Into That Darkness Peering: Nightmarish Tales Of The Macabre - Vol. 1&2

Into That Darkness Peering: Nightmarish Tales Of The Macabre - Vol. 1&2
Written by Edgar Allan Poe;

Read by Wayne June
Publisher: AudioBookCase.com

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,” Edgar Allan Poe: The Raven

Edgar Allan Poe has a penchant for murder, insanity and boarding up bodies under floorboards and behind walls. These were my ponderings on my stuffy Northern Line journey.

Listening to these exceptionally well read stories of the ‘Macabre’, took me back to Roald Dahl’s ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ - that early eighties TV series.

I was always sent to bed around the time it was on TV, but I remember creeping into my parents bedroom while they were watching it in the living room, and turning their bedroom telly on really carefully (it was one of those twisty knob ones that made a 'clcking' sound when you turned it on). I never got the whole story with the sound turned off...but i felt rebillious anyhoo!

Wayne June has a timbre to his voice that fits with the spooky, sinister content of Poe’s poetry and short stories. He captures Poe’s rhythmic beats in The Raven, for example, and carry’s us in its gravitational pull to the bitter end.

Poe was a master of selecting words that created mood, and Wayne June underlines this with his reading. The spooky music at the introduction and end of each tale (although even more ‘Tales of the Unexpected’) also create a mournful mood.

Forgiving the ‘old’ language of the 1800s his stories still capture the imagination.  Insantiy is a regular theme, and in, "The Tell-Tale Heart," a man betrays his crime when he thinks he hears the beating heart of the man he has murdered.

I think my favourite tale (or, worst tale? Or, best worst tale…??) is "The Black Cat". Poe loved making his readers very uncomfortable in their skin. Our narrator becomes an alcoholic and thus begins his descent into insanity. He describes himself as an animal lover at the beginning of the tale; thus his describtion of his abuse of the cat and subsequent murder jarred with me. We hear our narrators obvious embarrassment as he describes the alcoholic madness that took over whilst torturing and murdering the poor thing! Even worse, in a rage, he does the same thing to his wife…

If you like a spooky tale, and don’t mind the olde worlde language – you’ll love these audiobooks.

Audiogeist.com



The Heavenfield

Written & read by I G Hume

Published by: TheHeavenfield.com

Price: 0

Following on from audiogeist.com’s post last week on The Heavenfield, the gripping sci-fi thriller podiobook  i stumbled across on twitter…

A team of researchers are trialing ‘The Standing point’, a technology rather like Star Trek’s teleporting technology (‘beam me up Scotty), although, it seems to beam them to a place they really have no concept of. One minute it’s a place similar to ‘Heaven’…then, for reasons we’re still trying to figure out, it’s complete Hell, topped with grotesque and very fast moving demons.

Let me first say that the listening experience of this podio was spot on. I G Hume took on personas (yes, even the women), delivering well rounded characters that I could easily imagine. I liked the quirkiness of the sharply spoken Grace Palmer, Head of Research. She’s am eccentric chain smoker, heavy drinker and keeps calling her newbie team member Tim. His name is Thomas.

Thomas Sullivan is a genuine geek, straight out of college. He’d caught the Base Commander’s attention with academic papers that pointed to genius. He stumbles into the fray of espionage, enlisted as a Theoretician, blushing and stuttering…we never really get to see the outcome of his true potential.

Hume is good at suspense. The team gets stranded in The Heavenfield after an attack on their base. Low on air, and with the hellish red (Eeooww! Dried blood!) dust eating away at their suits – they have to wait until Maunsworth house is back online before they can be ‘teleported’ home. It seems the demons and specters of The Heavenfield want to keep them there though…

When I first started listening to the Heavenfield, I envisaged a guy in his living room reading and recording his own novel (a little like Daniel Bedingfield of the literary world). So saying, I’m sure I caught birds tweeting in the first episode…but this could almost be intentional, as the following episodes resulted in subtle but relevant periphery sounds that underlined the whole experience as a professional one.

On a different note, I did find the story line hard to follow. It took me a while to figure out who Alexi was, and who he was working for. Although, this could be the point of the tale if the ending is anything to go by. Um…sequel perhaps Mr. Hume?

The people he’s working for already have the technology that our team at Maunsworth house is testing, and he sets out to sabotage Standing Point, on a mission to kill Grace Palmer and especially Thomas Sullivan.

I downloaded via iTunes, and got a little confused with which version to download. I imagine the podiobooks recently been updated and spit into Book One and Book Two.

The interactive website is also well worth a visit – treats galore with artwork and t-shirts available to buy, plus biogs of all the characters.

The Partisan’s Daughter

Written by: Louis De Bernieres

Read by: Sian Thomas and Jeff Rawle

Published by: Random House Audiobooks

Pushing play on my CD player, my grip on my stearing wheel loosened as we were introduced to Roza. A Serbian ex prostitute, she's standing on a dark street in Archway near her derelict house. She’s not really waiting for a ‘client’, she’s having a laugh; a fact that made me immediately cynical of her ingenuous personality from the off. Her need to tell stories is compelling; i was constantly waiting for the ‘truth’.

The unfortunate who drives past Roza that night is the dull, shy Chris, a travelling salesman in his mid-forties and married to ‘the great white loaf’. He propositions Roza in a moment of madness, and begins a snowball of unrequited love.

I must add that my disquiet was further stirred by the smooth, Audrey Hepburn-esq voice of actress Sian Thomas, I was expecting a Serbian lilt. What’s more, the first-person narrative of Roza is fluent, very different from the broken English of her initial dialogue.

Jeff Rawles’ voice filled my car with the heavy tedium that was Chris. His was a voice that would be unremarkable say, in a short conversation in a pub over the advantages of blackcurrant in Guinness. But for the short time that he was mulling over his Balkan anomaly (we don’t even know if Roza is her real name) I sympathised with Chris and his bland ‘Englishness’.

Roza spends her days drinking coffee, smoking, and telling stories from her past to shock Chris. Her tale of sleeping with her father, her time at a hostess bar where she was abducted and gang-raped for days by a rogue client and his friend seemed specifically told to hurt Chris.

He’s a bland and dogged character in comparison, and he complains of her obliviousness to his feelings. Although it wasn’t the story of Roza’s upbringing as the daughter of a decorated partisan in Tito's Yugoslavia that intrigued, it was her telling of it. But, why does Roza need to read up on Yugoslavian history at the library?

Chris’s visits become less about the prospect of sex (her quote was £500 which he saves throughout the months in a brown envelope) and more about his infatuation. He wants to sit and listen to her tales, because he needs an excuse to be near her.

The question I put to my car stereo was; is she repelling him so that he never asks her for sex? And although Louis De Berniere’s artful tale kept me riveted, I’ve not drawn a conclusion from the ending; just a sense of pointless loss.

Nicely done.

The Ghost

Written by Robert Harris

Read by Robert Glenister 

Published by Random House Audio

Price: £16.99 

This is a belter of a thriller from the off. The “Ghost” of the title, whose name we are never told, has been drafted in to finish off the memoirs of Adam Lang, a former British Labour prime minister after his predecessor, a long-standing political aide, is found drowned in an apparent suicide. Our ghost doesn’t know anything about politics, a trait he flags up when pitching for the job. He’s much better known for his celebrity biographies.

I laughed out loud when, going through the metal detectors to get to the interview he asks, “Who’re you expecting to bomb you? Random House?”

Rumours abound, of course, that The Ghost, is based on Tony Blair, his wife Cherie, and the former Prime Minister's loyal "gatekeeper" Anji Hunter. Robert Harris knows the Blairs really well, so I do wonder how much truth lies in the characters of Adam and Ruth Lang.

The thing that gripped me most about this thriller is the real questions it raised surrounding British politics. Who was it controlling our puppet prime minister; who persuaded him that it was a good idea to tuck his tail between his legs and cower down to American interests at the expense of our own? WHAT IF THIS BOOK WERE TRUE?

The ghostwriter (who narrates the story) and Adam Lang are ensconced in his publisher’s luxury compound on Martha’s Vineyard to rewrite the memoir started by his predecessor.

Adam Lang is a gifted communicator and former actor, a trait that Robert Glenister cleverly picks up on embellishing Lang’s teeth grating over familiarity with the ghost and his aide, Amelia Bly. His beautiful and bristly wife is intelligent (and very suspicious of Lang’s relationship with Bly) and extremely politically astute.

In the meantime, Richard Rycart, the former Foreign Secretary sacked by Lang and now working as a UN special envoy for humanitarian affairs, accuses his former boss of involvement in war crimes and for facilitating a CIA snatch and the subsequent torture of four British citizens.

The plot is steeped with eyebrow raising twists. I whole heartedly recommend this for both Harris’s clincher of a tale, and Glenister’s storytelling!

Playing for Pizza

Written by John Grisham

Read by Christopher Evan Welch

Published by Random House Audiobooks

Price: £16.99 Random House

Playing for Pizza is about failing American Footballer, Rick Dockery. It's set in Italy, and there’s not a lawyer, murder, kidnapping or Mafioso in the entire plot! Oddly enough, considering it's about American football, there are only a couple of cheerleaders!

Christopher Evan Welch opens with Rick, a quarterback for the Cleveland Browns, in a hospital bed. His soft American twang fits with the story, making our Main Character come alive in the imagination. The whole book is easy on the ear; both with the tone and prose making me reach for disc after disc – even though I haven’t a clue about American Football! I’m actually shocked at how physically dangerous the game is!

Rick’s been severely injured in a tackle whilst snatching defeat from the jaws of victory to become a national “Goat”. Overnight he becomes the most hated player in Cleveland, with picketers outside the hospital (and a standing joke in Denver). He’s duly dropped by Browns, making a job on any other American team out of the question.

By fluke, Rick's agent finds him an opening with a struggling Italian NFL team, the Parma Panthers with an American coach, Sam Russo. Rick doesn’t even know where Parma is and finds the team consisting of local amateurs who have day jobs, and a couple of American pros. Worse still, gone is his ‘stupid thousand dollar’ salary, penthouse and top-of-the-range car. He has to learn to contend with a small flat in town and even smaller car. Even so, the Panthers’ fight hard to in the Italian Super Bowl for the chance to come away as champions, and beat the Bergamo Lions.

During his season in Italy, Rick negotiates a huge learning curve. This being the crux of the story, he realises that there is more to life than Football and a huge salary. He discovers opera, art, and architecture with Livvy Galloway, a frustrated college-student daughter of two warring parents in the middle of a divorce. He falls in love with all of it, especially Livvy.

I’m craving an Italian break now, due to the cultural destinations visited, the mouth watering food descriptions and the beautiful language. This audio read a little like a travel book with heart.