frankly, wouldn’t have bothered if it weren’t sent as a review book. I am usually disinterested in add-on short stories that sew up “loose ends” of novels or serve to tell us what a character’s been doing between one book and the next. In my experience, those are toss-offs and these days, what with 99-cent stories on Amazon, they just serve as money grabbers.

However, we all know I’m a sucker for Joe Ledger and I absolutely love the narrator’s way with these stories so if I wasted a few hours on mental cotton candy so be it. Also I was mildly interested in what seem to be two stories that aren’t connected to any novels, “Deep, Dark” and “Material Witness.”

Countdown: The prequel to Patient Zero and it told me nothing I didn’t learn in the beginning of the book. Honestly, it seemed as if it were a story prospectus given to a publisher to gain interest.

Zero Tolerance: The second story added a little to Patient Zero‘s ending since it could have been called “What Happened to Amirah.” (Pardon my spelling as I’ve only heard the audio for the novel.) Worth paying for? Not to me.

Deep, Dark: With the third story we get to something interesting. As is the case in Joe Ledger novels, it teeters on the knife’s edge between probability and supernatural/horror fiction. The Army has a little problem in one of their underground complexes. A little bio-engineered problem. It’s just a “bug hunt,” as it goes in one of my favorite lines from Aliens, but one that has righteousness on its side.

Material Witness: This story was more interesting than anything preceding it (or following, as it turned out … yes, foreshadowing!). However, that was mostly because Maberry was filling us in on another series of his: the creepiness that is Pine Deep, Pennsylvania. Imagine the house from The Shining, but … it’s a whole town! Maberry’s melding of the two worlds was rather intriguing but not enough to make me want to get whatever book it was he wrote about Pine Deep. For one thing, spoilers abound. I wonder if I already knew all about that “world” if the story would have kept my attention as it did.

Dog Days: The final story and the one which was the test of whether Maberry had improved at short story writing or whether the previous two just created interest because of the unfamiliar material. Yep. Choose door number two. It wasn’t a terrible story, just extremely easy to figure out as Joe Ledger goes to settle a personal grudge against the world’s deadliest assassin. The most interesting thing about it to me was the introduction of Ghost, the wonder dog. One feels (at least I do) that this should have been a prequel or flashback in The King of Plagues. I especially feel this since I spent much of the beginning of that book wondering what the heck happened to Ledger’s cat and why only one or two sentences gave us the dog’s history. This almost reads as discovery writing or something that was edited from a book. Ghost is ok, but he is definitely “made” to be Ledger’s dog, as he is a Wonder Dog with super-canine reflexes and understanding.

Summing up – these files could’ve stayed missing. It’s only four hours long but that is four hours you could use on something uniformly good.

Posted by Julie D.