Showing results for "Pied Piper" in Literature & Fiction

In Seattle, they're calling him The Pied Piper - someone who comes in the night and takes children away. To newly promoted police lieutenant Lou Boldt and police psychologist Daphne Matthews, it's clear this isn't about a single lunatic or random kidnappings: these crimes are well orchestrated, well executed, and, most chilling of all, occurring in cities across the country.

This classic legend, rendered in verse and published in 1842 by the masterful British Victorian poet, Robert Browning (when only 30 years old), tells of what happens to the town of Hamelin when its burghers, desperate to rid the town of the rats that were overrunning it, engage a mysterious man dressed in red and yellow, who promises, for a fee, to cleanse the town of the vermin by the magic in the music he can play on his pipe. But when the burghers refuse to pay him the sum he was promised for his service, the piper uses his magic pipe to get even.

With makeup and an affected Elvis pout, Tucson’s Charlie Schmid was a crude parody of a bad-boy heartthrob. In 1964, he still had a hold on girls who’d follow him anywhere. He murdered three of them. It was the dawn of the free-love movement - perfect for a magnetic madman who’d also foreshadow its end a few years later in the malignant charisma of Charles Manson. The inspiration for a classic story by Joyce Carol Oates, Schmid, the most bizarre serial killer of any era, was the epitome of a narcissist flattered into believing he could get away with murder.

The legend of a garishly-dressed piper who uses his musical skills to rid a town of a plague of rats and then lures the town's children into a mysterious and inaccessible realm when denied payment for his services dates back to the Middle Ages. Browning's colorful retelling of the tale first appeared in 1842 in the collection Dramatic Lyrics. As with many of Browning's monologues, the poem's vivid wordplay and jangling rhymes make it an apt vehicle for recitation.

Masterfully read by award-winning narrator Mike Vendetti, travel to the town of Hamelin suffering from a rat infestation, when a piper dressed in multicolored ("pied") clothing appeared, claiming to be a rat-catcher. He promised the mayor a solution to their problem with the rats. The mayor, in turn, promised to pay him for the removal of the rats (according to some versions of the story, the promised sum was 1,000 guilders). The piper accepted and played his pipe to lure the rats into the Weser River, where they all drowned. The rest is a legend enjoyed for centuries.

BBC Radio dramatisations and readings of Browning’s most famous poems, performed by stars including Anton Lesser, Roger Allam and David Tennant, plus two bonus plays Victorian poet Robert Browning was renowned for his evocative dramatic monologues peopled with vivid, morally ambiguous...

Une jeune femme violemment agressée et laissée pour morte par trois monstres sur une plage de la côte du Maine. Un petit village touché par des disparitions multiples et des cérémonies païennes cauchemardesques. Un shérif lugubre et alcoolique, incapable de mettre fin au fléau. Un tueur en série libéré, puis recruté afin de trouver la bête sévissant dans le parc de l’Océan. Une enseignante à la beauté d’Aphrodite qui sacrifie tout pour sauver les siens.

On Walpurgis Nacht, The Satanic Sabbath, The Most Evil night of the year, on the evening prior to the commencement of his interplanetary invasion, a soldier records a letter to a woman to be delivered upon his death, revealing to her that they are bound in life and death in a horrific way.