William Hope Hodgson's "The House Among the Laurels" - Free Release Through the Classic Tales Podcast

By -
Friday's latest installment of Fear in The Classic Tales was William Hope Hodgson's "The House Among the Laurels."  This story is part a chapter from a larger book called Carnacki.  Carnacki is also the name of the lead character, a ghost hunter.  In this story, our hero and his aids must investigate the horrific tales surrounding an Irish mansion. Once the blood begins to drip, people begin to die...

A big shout out to listener Vincenzo Bonitatibus for suggesting the week's author to B.J. Harrison

 Hodgson was quite a character.  For a while, he owned a gym, where he trained cops.  He was also on stage with Houdini at least once, and put the cuffs on the magician.  Later Houdini claimed that Hodgson has purposely sabotaged the cuffs so they were particularly hard to open. 


Hodgson spent much of his youth at sea, first as an apprentice and later as a mate.  His time at sea not only inspired many of his stories, but was also the cause for his interest in fitness.  You see, he was heavily bullied by other seamen, so decided to buff up a bit.

I hope you are enjoying B.J. Harrison's scary tales this month!  But if you need more, please check out Classic Scary Tales, Vol. 1. and enjoy over 15 hours of your favorite frightening writers, such as H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, and Mary Shelly, all narrated by your favorite person!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Download The Classic Tales Direct to iOS devices!

By -
Image
I love The Classic Tales, but I only have an iPad. I’m on the road, and I’d like to download an audiobook for the ride home. Does this sound familiar? Now, with a little help from some friends, you can download any title from The Classic Tales website without a computer. Let’s face it, iPads, iPhones and iPods are great, right? But when it comes to audiobooks and music, Apple doesn’t like you to get your stuff from anywhere else. And so if you try to download an mp3 file, or an m4b audiobook file while using Safari on your iOS device, it will start streaming it in a window. No download options available. Nope. And even if you could download it, iTunes won’t recognize it. Now, with a little finagling, we can set it up so that you can buy an audiobook from The Classic Tales website , download it and play it on your iPad, iPhone or other iOS device. These are the two things we’ve got to do: Download the file and Play it. Now, to do this, we need to pick up a couple apps at t...
Read more

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare

By -
Image
The latest production of The Classic Tales Podcast is an episodic presentation of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, by William Shakespeare – a miniseries in 5 episodes. Hamlet has been my favorite play for many, many years and if I had to point to one work of literature that has turned my casual pursuit of books into a passion for the classics, this is it. When I was a teenager, and a junior in high school, I wanted to take it easy. So, instead of enrolling in Honors English 2, as I could have, I thought I’d take the year off , essentially, and enrolled in the “lower grade” English class. This was a profound misstep. While my friends were reading Great Expectations , I was reading Cold, Sassy Tree . When they studied Shakespeare, I read Mrs. Mike . I have no one to blame but myself, I’m afraid. For my elective reading, I chose Hamlet, and it literally changed my life. I memorized the soliloquies and performed them in drama class. I watched the film productions of Derek Jacobi, Kenneth ...
Read more

Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, from The Arabian Nights - free release through The Classic Tales Podcast

By -
Image
The Arabian Nights originated in the oral folk tales originating from India, Persia (Iran), Iraq, Egypt, and Turkey among others. The original manuscript is now lost, consisting of a ninth-century text translated into Persian called Hazar Afsanah (A Thousand Tales). By the end of the thirteenth century, the principal tales were compiled and written down. The book’s Arabic title means Thousand and One Nights . Over the years, the collections anonymous editors added new tales to justify the title. The French scholar Antoine Galland was the man instrumental in bringing the tales to Western Culture, releasing his collection of Arabian Tales in 1704. The text used for the Classic Tales Podcast releases of the Arabian Nights tales are an English translation by H.W. Dulken, which is based on Galland’s sweeping translation. There are several other remarkable translations to date, perhaps the most notable being Sir Richard Burton’s translation (1885-1888) . The Burton tra...
Read more