Just had to share this today : The Bite Sized Audio version of Frank Cowper's 'Christmas Eve on a Haunted Hulk'...
I quite like Simon Stanhope's
Bitesized Audio Classics, but these days prefer Jasper L’Estrange’s,
EnCrypted Horror channel. I’m picky with my voices and narration style, and the narrator of this channel suits my ears perfectly. (Although - a warning to
@ramonmercado and any others who hail from the Land of Saints and Scholars - both Stanhope and L'Estrange's Irish accents would get them kicked out of a pub up Kilburn High Road, never mind Dublin.)
He is also a great curator of tales; I considered myself pretty familiar with the genre, but there are many stories in his back catalogue that I’d never come across. I’m a big fan of E F Benson and Hugh Walpole (the latter ridiculously neglected these days) and I was first drawn to the channel by his telling of some of their works.
One thing I’ve noticed, listening to his readings, is how an average tale can be completely transformed by a good telling – and that, if the written word in story form is simply an extension of the ancient process of verbal storytelling, then maybe the ghost story, being so often lifted out of its written form by the addition of the human voice, is the best modern example of this.
Although it will be something of a matter of taste, I think the following is a good example of that latter point – at least for me. Although well-written, I suspect I would have found the following a little
meh, and possibly - in its denouement - a bit ridiculous, if I’d read it from the page. But in spoken form, it totally works for me (and actually, I do like the very early description of the way some houses immediately make our hackles rise: 'Emanated antagonism' is a phrase I've filed in my mental glossary for future use):
Also I should maybe point out that he narrates some of his own original stories - and the ones I've listened to are actually really very good.
