Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic tale of a mother in distress! I managed to use a different voice for the husband every time he spoke, which I think is half hilarious blunder, half stroke of genius. After all, we're hearing the version of John that exists in the narrator's head, and I think it's fair to say she thinks of him as a different man almost every time he speaks.

Hallmark holiday or not, I wish everyone a happy Mother's Day, and encourage you to spend some quality time with your mother. I ran out of mothers roughly two years ago, so it's a tough time of year for me.

As always, I owe some thanks to Vivek Abishek's generosity! Check out his royalty-free music and thank him for his work. "The Door" is our theme song; an excerpt from "The Forest" gave us our music at the climax.

#mothersday #horror #charlotteperkinsgilman

Our first recommendations episode! I usually restrict myself to the public domain, but I've decided to touch on some of the fine writers I can't cover properly here. The excerpts are brief, but Theodore Sturgeon, Ray Bradbury, and Walt Kelly are our stars tonight. Sturgeon's "It" is a wonderful tale for spring, all mucky life and death. Bradbury's "Dandelion Wine" is a celebration of life, love, and grisly murder in an early twentieth-century small town. Finally, Walt Kelly's "Dog-Gone" and "The Town on the Edge of the End" are humor classics, but they're also more than a little scary.

Vivek Abhishek's "The Door" is our theme song. You can check out his royalty-free music at: https://www.youtube.com/user/VivEKhsihbA

#horror #beltane #mayday #spring

Good night, everyone. Happy horrordays to you.

Edith Wharton! One of the greatest writers of her generation, and one of the finest ghost story writers ever! "Miss Mary Pask" is a kind of resurrection tale. On a more profound level, it's about a man more interested in the idea of miracles than he is in the actual people around him. Whatta creep.

While I think my slightly British interpretation of Grace's New England accent is pardonable, I want to apologize for forgetting that Brittany is on the French coast, not in Britain! I mean, I know this, but I couldn't hold it in my head while I was recording. I was distracted by helicopters, my dog, and throat problems; I can blame it on all kinds of things. My French also came and went like the wind. In all seriousness, I hope it wasn't distracting.

Theme music! Vivek Abhishek's "The Door" is our theme song; a version of his song "The Forest" provided the jump scare in the middle of the story. As always, his royalty-free music is available at: https://www.youtube.com/user/VivEKhsihbA.

#edithwharton #easter #ghosts #horror

April sweet is rolling in, and the Feast of Fools is upon us again! Saki is our master of revels again this year, as his antihero Clovis Sangrail wanders onto the podcast for the first time.

Clovis is an influential character. Along with the aunts that populate Saki's stories, Clovis helped inspire Wodehouse's "Jeeves and Wooster" stories. And if you've never read any Wodehouse, God bless you. Sangrail is less of a twit than Bertie Wooster, though; he's a trickster who enjoys puncturing aristocratic egos like balloons. Is he a fool? Perhaps, but he's always surrounded by greater fools, and pettiness is a trickster's prerogative.

Vivek Abhishek's "The Door" is our theme song. You can check out his royalty-free music at: https://www.youtube.com/user/VivEKhsihbA

#aprilfools #Saki #humor #horror #wolf

Happy Saint Patrick's Day! Here we have a story from W.B. Yeats' own Fairy and Folktales of the Irish Peasantry. I was looking for a particularly grisly passage about roasting a corpse on a spit I remembered from another old story, but once I happened on this one, I couldn't resist its charms.

Fairies are terrible, wonderful things in Irish stories, and even if they don't mean you any harm, a mere dream of fairyland can consume a man. How does Teig O'Kane fare after his encounter with the other world? He's not the man he was, but he was pretty useless before, so perhaps the Good People meant well from start to finish in this tale.

#yeats #stpatricksday #horror #irish

As always, I need to thank Vivek Abhishek. I'm learning to make better and more subtle use of his royalty-free pieces, and I appreciate him making his music available for use! I've adopted his song "The Door" as our theme, and I brought in his "Haunting Ghost Choir" for this grim little tale. Check out his channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/VivEKhsihbA

Lafcadio Hearn collected ghost stories from New Orleans, from his adopted home, Japan, and from visiting scholars from China. The Tale of Ming-Y is a romantic ghost story, as befits the romance of the Red Lantern Festival, which marks the end of the Lunar New Year.

I'll make this one brief. I borrowed music from Vivek Abhishek - "The Door" is still our theme, and "The Forest" gave us our spooky sounds midway through the story. As always, his royalty-free music can be found on his YouTube channel.

Oh! And I promised a link to Throughline's excellent episode about the history of Chinese transliteration, "The Characters That Built China." Every episode of Throughline is a revelation. Trust me on this.

I'm very tired. Good night, everyone.

We've got a horror story for Valentine's Day, never fear! However, this is a rare episode where the history lesson dominates and, believe me, it's worth listening to!

Edgar Allan Poe wasn't the sad, lonely little man you probably imagined. His wife's death affected him greatly, of course, but Poe never wanted for companionship before, after, or even during his marriage. At the height of his fame, he attracted at least one more female poet's attention than he would have wanted.

It was true in the 1830s, and it's true today. Poets living in New York City are messy.

I'm gonna have to start experimenting with Vivek Abhishek's catalog a bit more, just to give my episodes more character mid-story. However, I'm rushing to get this one out, so I'll just plug "The Door" as our theme song, sing Vivek's praises, and link to his royalty-free music page. Cheers!

https://www.youtube.com/user/VivEKhsihbA

#valentines #poe #edgarallanpoe #darkromance #history #messy

This story is actually perfect for the Lunar New Year and the Year of the Fire Horse! When my wife told me how that shook out, I kicked myself. No regrets, though, I think any story about animal exploitation works pretty well for Groundhog Day.

This is the second, and probably the last, Mary Frances McHugh story on the podcast. She didn't publish much and, apart from her poetry and her children's novel, I've now covered 2/3 of her body of work. That said, I hope she was proud of her stories. No one makes me feel realistic horror deep within my body like Mary Frances McHugh.

#horror #groundhogday #shortstories

As always, I owe Vivek Abhishek a vote of thanks. His song "The Door" has become our de facto theme. You can support him by checking out his YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/VivEKhsihbA, where you can find some memorable music for your own projects.

See y'all on Valentine's Day. I've got it picked out, but I'd better start looking for a Lunary New Year story, stat. I'll need both of those in the can so I can start editing early.

If you're lucky enough to be born Southern, Old Christmas is the holiday your grandparents remember. Or maybe remember their grandparents reminiscing about. The Gullah and Geechee people of the Carolinas still practice it, I understand, and in some regions a boat or a bull named Old Buck visits the islands on Old Christmas. It's a downhome holiday, one I've always wanted to celebrate, though I can't truly claim it as my own.

Back to M.R. James this week. "There Was A Man, Dwelt By A Churchyard" puts me in mind of the spooky stories my dad told kids when I was young. Dad has a deep, trained speaking voice and he' d mesmerize us with it, then jump at us at the end when the "booger" (read "boggart," a kind of malevolent faery, but often a synonym for ghost) would grab the protagonist/victim at the story's end. Tradition, right?

Vivek Abhishek's "The Door" is our intro music this week, and "Santa is Coming" is our exit. Check out Vivek' royalty-free song catalog at: https://www.youtube.com/c/VIVEKABHISHEK

#oldchristmas #christmas #horror #mrjames

W.E.B. DuBois is better known for his essays on race and civil rights than his fiction. That said, "The Comet" is a gorgeous yarn that sent its tendrils throughout various genres. His facility with language is on full display here, as is his deep exploration of what we feel in the middle of disaster. Written in 1920, it anticipates stories like "Time Enough At Last," Night of the Living Dead, The Stand, and the entire apocalypse subgenre. Long before we were dreading and fantasizing about the end of the world, DuBois imagined it in terrifying, stark detail.

While time marches on by running in place, "out with the old, in with the new" echoes from the mountaintops this time of year. Fortunately, we've got a story that embodies both sentiments.

Our theme song this week is Vivek Abhishek's "The Door;" check out his royalty free music at: https://www.youtube.com/c/VIVEKABHISHEK

And hey! Have a #happynewyear

#horror #fiction #webdubois