Classic Ghost Stories

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Episode 47: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde (Part 2) May 03, 2020

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Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde Themes"As we think in our hearts, so are we."(Proverbs, 23.7)The TwinsMost cultures have a fascination with the phenomenon of twins. Jekyll and Hyde can be understood to be a strange type of twin. Castor and Pollux were twins in Classical Mythology, both had the same mother (as would be expected): Leda, but each had a different father. Castor’s father was Leda’s mortal husband and was thus mortal, while Pollux was the son of Zeus, and thus an immortal. When push came to shove and Castor was killed, Pollux shared half his immortality with his twin. We see in Tolkien, the half-elf brothers Elrond and Elros choose their kindred, Elrond to be an elf and thus immortal and Elros to be human and thus to die. In fact the symbol of the twins runs through our culture: Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus, Osiris and Set. Very often one is bad and the other good. Most often, stories about twins involve a moral choice. The psychologist Carl Jung felt this motif revealed an archetype in human nature itself. Jung (Collected Works XX, 217n) mentions the old apocryphal legend that Jesus (the believer) was twin to Thomas (the doubter). Chevalier and Gheerbrant (trans. John Buchanan-Brown) in their Dictionary of Symbols (1994, p1047) talk about different pairings of twins; one dark, the other light, one good, the other evil, and they say that they represent the contradictions in a person’s nature and his or her moral struggle to overcome them. Stevenson’s discussion of this theme addresses the morality, but as well as being philosophical, he manages to demonstrate it through its human and dramatic aspect and show the suffering that such a struggle within a person’s nature can bring.It is not so simple as good fighting against bad. Jekyll wants to be both evil and good at the same time and to enjoy his evil with no penalty. His solution is to create, or more correctly, liberate Mr Hyde. Jekyll gets away with his guilty, but tempting pleasures while he can, but when he fears that Hyde will cause him to be punished, he tries to do away with Hyde, but he has fed the beast too much and it has grown too strong, and in the end, it is Hyde’s evil that proves the stronger. Rather than sharing his immortality as Pollux does for Castor, Jekyll chooses to share his death with Hyde, killing himself and thus killing them both.The idea is that in each of us is a mortal and an immortal part. They are always together but never completely one. We see this in Castor and Pollux but also in Jesus and the Christ, who were both man and god in the same body. We see a version of it where Jekyll is the mixed man, very mortal, fond of both his sensual pleasures and his pious reputation, and Hyde who is uncombined, younger, more vital, his senses sharper, but wholly made of shadow. The ElixirStevenson’s Tincture that changes colour and foams and bubbles has been portrayed many times on the television and movie screens. You can even get your own alcoholic version in The Alchemist bar in Manchester and now elsewhere.It does seem to link back to the Elixir of Life of the Medieval and Renaissance alchemists, which they also called a ’tincture’ in that it is transformative. The Elixir of the alchemists could reputedly turn lead into gold, bring that which was dead alive once more and transform man into god.Jekyll’s elixir turns man into monster. It is also interesting that in an old Irish story, the druids gave the great warrior Cú Chulainn an elixir of forgetfulness so he would forget his love for a woman who was not his wife and therefore not fall into sin. In a sense, Jekyll’s elixir allows him to forget his moral natureSupport the show

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Episode 46 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde (Part 1) May 02, 2020

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Robert Louis StevensonR L Stevenson was born Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenons in 1850 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He died aged only 44 in Samoa. He was phenomenally successful in his time and is still remembered for such classics as Treasure Island, Kidnapped and of course The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.Robert Louis (he changed his name from Robert Lewis Balfour when he was around 18) was an only child. His father Thomas Stevenson was a famous lighthouse engineer, from a line of lighthouse designers. His grandfather Robert Stevenson and his uncles were in the same line of work. R L Stevenson's mother Margaret Balfour came from a line of landowners from Fife, but her father was a Church of Scotland minister. Stevenson suffered from respiratory problems as a child, an ailment he shared with his mother and maternal grandfather. He never fully recovered from his chest problems. After school, he went to Edinburgh University to study engineering. He used to go to the family engineering works in the summer and accompanied his father on a tour of lighthouses in Orkney and Shetland on 1868.By 1871, Robert Louis told his father he didn't want to be an engineer but wanted to pursue a career as a writer. His family took it relatively well but suggested he change to studying Law at University to give him some security. He was 21, and in common with many 21 year olds, he became more Bohemian, taking to wearing his hair long and sporting a velveteen jacket. In 1873, he went to stay on the French Riviera for the good of his health for a year but came back to Edinburgh and was admitted to the Scottish Bar in 1875.He met and fell in love with an American woman called Fanny Van de Grift Osborne from Indianopolis who had come with her children to study art in France. She was married but her husband was multiply unfaithful so they separated. She retured to the USA after they had spent over a year together and eventually in 1878, he travelled to meet her in San Francisco. He wrote about his journey across America, but it ruined his health. He was reputedly almost dead when he arrived in Monterey, California. By December 1879, he was well enough to travel on to San Francisco. He described the time as being 'All alone on forty-five cents a day and sometimes less'He met up again with Fanny in San Francisco. She was divorced by that time, but by the winter of 1879, he was at death's door again and Fanny came to nurse him. They married in 1840 and travelled to the Napa Valley for their honeymoon in an abandoned mining camp on Mouth Saint Helena. In August that year, he sailed back to Liverpool in England. Because of his failing health, Stevenson looked for suitable places to live, staying on the south coast of England, to France and in places in Scotland. After Stevenson's father died, he went to live in Colorado. By 1888 he chartered a yacht in San Francisco and decided to set ail for the east and central Pacific, stopping in Hawaii, Tahiti, the Gilbert Island and New Zealand. He ended up in Sydney, Australia, and in 1890 set out on another voyage and arrived at Vailima in Samoa where he bought land and became part of the local community. He was to die of a stroke in 1894 while opening a bottle of wine.The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde'Jekyll and Hyde' was published in 1886. Stevenson finished it in six days during a period of illness and gave it to his wife who didn't like it. It is written a little like a mystery where Mr Utterson the lawyer is the detective. The truth of what happens is actually more or less laid out in the first section for those who have eyes to see. We see the evil Mr Hyde draw Support the show

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Episode 45 The Men in the Snow by Alex Boast Apr 25, 2020

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Alex BoastAlex Boast is a young British writer, born in Ipswich, raised in Surrey and living in London. He has an MA in Creative Writing and is constantly improving his skills by writing on https://medium.com/@boastalex (Medium) and https://www.quora.com/profile/Alexander-M-Boast (Quora) as well as doing Master Class courses and attending writing courses by the British writing school The https://www.arvon.org/ (Arvon Foundation).He has a love of ghost stories and references H P Lovecraft and Stephen King as influences as well as J R R Tolkein.Alex had been working in health marketing which necessitated frequent global travel and due to the Coronavirus epidemic, he was laid off. Fortunately that made him focus more on his writing, so every cloud has a silver lining. He has just been commissioned to write a horror movie script based on the Irish legends of the Banshee. This is only the second interview Classic Ghost Stories Podcast has done with a living author, but we figure there are more of you out there, so if you write ghost stories and want to have them appear in Classic Ghost Stories Podcast then get in touch.If you want to read Alex's story, you can get it from Amazon https://amzn.to/2xKaWMO (here)The Men in the SnowInevitablly when you read a new story, you try to catalogue it with others you have read. On the podcast now we have read a wide range of stories written by authors born in the 18th, 19th, 20th, and soon the 21st centuries. Styles change of courseWhen I read the Men in the Snow, I was struck by the weirdness of it. We don't know if the perceptions of the young girl narrator can be relied on. Some of them seem distinctly odd; her father sitting reading the paper in the kitchen who never moves and never speaks. Her mother who yells at her to stop shaking and later disappears. The newts in the pond, her only friends. So it starts off as purporting to be a naturalistic, realistic story, but then gets shunted off into the odd.This is something I find with https://amzn.to/3dRE05z (Robert Aickman) too. His settings are ordinary, mundane almost, and seem to be naturalistic, but he injects the unnervingly odd into them.The other story that popped into my mind was https://amzn.to/3dTK6Cx (The House of Leaves) by Mark Z. Danielewski. This was because the house in The Men in the Snow changes size. If you don't know the House of Leaves you should read it. In fact, our narrator is growing larger, the house isn't shrinking!And as for the advancing angry eyes...So, it was great to have a modern story and greater still to interview Alex. I hoped you liked it as much as I did.And finally,By the time this episode of the Podcast goes out, we should finally be seeing some light at the end of the tunnel of the Coronavirus epidemic. I hope you and yours (and me and mine) all come through it safely. Take careTonySupport Us!Ways to support Tony to keep doing the show:https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/classic-ghost-stories-923395 (Share and rate it!)http://bit.ly/2QKgHkY (Buy Tony a coffee) to help with the long nights editing!Become a http://bit.ly/barcudpatreon (Patreon) to get additional stuff and allow the show to go on in the long term. Facebook GroupWhy not join Classic Ghost Stories Podcast on https://www.facebook.com/classicghoststories/ (Facebook) for the lastest news?MusicBeginning music ‘Some Come Back’ is by the marvellous https://theheartwoodinstitute.bandcamp.com/album/witch-phase-four (Heartwood Institute) . The end music is by MYUU Bad EncounterDarkworldsI’ve just launched a new podcast of my book Darkworlds, a horror sci-fi story set in a virtual reality 1927 London.https://darkSupport the show

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Episode 44 Bosworth Summit Lock by L T C Rolt Apr 18, 2020

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L T C RoltLionel Thomas Caswall Rolt, was an English writer born in 1910 and who died in 1974, therefore for us, he's a recent writer! He was a prolific writer who had an interest in engineering and that shows in this story in his description of the tunnels and the knowledge of ventilation shafts which are integral to the plot of the story. In keeping with this love of engineering, he wrote biographies of major engineers such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Thomas Telford. He had a major enthusiasm for vintage cars, heritage railways and was a pioneer of the canal cruising industry. Write what you know, they say, and he did.His father was a bit of a pioneer and had worked on an Australian cattle station s well as a plantation in India and being part of the Yukon gold rush in 1898.Rolt's father and uncle were interested in engineering and machines and his uncle had a horse drawn canal boat which he fitted with a steam engine and then a petrol engine.From 1936, Rolt decided he wanted a life afloat and he converted his uncle's old boat Cressy into a boat he could live in and spent his time mooching up and down the canals of England.During the Second World War, he went to work for Rolls Royce and made Spitfire engines, the Royal Airforce's legendary fighter plan. After the war, Rolt teamed up with Robert Aickman, another major ghost story writer to form the Inland Waterways Association to promote the use of the canals and restore them. Bosworth Summit LockAs noted, Rolt was a friend of Robert Aickman, author and editor, due to their shared love of canals. Kai Roberts, compares their work and finds Aickman's work quite radical (it is very unnerving) where Rolt's ghost stories are more traditional.Rolt set a number of his stories on the railways and canals. What I particularly, loved about this story, Bosworth Pound Lock, is the setting. As well as traditionally moral ghost story; boy messes with girl beneath his station, gets girl pregnant, boy kills girl by dumping her down a ventilation shaft into a canal tunnel, girl gets revenge as a ghost by dragging boy into canal with her, girl and boy are happily reuninted in the grave.But as well as this we have a lovely description of him fishing on his canal boat on a golden May evening, with the fresh leaves, the birds, the gentle flow of the water. It's just what we need in times like this.Of course, the victim's mother is a Gypsy with second sight and she sees the boys murder as a marriage with her daughter.Another little synchronicity (or not) is that I am reading The Stopping Places by Damien Le Bas, which is a book about Damien revisiting the places his Romany family used to stop as they travelled around the country. That's another book which is balm to the soul in these times of Corona Virus when we can't get out.Check out:https://amzn.to/2JpQbsq (The Stopping Places US Link) https://amzn.to/3bDTQyF (The Stopping Places UK Link)http://imbolcfire.blogspot.com/2010/01/some-thoughts-on-weird-fiction-of-ltc.html (Kai Robert's article on Rolt is here)And finally,I hope you are well, and bearing up. We shall overcome. What is really lovely to me is that the world is united against this enemy. I really hope this sense of unity will remain and that we can then turn to deal with the disasters that seem to be caused by global warming and fix that problem before it's too late!Take care, all.TonySupport Us!Ways to support Tony to keep doing the show:https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/classic-ghost-stories-923395 (Share and rate it!)http://bit.ly/2QKgHkY (Buy Tony a coffee) to help with the long nights editing!Become a http://bit.ly/barcudpatreon (Patreon) Support the show

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Episode 43: A Strange Goldfield by Guy Boothby Apr 12, 2020

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Guy BoothbyGuy Boothby was born in Adelaide, Australia in 1867 and died in Bournemouth, England in 1905. At the time of his birth South Australia was a recently established British colony and his father's family were important administrators and legislators of the colony. Boothby's mother was English and she separated from his father when he was only seven, and took him back to England where he was educated at Salisbury.He returned to Australia aged sixteen and entered the colonial administration where he was secretary to the mayor of Adelaide, but he didn't like the work. He began writing lyrics for light operas aged 23, in which he acted. The Australian colonies suffered an economic collapse in 1890 and he took ship for London. However, he didn't have enough money for the full passage and disembarked in Colombo, Sri Lanka and made his way back to Australia. He worked in various ventures across south east Asia, working on ships, stoking furnaces, becoming a ruby miner, working in an opium den in Singapore, acting, being a cowherd and even as a prize fighter. He was even a pearl diver for a while in Queensland before making his way back to Adelaide.He did manage to reach London eventually and wrote a book about his adventures. When his travel memoir was successful, he wrote a series of novel and was so prolific he ended up writing around six novels a year. He was only 38 when he died in 1905, officially of flu, but no doubt worn out by the hard and adventurous life he had led. He is buried in Bournemouth.A Strange GoldfieldI think the merit of A Strange Goldfield is particularly how it gives us an insight into Australia during the early days of European settlement there. We have a picture of adventurers wandering the huge continent searching for riches among and putting up with incredibly hard conditions. It has echoes of the goldrush in California and the Yukon but it's set against the burning Australian desert.In that, it has echoes of Victorian stories of explorers and novels suggesting that strange things are to be discovered in distant and difficult to get to lands, such as in Rider Haggard's She stories and all the interest there was among the British at home in the tales of explorers in Africa such as Livingstone, or even Scott of the Antarctic. It is in essence a boy's own adventure yarn as much as a ghost story. Though ghost story it is with the ghosts of the goldfield being forced to toil after death. There is an echo of morality here perhaps. Are they being punished for their greed? Was the destroying angel of typhoid sent to punish them for that and are they kept at the goldfield still as some kind of purgatory for the sin of venality.Strange TimesI'm writing this on 18th March. We were supposed to be going to York for my birthday tomorrow, but that's been cancelled due to the Coronavirus precautions. By the time this episode airs, it will be early April and who knows what will have happened? There might be light at the end of the tunnel or there might not. I have no idea. All I can do, is keep on reading stories like I have done for the past six months in the hope that it gives some entertaintment for those of you locked in by the coronavirus. Keep well and safe.Support Us!Ways to support Tony to keep doing the show:https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/classic-ghost-stories-923395 (Share and rate it!)http://bit.ly/2QKgHkY (Buy Tony a coffee) to help with the long nights editing!Become a http://bit.ly/barcudpatreon (Patreon) to get additional stuff and allow the show to go on in the long term. Websitehttp://bit.ly/ClassicGhostStoriesPodcast (Classic Ghost Stories Podcast)MusicBegSupport the show

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Episode 42: The Ring of Thoth by Arthur Conan Doyle Apr 04, 2020

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Sir Arthur Conan DoyleOr to give him his full name, Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born in 1859 in Edinburgh in Scotland and he died in Crowborough, Sussex, England aged 71. His family name was just Doyle and Conan was his middle name but taking Ignatius and Conan together with the surname Doyle, he could hardly be anything other than of Irish Catholic heritage. His mother was Irish and though his father was born in England, he was of Irish family. He was born in Edinburgh and his father Charles was an alcoholic and that caused the family to fall apart. His father ended up in the famous Crichton Royal psychiatric hospital just outside Dumfries. Because his father could not support him, Doyle’s wealthy uncles sent him to a large Catholic school in Lancashire, which I stumbled upon one sunny night several years ago when out for a walk. Then aged 16, he went to another Catholic school at Feldkirch in Austria. Despite his Catholic upbringing, Doyle renounced Catholicism and became an ardent believer and supporter of spiritualism. He was a member of the Hampshire Society for Psychical Research and the Society for Psychical Research in London.After his time in Austria, he went back to Edinburgh where he trained as a doctor. After graduating he worked in the south of England, setting up a practice in Southsea. Incredible as it sounds, he didn’t make money and had to become a writer to support himself. He also became the goalkeeper of the Portsmouth Association Football club when he was at Southsea. He also played cricket form Marylebone Cricket Club in London and then as part of the Authors XI with J M Barrie, P G Woodhouse and A A Milne. He was also a keen golfer!He was a big supporter of vaccination. He went to study ophthalmology in Vienna but found the German too hard (though he had been a school student in Austria off course). While he was in Vienna he mainly spent his time ice skating and writing fiction.He was a prolific writer and his first short story was published in 1879 when he was 20. He wrote his first Sherlock Holmes story when he was 27 and struggled to find a publisher for it. By the time he had written several stories he was tired of Holmes. Doyle was interested in many things and it is said that he wasn’t considered a great writer because he kept changing the focus of his enthusiasms, from writing to medicine, to golf to psychical research and many other subjectsThe Ring of ThothGiven what we’ve just said about Doyle’s wandering enthusiasms, it is interesting to note that is the same criticism he makes of the John Vansittart Smith hero of the Ring of Thoth. The observation adds little to the story, and has the ring of a personal anecdote. The Vansittarts were a noble English family of Dutch descent, and Doyle would probably have heard of them.The Ring of Thoth was published in 1890 in the Cornhill Magazine. The Ring of Thoth was the first mummy story. If we think of our Gothic Horror and especially of our Hammer Horror tradition, we have mummies, werewolves and vampires; in some movies they even meet up and do battle!I remember the Matell glow in the dark mummy, wolf man and other figures. My memory is hazy about the others. A friend of mine had a glow in the dark mummy and I wanted it. And Boris Karloff’s role in The Mummy from 1932 owes it all to The Ring of Thoth. As stories go it’s fairly straightforward. We have the learned man delving too deeply into things that should not be delved into, a little anyway. He’s not as bad as some of M R James or H P Lovecraft’s protagonists who mess with the really bad stuff. I think that’s a quote from Phil Lynott, by the way (if yousSupport the show

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Episode 41: Mr Arcularis by Conrad Aiken Apr 04, 2020

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Conrad AikenConrad Aiken was an American poet and author born in Savannah, Georgia in 1889 and died in Savannah in 1973 aged 84.His family were wealthy, originally from New England, but his father was an eye surgeon who moved to Savannah. Most bizarrely and disturbingly, Aiken’s father murdered Aiken’s mother and shot himself in 1901. Aiken was 11 at the time. He heard the shots and ran through to find the bodies. Aiken then went to live with his great aunt in Massachusetts. He went to Harvard where he became a life-long friend of the poet T S Eliot.Aiken was deeply interested in philosophy and was taught by George Santayana. This influenced his poetry as did his admiration for the work of Walt Whitman. Aiken was also heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud and was due to go and meet him but never did, because he had second thoughts and money was running short.Aiken was a prolific writer and very influential in literary circles. It was his influence which led to to the recognition of Emily Dickinson as a great poet.Aiken moved to England with his Canadian wife and had three children there in Sussex. His daughter Joan became a well-known writer of children’s stories, including the famous Wolves of Willoughby Chase.Aiken was divorced in 1929 and then he returned to America. He suffered from nervous problems and was terribly frightened he was going mad. He attempted suicide at least once. Mr ArcularisConrad Aiken published Mr Arcularis in 1931. It was selected by the Library of America for inclusion in a two hundred year retrospective volume of American fantastic tales. Mr Arcularis is a strangely disquieting story. Not quite a ghost story, because he isn’t dead but dreaming until the end. The narrative becomes more dreamlike as it goes on and is threaded with the fantastic.The unsettling oddness has something of Robert Aickman’s stories to it. It’s not a moral story either. I suppose, to me it’s a curiosity — very well put together. And, on reflection if all art is to make us feel something and that is its main purpose - to work in us at the level of feelings rather than thought, then it certainly works. The description of journeys among distant frosty stars is very beautiful. It actually reminds me of when I was much younger and had some teeth out under general anaesthetic. In those days it was done by gas with a rubber mask clamped on my mouth while I struggled by the dentist. I had weird dreams that morphed in and out of reality and featured hints that I was having teeth out. This story reminds me of that rather unpleasant experience.It’s hard to know what Conrad Aiken meant by calling his protagonist Mr Arcularis. I’s not a common name. An arcularius in Latin is a maker of small chests, boxes and jewel caskets. Is Aiken alluding to this? Or is it merely because, as Mr Acularis says, his name rhymes with Polaris. Polaris the North Star, where the dead go.The first hint we get that everything is not what it seems, to me at least, is when Harry has put him on board and is about to leave and says for Arcularis to bring him a sprig of edelweiss and a postcard from the Absolute. That may make our minds cast themselves back to when he is in the car and he misses big stretches of the journey, quite plausibly by falling asleep, but certainly the story begins to acquire a more dreamlike quality from here on in.The action jumps from him being cold in his cabin to sitting opposite the freckled girl whom he recalls but can’t think who she reminds him of. Later, he feels she may be his soul — which makes me think of the Jungian concept of the Anima.The Parson, the Doctor and the Freckle-Faced woman seem alSupport the show

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Episode 40: The Hound by H P Lovecraft Mar 21, 2020

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Howard Phillips LovecraftHP Lovecraft was perhaps the most influential writer of horror and weird tales of his generation. That may not have been evident during his life or even for a while after his death, but his work continues to be made into movies The Colour Out of Space was recently released, starring Nicholas Cage which is a based on Lovecraft’s weird tale of the same name.Lovecraft was born in 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island and died in the same city in 1937 aged only 46 of untreated stomach cancer.His family was originally wealthy but the fortune was tied to his grandfather and after his death, the money dried up. He was almost a pauper at the time of his death.Lovecraft’s father was a travelling salesman but it appears that his mother’s family had the money , In 1913 he began to get involved in pulp fiction and most of his stories were published in pulp magazines. He was a mentor to younger writers and perhaps the thing which ensured his later fame was his encouraging of other writers to develop his Mythos. It appears that Lovecraft suffered from mental illness during most of his life, most probably depression. Lovecraft was very conservative and an Anglophile in his writing. He did not like Americanisms and he uses some deliberately British stylings in his writing.The HoundThe Hound is Lovecraft’s most clearly Gothic tale, and that’s saying something. When he talks of his hero’s taste for the macabre, we can’t help but feel that Lovecraft is speaking through him. The Hound is like a story by Edgar Allen Poe channeled through Lovecraft’s pen. He never uses a normal word when he can use an outlandish one, and where one adjective would do, he piles on three or four and makes sure they are outlandish and obscure. This makes his style relatively easy to parody with its unspeakable cults and squamous monstrosities not to mention countless eldritch blasphemies on every page.The story is pretty simple. It concerns two post Baudelaire decadents going grave robbing for kicks. As often happens in Lovecraft’s stories they find an ancient arcane item (a McGuffin in screenwriting terms) and as is often the case it is made of jade. Somehow them moving the token gets the hound to haunt them all the way back to their horrible house in England and when our man ventures back to Holland to put it back (though it is robbed from him before he can do so), there he finds the monstrous hound waiting for him. Or at least that is the sense I made of it, with the addition of a good number of oversized vampire bats for good measure.In any case, a fun gothic romp, overdone and vulgar no doubt, but great fun to read out.Darkworlds ParisIf you like Lovecraft, you may like my new story [Darkworlds Paris] (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B084WW6LSK (Amazon.com: Darkworlds Paris: A Cthulhu LitRPG eBook: Tony Walker: Kindle Store)``) The story is the second book in the Darkworlds Series: Lovecraftian Horror set in a virtual reality computer game. The Great Old Ones are stirring, and they’re inside your head!Call to Action!This week, because of the success of the previous Call to Action, we are growing, fast and the Classic Ghost Stories Podcast is getting 12000 downloads a month. This is fantastic, but it trips us into the next cost category for Podcast Hosting. As this is a big leap up, if you would like the Podcast to keep going, and if you are able and willing, I would like to ask you to consider becoming a monthly http://bit.ly/barcudpatreon (Patreon.)Support Us!Ways to support Tony to keep doing the show: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/classic-ghost-stories-923395 (Share and rate it!) http://bit.ly/2QKgHkY (BSupport the show

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Episode 39: The Taipan by W Somerset Maugham Mar 14, 2020

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William Somerset MaughamW. Somerset Maugham was born in 1873 in Paris and died in Nice in 1965, was despite his brith and death places, English.He was a fantastically successful writer, being the highest paid author of the 1930s. His parents died when Maugham was only 10 and he was brought up by his uncle, a clergyman, and sent to King’s School, Canterbury. Many men in his family were lawyers, including his elder brother who was a viscount, but Maugham didn’t want that. He hated his school in Canterbury and finally his uncle let him to go to study German literature at the University at Heidelberg, after which he went to St Thomas’s hospital in London where he trained as a doctor, and qualified as one in 1897. He specialised in obstetrics and used his work experience to inspire his first novel, Liza of Lambeth. After that he worked as a novelist and playwright and travelled through Spain and Italy.Maugham, like many of the writers we read out, was gay. He was married to a woman but this was unhappy and after it broke down he lived in France with his male partner. His writing made him famous by the outbreak of the First World War.During the First World War he worked for the Red Cross and the Ambulance Corps before being recruited by MI6. He had missions in Switzerland and Russia for British Intelligence but when the war was finished he went back to his globe-trotting lifestyle until 1928 when he bought a villa in the South of France and stayed there until his death. The TaipanA Tai-Pan is a Cantonese word for a leader of a Western Trading Company that operated in China in the 19th Century. The Taipan who is the main character of the story is not a very sympathetic chap and I didn’t feel myself warming to him much.The story is set in the days of the British Empire among a colony of ex-pats who spend their time drinking, playing bridge, having affairs and racing horses. As well as being contemptuous of the people they are among.The Taipan is self-satisfied, sociopathic, adulterous, alcoholic, snobbish and racist and ultimately riddled with anxiety. In a short story, we see the fall of a man from the pinnacle of arrogance to become a trembling wreck. It is a nice moral tale of the mighty being humbled by their own faults. He gets what he deserves.My New BookI’ve got a Cthulhu LitRPG horror novel coming out! If you don’t know that that is go look it up at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B084WW6LSK (Amazon)That’s book 2 in the series mind you. Darkworlds Paris. Book one is imaginatively named Darkworlds London. Book 3 was going to be Darkworlds Salem but I need to get my hero across the Atlantic on The Queen Mary in 1927, so book 3 will have to be Darkworlds Atlantic!If you like a bit of Lovecraft horror science fiction cyberpunk Call of Cthulhu then it’s for you!Support Us!Ways to support Tony to keep doing the show: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/classic-ghost-stories-923395 (Share and rate it!) http://bit.ly/2QKgHkY (Buy Tony a coffee) to help with the long nights editing!Become a http://bit.ly/barcudpatreon (Patreon) to get additional stuff and allow the show to go on in the long term. Website http://bit.ly/ClassicGhostStoriesPodcast (Classic Ghost Stories Podcast) MusicBeginning music ‘_Some Come Back’_ is by the marvellous https://theheartwoodinstitute.bandcamp.com/album/witch-phase-four (Heartwood Institute) . The end music is by 'MYUU Bad Encounter'Support the show

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Episode 38: Between Sunset and Moonrise by R H Malden Mar 07, 2020

Show notes

Richard Henry MaldenR H Malden was born in 1879 in England and died in August 1951. He was brought up in East Anglia. He was educated at Eton and King’s College Cambridge and was a long-standing friend of M R James.He spent his career as a churchman, working across England from Salford to Cambridge then Leeds and Ripon and then Wells in Somerset. He married a Yorkshirewoman, the daughter of a clergyman. He was president of the Somerset Archeological Society. It is said he was a well-known sight in Wells as he wandered round in his top hat and from coat. He wrote a good deal and most of his works are on Christian themes, but he did publish a book of ghost stories in 1943: Nine Ghosts.. This book was written as a tribute to his friend M R James who had died in 1936. Malden was one of the circle of the chosen at Cambridge who heard M R James read his stories on Christmas Eve.Because of his connection to M R James, he is often compared with the great man. M R James is probably one of the best writers of ghost stories so the comparison is perhaps unfair, but Malden’s stories are certainly reasonable examples of their genre.Between Sunset and MoonriseBetween Sunset and Moonrise has certain folk horror themes. We have a remote country area where things go on far from the eye of civilisation. The remoteness and backwardness of the area are emphasised by the droves or poor roads that go out to remote, poorly-maintained cottages. There is even a boy who is what they called simple then and he can see supernatural things that others can’t.In fact that very motif was used in the 2019 folk horror movie Midsommar where the boy with the congenital defects interprets the sayings of the gods by drawing rudimentary pictures that the scholars of the tribe need to interpret.Malden was a churchman and his hero is also a clergyman. He goes in duty, on New Year’s Eve to see a woman whom he doesn’t really like and to his surprise sees her reading an obscure part of the Bible that deals with the story of the devil Asmodeus. Whether we are to think that Mrs Vries has entered into some kind of pact with an evil creature, I’m not sure, but the witness boy says that the mysterious ‘they’ had been out to get Mrs Vries. Perhaps because she was an outsider?Most if not all of James’s monsters are not exactly Satanic, whereas this one has more of the character of an adversary of the church, something from the dark books of the Bible. In fact, England is full of these strange spirits that haunt lonely roads and byways. Where I live they are called boggles and can assume all sorts of terrible shapes and shift between them. Call to Action!This week, because of the success of the previous Call to Action, we are growing, fast and the Classic Ghost Stories Podcast is getting 12000 downloads a month. This is fantastic, but it trips us into the next cost category for Podcast Hosting. As this is a big leap up, if you would like the Podcast to keep going, and if you are able and willing, I would like to ask you to consider becoming a monthly http://bit.ly/barcudpatreon (Patreon.)Support Us!Ways to support Tony to keep doing the show: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/classic-ghost-stories-923395 (Share and rate it!) http://bit.ly/2QKgHkY (Buy Tony a coffee) to help with the long nights editing!Become a http://bit.ly/barcudpatreon (Patreon) to get additional stuff and allow the show to go on in the long term. Website http://bit.ly/ClassicGhostStoriesPodcast (Classic Ghost Stories Podcast) MusicBeginning music ‘Some Come Back’ is by the marvellous https://theheartwoodinstitute.bandcamp.com/album/witch-phase-four (Heartwood InstiSupport the show

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