Friday, October 27, 2006

Hugh B. Cave's The Prophecy

A Little about Hugh Cave.

I don't remember when I first heard of Hugh B. Cave but it was probably in the mid 1990s with the publication of Fedogan & Bremer's hardbacks THE DOOR BELOW and DEATH STALKS THE NIGHT. I bought both of them and started reading one of the stories in THE DOOR BELOW. I don't remember a lot of the details or even which story it is now (I'll have to go back through and check at some time), but I do remember it being so lurid and intense that I had to put it down. It was just too intense for me at the time. I, who live and breathe horror, had to stop reading because it was just too overwhelming to deal with.

It was a while before I tried Cave again with some different stories and have come to appreciate his overheated, feverish and even psychotic tales of everyday life gone really horribly wrong. There's something about how he can craft a story that might start out as a mundane, relaxing evening with friends having a nice dinner and conversation and turns into a bloodbath full of screaming and wretching horror by the end that is just fascinating and horrifying at the same time.

And that is what our experiment for today is about. The mundane gone wrong in horrible and terrifying ways. The Prophecy was originally printed in Black Book Detective Magazine, October 1934.

If you find this piquing your interest in Cave's writing I would suggest the two books mentioned above and also a larger book of collected horrors called MURGUNSTRUMM AND OTHERS which was originally a very rare hardback by Carcosa Press but is now out in a broadly available soft cover (and also HB version) from Wildside Press.

Further reading on Hugh B. Cave:
bio on wikipedia
listing of his short stories, which numbers over 1000
CAVE interview by Tim Dill
CAVE interview by Tracey Hessler

Ok, and now on with today's experiment
CLICK TO LISTEN TO THE PROPHECY
(RIGHT CLICK AND "SAVE AS" TO DOWNLOAD)

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

The Festival by H. P. Lovecraft

So Halloween is almost upon us and I've spent most of October not posting anything because I've been trying to assure that this blog is showing up in google. It's not very enticing to think that I put this together for you folks but ya wind up not even knowing it exist because it's not on any search engines. It is now so we'll continue on with the experiment.

What we have for today is one of the first Lovecraft stories that I ever read. What first drew me to HPL was the stark and scary covers by Michael Whelan. I picked up The Tomb and Other Tales just randomly based on the Whelan cover and the weird-sounding name "Lovecraft". It had "Love" in it but together with "craft" made it somehow itself a creepy and might I say Eldritch sounding name.

After reading more classical horror staples such as Poe and Shelley, running into Lovecraft was quite a revelation. This was like truly classic gothic horror, but with gloppy, disgusting monsters of some type of alien origin in it. I had no idea what was hidden behind the cloaks of the revelers in The Festival. I was blown away and immediately started drawing those horrors that I read about. That stuff was really stimulating, and sometimes even now, a quarter of a century later it can still fire my imagination.

So on that demented, mad-piping note, I present The Festival. This entry in the experiment includes some ambient music just to weirdly spice things up.
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN OR RIGHT CLICK AND "SAVE AS" DOWNLOAD

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

G-8 : Squadron of Corpses Chpt 17 - 19

Time to wrap this one up! In the last three chapters we'll see voodoo rituals, daring escapes, dead heroes, bad jokes from Battle the butler and much much more!

Click to listen or right click and "save target as" to download.
Squadron of Corpses
Chapter SEVENTEEN
Chapter EIGHTEEN
Chapter NINETEEN
G-8 is (C) 2006 Argosy Communications, Inc