Classics Literature Horror

Regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story, Rudyard Kipling was one of the most popular writers of prose and poetry in the late 19th and 20th century and awarded the Noble Prize for Literature in 1907. Listen to one of his well-known works.

Dr. Henry Jekyll, fascinated by the dichotomy of good and evil, no longer wants to inhibit his dark side. He concocts a potion to create the alter ego of Mr. Edward Hyde. With the burden of evil placed on Hyde, Jekyll can now take pleasure in his immoral, nefarious fantasies - free of conscience and guilt. It's when Hyde turns to murder that Jekyll realizes how monstrous his impulses are and how hard they are to suppress.

The gothic tale of Frankenstein and his construction of a human being who runs amok has, with the help of numerous films, become one of the most vivid horror stories. But Mary Shelley's original novel, written in 1816, dealt more sympathetically with "the daemon," showing how an initially beneficent creature is hammered into a daemon by the way he is treated. Her ideas, and her dramatic but poignant story, is brought to life in this sound dramatization.

In 1827, Arthur Gordon Pym stowed away on the brig Grampus, set for the South Seas. Thus begins a saga of mutiny and butchery, recapture of the vessel by a loyal few, subsequent shipwreck and sufferings, and deliverance.

When modern-day occultist Aaron Pace discovers the secrets of inter-dimensional travel via a mystical pathway called The Labyrinth, he wastes no time in exploring a multitude of strange new worlds and alternate realities. But then, Aaron finds himself trapped in the most bizarre dimension of all - a place where dinosaurs coexist with giant robots, where cowboys fight reptilian lizard people, and where even the grass can kill you. This is a world populated by the missing and the disappeared, a world where myth is reality and where the extinct is reborn.

William Wymark Jacobs (1863 - 1943) was an English short-story writer. "The Monkey's Paw" is a classic horror story whose title refers to a shrunken monkey’s paw that is said to have the power to grant its possessor three wishes.

Halloween Night, 1954. A young, film-obsessed scriptwriter has just been hired at one of the great studios. An anonymous investigation leads from the giant Maximus Films backlot to an eerie graveyard separated from the studio by a single wall. There he makes a terrifying discovery that thrusts him into a maelstrom of intrigue and mystery - and into the dizzy exhilaration of the movie industry at the height of its glittering power.

Gillian Bellaver's family is one of the wealthiest in the world. Robin Sandza's father Peter is a government assassin. The two teenagers seem to have nothing in common. Yet they are spiritual twins, possessing a horrifying psychic energy that threatens humanity. While dangerous and fanatical men vie for the secrets of their awesome power, Peter Sandza, using all the ruthless skills of his trade, makes a final desperate effort to save them.

Meet Mookie Pearl. Criminal underworld? He runs in it. Supernatural underworld? He hunts in it. Nothing stops Mookie when he’s on the job. But when his daughter takes up arms and opposes him, something’s gotta give....

A collection of short... stories by W W Jacobs. Serpents, skinflints, skivers, suitors and sundry sailors take the foreground in these stories about the East End of London and the mythical village of Claybury at the turn of the century.

Ebenezer Scrooge is mean and unpleasant. He dislikes people and Christmas especially but on this particular Christmas Eve he’s visited by the ghost of his business partner Jacob Marley and the spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come. As Ebenezer sees the effects he’s had on people’s lives, he is transformed.

Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories is a collection of shorter works on the strange and the macabre, first published in 1914, two years after Stoker's death. The title story "Dracula's Guest" is believed to be the deleted first chapter of Stoker's masterpiece, Dracula. The other nine stories like "The Squaw", "The Judge's House", and "The Burial of the Rats" rank very high among classic tales of horror.

Washington Irving was an American author of the early 19th century. He is best known for his short stories, with his two most famous being "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip van Winkle".

For a century Bram Stoker's Dracula has reigned supreme as the undisputed masterpiece of horror writing. We have all grown up under the shadow of the elegant Count, at once an attractive, brutal and erotic creature of the night. The gothic tale of Frankenstein and his construction of a human being which runs amok, has, with the help of numerous films, become one of the most vivid horror stories.

Few ghost stories are as chilling as the ones written by Victorian writers. Featuring work by H.G. Wells, Edith Wharton, F.G. Loring and Florence Marryat, this second volume of eight enduring stories, some well-known, others less familiar, transport you to a cosy fireside to hear tales of disembodied voices, haunted objects and unknown entities lurking in the shadows cast by candlelight.

This triumphant final volume of Spinechillers begins with Doug Bradley's personal guide to the writers and the history of the stories. M. R. James' classic "Number 13" starts off this volume with a mystery about a disappearing and reappearing hotel room, can you guess the room number? Story two is the tale of a cat that can not only talk, but spills secrets that should have been truly left behind. Next, we present one of the most famous stories by H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu".

Volume ten launches with Doug Bradley's well-researched insight into the stories and their authors. This is followed by HP Lovecraft's evocative tale of exploration, "The Strange High House in the Mist". Next we hear Ambrose Bierce's truly chilling "A Diagnosis of Death", and Jeffery Combs reads Edgar Allan Poe's classic revenge tale, "The Cask of Amontillado".

Award winning narrator Mike Vendetti reads The Mask of the Red Death by Edgar Allen Poe, a Gothic short story that originally appeared in Graham's magazine in May of 1882. This short story later appears as The Masque of the Red Death. The Red death is fictitious, but it is likely that the disease was inspired by tuberculosis (or consumption, as it was known then), since Poe's wife, Virginia, was suffering from the disease at the time the story was written.

One of the world's most famous intellectual ghost stories, The Turn of the Screw is a haunting tale of suspected supernatural possession. A governess at a country house claims that Miles and Flora, two orphaned children in her care, are being controlled by spirits for some evil purpose. No one else can see the ghosts, and the children themselves are silent. Are they being dominated by spectral forces, or are they hiding something? Is the governess simply paranoid, or is something else going on?

"La Lettre volée" est une nouvelle policière d'Edgar Allan Poe. Elle met en scène Auguste Dupin, qui inspirera le personnage de Sherlock Holmes. La sagacité de Dupin permettra-t-elle de remettre la main sur la lettre compromettante que la police a vainement cherchée ?