A Lovecraftian Collection of Weird Tales
In his Commonplace Book and and his lengthy essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, author H.P. Lovecraft carefully assessed weird tales through the ages. He named a great many stories that he admired. The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society has curated a collection of 43 of the best of them and recorded them as audiobooks for your listening enjoyment. Read by the HPLHS' own Andrew Leman and Sean Branney and featuring original music by Troy Sterling Nies, these eerie tales will delight your mind and chill your blood.
This collection features forty three tales totaling roughly fifty hours of thrilling storytelling by masters including Blackwood, Dickens, Kipling, Machen, Chambers, Conan Doyle and Poe. You'll likely meet new authors whose works you may not know. The collection features a special audio Afterword in which Mssrs. Branney and Leman share their thoughts as editors and readers of the collection in a casual conversation.
For more information, please visit the web page for the collection!
Contents
- "The Adventure of the German Student" by Washington Irving
- "The Avenger of Perdóndaris" by Lord Dunsany
- "The Bad Lands" by John Metcalfe
- "The Black Stone" by Robert E. Howard
- The Boats of the Glen Carrig by William Hope Hodgson
- "Count Magnus" by M.R. James
- "The Dead Valley" by Ralph Adams Cram
- "The Death Mask" by Henrietta Everett
- "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe
- "The Ghost of Fear" by H.G. Wells
- "The Ghostly Kiss" by Lafcadio Hearn
- "The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant
- "The House and the Brain" by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
- "The House of Sounds" by Matthew Phipps Shiel
- "Idle Days on the Yann" by Lord Dunsany
- "Lot #249" by Arthur Conan Doyle
- "The Man-Wolf" by Erckmann & Chartrian
- "The Middle Toe of the Right Foot" by Ambrose Bierce
- "The Minister's Black Veil" by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- "The Monkey's Paw" by W.W. Jacobs
- "One of Cleopatra's Nights" by Theophile Gauthier
- "The Phantom Rickshaw" by Ruyard Kipling
- The Place Called Dagon by Herbert Gorman
- "Seaton's Aunt" by Walter de la Mare
- "The Shadows on the Wall" by Mary E. Wilkins
- "A Shop in Go By Street" by Lord Dunsany
- "The Signal-Man" by Charles Dickens
- "Skule Skerry" by John Buchan
- "The Spider" by Hanns Heinz Ewers
- "The Story of a Panic" by E.M. Forster
- "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" by Robert Louis Stevenson
- "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" by Clark Ashton Smith
- "The Tapestried Chamber" by Sir Walter Scott
- "The Upper Berth" by F. Marion Crawford
- "The Vampyre" by Johni Polidori
- "The Venus of Ille" by Prosper Mérimée
- "The Were Wolf" by Clemence Housman
- "What Was It?" by Fitz-James O'Brien
- "The White People" by Arthur Machen
- "The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains" by Frederick Marryat
- "The Willows" by Algernon Blackwood
- "The Yellow Sign" by Robert W. Chambers
- "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- Afterword - in which readers Andrew Leman and Sean Branney engage in a lively improvised discussion of the many tales and authors in this collection
- Outtakes - hear unvarnished audio wipeouts, dialect disasters, textual lamentations and expletive-laden outbursts by your dedicated narrators
Deluxe Edition. Due to the massive size of this collection, we are not offering it on CD (it would take 39 CDs). This collection comes packaged in a custom designed faux library book which artfully holds a custom designed 16Gb USB flash drive containing all of the stories in a format that's permanent, portable and easily added to your audio collection. The Deluxe Edition also comes with a free download of the stories.
Download Edition. Start enjoying the tales immediately via digital download. No shipping, no taxes, just weird tales! Because the collection is large, we recommend than you download it to a computer first and then sync the files to your phone or tablet - it generally works better that way, although it can be downloaded directly to any device that can manage a 5Gb .zip file.
Free Samples. To give you a taste of the collection, we're giving you two stories to enjoy in their entirety absolutely free
- "Seaton's Aunt" by Walter de la Mare - the entire story
- "What Was It?" by Fitz-James O'Brien - the entire story
Additional samples - the openings of a few other stories:
- "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe
- "The Spider" by Hanns Heinz Ewers
- "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" by Clark Ashton Smith
- "The Willows" by Algernon Blackwood
A large collection of stories that inspired/influenced Lovecraft. The vocal performances are very engaging and easy to listen to. The faux book packaging is very well done and blends in well with actual vintage books. Well worth your time.
I was kindly gifted the physical edition this by my Eldritch Elf one year.
An excellent collection of stories. It is nice to hear stories that had inspired HPL and use it as a jumping off point of discovering other authors he admired.
The faux Library book is very well produced (as are all HPLHS props) it almost goes without saying. The USB stick is very nice. The book looks real on the shelf. It is nice to have, but I would say not necessary if money or space is a concern.
My only complaint is the music cues between chapters/passages can be quite jarring and have made me jump a few times. A download option without these would be welcome.
I am uncertain if its because this is their third foray in audio book recording or if its due to the differing styles of writing and characters, but this particular collection has some really great performances from Messrs. Branney and Leman, maybe even some of their best. That is not of course to suggest the previous two are of lesser quality per se, but perhaps straying from the various constraints of Lovecraft's style of writing freed the intrepid duo and allowed for a more spirited approach to the readings. Whatever the case may be, I really enjoyed my time listening and wanted to take my time and savor each story before moving to the next. Among my very favourite readings is that of "The Yellow Wallpaper." When I first read it years ago I found it somewhat underwhelming and had not thought twice about it since, but Mr. Branney's reading of it is superlative and it is through his performance that I really began to appreciate the subtlety and strangeness of the story as the narrator's state crumbles over the course succinctly told tale. I am very much looking forward to all future installments, and I would absolutely love it if they recorded some more Lovecraft pastiches written by his friends.
Calling these stories Lovecraftian may not be technically accurate, since some of these works predate HPL and were influences on his themes and style. That quibble aside, this is a very fine selection of stories from masters like Poe, Hodgson, MR James, Machen, Blackwood, Maupassant etc.
I have only heard a couple of the stories, but I can say here that the readings are quite professionally done, and I imagine the rest to be so. They do a good job of trying to imitate the voices of the characters in dialect / diction. The stories themselves, I have read most of them and they represent quite the cream of vintage weird fiction. You have excellent variation between short mood pieces and lengthy elaborate adventures (divided into chapters for convenient listening), and also in terms of the difference in styles between the authors. In all, this is a winning curated collection that promises great entertainment - all that one needs is a cold night, a fireplace and some nice hot beverage to go with.
Really nice readings of the stories. Listening to these adds another dimension from actually reading them.
Just to reiterate from another review, trying to get this collection in one book is near impossible. This is the next best thing.
The "book" containing the USB drive is about the size THE COMPLETE FICTION OF H.P. LOVECRAFT book and is a nice touch complete with a library check-out card filled with names of those that have borrowed it out.
The other HPLHS audio-books will soon be on their way...
