W.W. Jacobs – Page 3

LibriVox: Short Horror Story Collection #005

SFFaudio Online Audio

Horror Story Collection 005
By various; Read by various
10 Zipped MP3s or Podcast – Approx. 4 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: September 15, 2008
An occasional collection of 10 horror stories by various readers. We aim to unsettle you a little, to cut through the pink cushion of illusion that shields you from the horrible realities of life. Here are the walking dead, the fetid pools of slime, the howls in the night that you thought you had confined to your more unpleasant dreams.

Berenice
By Edgar Allan Poe; Read by MorganScorpion
1 |MP3| – Approx. 20 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]

The Black Cat
By Edgar Allan Poe; Read by Ernst Pattynama
1 |MP3| – 30 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]

The Monkey’s Paw
By W.W. Jacobs; Read by Matthias Whitney
1 |MP3| – Approx. 21 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]

The Occupant of the Room
By Algernon Blackwood; Read by Mooseboy Alfonzo
1 |MP3| – Approx. 23 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]

The Painter’s Bargain
By William Makepeace Thackeray; Read by Mooseboy Alfonzo
1 |MP3| – Approx. 32 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]

The Room in the Tower
By E.F. Benson; Read by MorganScorpion
1 |MP3| – Approx. 29 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]

Stalley Fleming’s Hallucinations
By Ambrose Bierce; Read by Read by heshman08
1 |MP3| – Approx. 5 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]

The Tell-Tale Heart
By Edgar Alan Poe; Read by Reynard T. Fox
1 |MP3| – Approx. 16 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]

To Be Read at Dusk
By Charles Dickens; Read by Alex C. Telander
1|MP3| – Approx. 22 [UNABRIDGED]

Transformation
By Mary Shelley; Read by: Alecia
1 |MP3| – Approx. 42 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]

Podcast feed:

http://librivox.org/bookfeeds/horror-story-collection-005.xml

Posted by Jesse Willis

Librivox.org’s FREE Public Domain Sourced Speculative Fiction Audiobooks

Online Audio

We first told you about LibriVox and its many ongoing FREE audiobook projects last year. Since then many of their titles have been completed. The LibriVox volunteers have read and recorded chapters of books, entire novels and short stories from the public domain using their home equipment. Their lofty objective? To eventually make every book in the public domain available in the audio format! That goal is well on its way to success. LibriVox now has more than three dozen Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror titles completed. There are even more “in-progress.” So with that wonderous news in mind here is the complete* list of all the SF Fantasy and Horror with links to the files :

UNABRIDGED BOOKS:

Andersen’s Fairy Tales (Short Stories)
By Hans Christian Andersen; Read by Various Readers
1 Zipped File full of MP3s – 5 Hours 51 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]

The Marvelous Land of Oz (Book 2 In The Oz Series)
By L. Frank Baum; Read by Paul Harvey
1 Zipped File full of MP3s – 4 Hours 32 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]

Dorothy And The Wizard in Oz (Book 4 In The Oz Series)
By L. Frank Baum; Read by Judy Bieber
1 Zipped File full of MP3s – ? Hours [UNABRIDGED]

The Road To Oz (Book 5 In The Oz Series)
By L. Frank Baum; Read by Kara Shallenberg
1 Zipped File full of MP3s – 4.7 Hours [UNABRIDGED]

Sky Island
By L. Frank Baum; Read by Judy Bieber
1 Zipped File full of MP3s – 5 Hours 41 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]

Present At A Hanging and Other Ghost Stories (Short Stories)
By Ambrose Beirce; Read by Peter Yearsley
1 Zipped File full of MP3s – ? Hours [UNABRIDGED]

A Princess Of Mars (First In The John Carter Series)
By Edgar Rice Burroughs; Read by Various Readers
1 Zipped File full of MP3s – ? Hours [UNABRIDGED]

Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland (First In The Alice Series)
By Lewis Carroll; Read by Various Readers
1 Zipped File full of MP3s – 2 Hours 58 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]

Through The Looking-Glass (Second In The Alice Series)
By Lewis Carroll; Read by
1 Zipped File full of MP3s – 3 Hours 19 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]

The Wind In The Willows
By Kenneth Grahame; Read by Mark F. Smith
1 Zipped File full of MP3s – 6 Hours 47 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]

Fairy Tales (Short Stories)
By Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (Brothers Grimm); Read by Various Readers
1 Zipped File full of MP3s – 10 Hours 32 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]

The Story Of Doctor Dolittle
By Hugh Lofting; Read by Various Readers
1 Zipped File full of MP3s – 3 Hours 8 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]

Call Of The Wild
By Jack London; Read by Various Readers
1 Zipped File full of MP3s – ? Hours [UNABRIDGED]

White Fang
By Jack London; Read by Various Readers
1 Zipped File full of MP3s – 8 Hours 28 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]

Great Big Treasury Of Beatrix Potter (Short Stories)
By Beatrix Potter; Read by Various Readers
1 Zipped File full of MP3s – 3 Hours 31 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]

Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus
By Mary Shelley; Read by Various Readers
1 Zipped File full of MP3s – ? Hours [UNABRIDGED]

Dracula
By Bram Stoker; Read by Various Readers
1 Zipped File full of MP3s – 16 Hours 31 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]

A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court
By Mark Twain; Read by Steve Anderson
1 Zipped File full of MP3s – 13 Hours 42 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]

A Journey To The Interior Of The Earth
By Jules Verne; Read by Various Readers
1 Zipped File full of MP3s – 8 Hours 10 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]

The Invisible Man
By H.G. Wells; Read by Alex Foster
1 Zipped File full of MP3s – 4 Hours 54 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]

The War Of The Worlds
By H.G. Wells; Read by Rebecca
1 Zipped File full of MP3s – 6 Hours 35 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]

The War Of The Worlds
By H.G. Wells; Read by Various Readers
1 Zipped File full of MP3s – Approx 7 Hours [UNABRIDGED]

The Velveteen Rabbit
By Margery Williams; Read by Marlo Dianne
1 MP3 – 28 Minutes 50 Seconds [UNABRIDGED]

UNABRIDGED SHORT STORIES:

The Black Cat
By Edgar Allan Poe; Read by Tom Yates
1 MP3 File – 26 Minutes 58 Seconds [UNABRIDGED]

The Black Cat
By Edgar Allan Poe; Read by Don Morgan
1 MP3 File – 32 Minutes 43 Seconds [UNABRIDGED]

The Pit and the Pendulum
By Edgar Allan Poe; Read by Eric S. Piotrowski
1 MP3 File – 39 Minutes 8 Seconds [UNABRIDGED]

The Telltale Heart
By Edgar Allan Poe; Read by Don Morgan
1 MP3 File – 18 Minutes 8 Seconds [UNABRIDGED]

The Cask of Amontillado
By Edgar Allan Poe; Read by Zach Weissmueller and Ryan Heuser
1 MP3 File – 15 Minutes 45 Seconds [UNABRIDGED]

The Masque of the Red Death
By Edgar Allan Poe; Read by Juan Carlos Bagnell
1 MP3 File – 16 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]

The Monkey’s Paw
By W.W. Jacobs; Read by annegram
1 MP3 File – 25 Minutes 52 Seconds [UNABRIDGED]

The Signal-Man
By Charles Dickens; Read by: Andrew Miller
1 MP3 File – 36 Minutes 58 Seconds [UNABRIDGED]

Tale Of Peter Rabbit
By Beatrix Potter; Read by: Kevin Devine
1 MP3 File – 6 Minutes 26 Seconds [UNABRIDGED]

To Build A Fire
By Jack London; Read by Betsie Bush
1 MP3 File – 40 Minutes 03 Seconds [UNABRIDGED]

The Birth Mark
By Nathaniel Hawthorne; Read by Katy Preston
1 MP3 File – 38 Minutes 8 Seconds [UNABRIDGED]

An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge
By Ambrose Bierce; Read by Matthew Stewart-Fulton
1 MP3 File – 22 Minutes 1 Second [UNABRIDGED]

The Yellow Wallpaper
By Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Read by Justine Young
1 MP3 File – 28 Minutes 18 Seconds [UNABRIDGED]

*Any keeners out there are invited to let me know if I missed any SF Fantasy or Horror audiobooks completed by LibriVox that I didn’t recognize as such. Check out the actual list of all of their completed audiobooks on the LibriVox site HERE.

posted by Jesse Willis

Review of Middle Woman by Orson Scott Card

SFFaudio Review

Middle Woman
By Orson Scott Card; Read by Mary Robinette Kowal
1 MP3 File – 9 Minutes 57 Seconds [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show
Published: March 2006
Themes: / Fantasy / Fable / Dragons / 3 Wishes /Immortality /

This is the second “Audio Bonus” from Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show online magazine, the plan appears to be to offer one bonus MP3 story per issue. Cool!

Orson Scott Card’s short fiction is connected to people in ways that other speculative fiction often isn’t. Realistic character psychology always takes the lead over scenarios, but his scenarios always test his characters’ psychologies – it makes for a special completeness rarely found in Speculative Fiction. Combine this with a refinement of prose, where every word is perfectly placed, and you get a little piece of magic in every OSC story. In this case, “Middle Woman” is a fable style fiction, another variation of that old saw “the three wishes”. Originally published under OSC’s pseudonym “Byron Walley”, it takes the idea of moderation, something almost always absent from fables, and runs with it. It reminded me of a kinder, gentler version of Robert Bloch’s classic That Hellbound Train. Interestingly, it also offers a more restive solution to W.W. Jacobs’ The Monkey’s Paw. The setting is Eastern, and given the “middle” of the title I suspect it is working in the ‘middle kingdom’ style of storytelling. Whether I’m right about that or not you’ll have to check it out yourself to decide.

Quite short, only 9 minutes, this is ably read by Mary Robinette Kowal who manipulates her voice in all the right ways to lend classic fairy tale reading to this modern fable. In addition to being a terrific narrator, Kowal is a professional puppeteer who also moonlights as speculative fiction author. “Middle Woman” is the Audio Bonus found in Issue Two of the online magazine Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show.

DISCLAIMER: Mary Robinette Kowal, when not reading stories aloud is an SFFaudio reviewer.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Good news and bad news for fans of Science Ficti…

Online Audio

Good news and bad news for fans of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror audio dramatizations today. First the bad news…

Zombie Astronaut, one of our favorite mp3 webzines, has sadly shuffled off it’s undead coil. The aural delights have ceased due to ZA’s overwhelming popularity. It seems that the bandwidth traffic made for a giant expense in the anonymous host’s pocketbook. It is a bitter shame that mere $$ have downed this floating corpse when even death itself didn’t stop it. Alas.

The good news:

An interesting podcast in a similarly horrifc vein is available, it’ll help relieve some of the loss of ZA’s passing….

Tales Of Horror is an excellent source for genre Radio Drama, unfortunately its episodes are being removed at a fairly fast clip, no doubt due to some bristly copyright issues. Cool episodes still available include:

Tales Of Horror Episode 11 – From the BBC Radio series Chillers an AWESOME adaptation of John W. Campbell‘s classic “Who Goes There?” If you download no other, download this one!

Tales of Horror Episode 4 – From the CBC Radio series Nightfall “The Club of Dead Men” A Canadian student at Cambridge, spends the night in a room once used for meetings by members of the Everlasting Club. Spooky.

Tales of Horror Episode 2 – From the CBC Radio series Nightfall “The Monkey’s Paw” by W.W. Jacobs an accursed curio from India destroys lives with its promises of three wishes. Much adapted, but likely never better that this.

posted by Jesse Willis

Review of Nightmares on Congress Street Part IV

SFFaudio Review

Nightmares on Congress Street Part IV
by Various, performed by the Rocky Coast Radio Theatre
1 MP3-CD – 2 Hours 35 Minutes [AUDIO DRAMA]
Publisher: Paperback Digital
Published: 2004
ISBN: 1584390069
Themes: / Horror / Poetry / Zombies / Poe / Cremation /

“Nightmares on Congress Street” is a radio show that has been broadcast each Halloween Eve since 2001. This is “Part IV” because it’s a recording of the 4th annual broadcast. It’s not “Part IV” in the sense that you need to run out and find parts I-III before listening to this one. As far as I know, they aren’t available. The shows are recorded by a group of theatrical professionals from the Portland, ME area, and are broadcast on Maine Public Radio.

It’s rare that I hear something modern that captures the spirit of Halloween. Sure, there’s some scary stuff out there, and some funny scary stuff out there, but “Nightmares on Congress Street” really catches the fun spirit of Halloween. There are scares and laughs in good measure throughout, and you’d be hard-pressed to find better production quality anywhere.

Included here are six productions:

The Monkey’s Paw by W.W. Jacobs
A mummified monkey’s paw seems to grant wishes, but, as always, a person should be careful what he wishes for.

The Cremation Of Sam McGee by Robert W. Service
The cover doesn’t list who does which part, but the actor who performed this horror poem was just fabulous. The poem tell the story of Sam McGee, who stumbles into the camp of a cowboy, and who asks that cowboy to make sure to cremate him if he dies.

The Cabin in the Woods by Clay T. Graybeal
A bunch of folks go to a cabin to spend some time, but doesn’t that plant outside look like someone we know? Ridiculous.

The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe
One of the finest renditions of this Poe classic that I’ve ever heard.
The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that gave utterance to a threat. At length I would be avenged; this was a point definitely, settled –but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved precluded the idea of risk. I must not only punish but punish with impunity.
And punish he does. Bravo to the actors on this one.

The Librarian by Rhonda Carlson
This piece is done by Rhonda Carlson, Rocky Coast Radio Theatre’s composer. Delightful mayhem, this one.

The Horror of Walker Point by Anthony S. Marino
This one is an excellent tale right out of George Romero’s playbook. It is performed in a kind of “War of the Worlds” style – regular programming is interrupted for important news about a chemical spill. As more and more people are affected by these chemicals, the newscasters bravely stay on the air.

I thoroughly enjoyed this production, and am eager to hear this year’s show!

You can get this title at Paperback Digital, Audible, and at Tantor.

Posted by Scott D. Danielson