Showing results by narrator "Cathy Dobson" in All Categories

Vernon Lee was the pseudonym of Violet Paget (1856-1935), a British writer most famous for her supernatural short stories. She was a leading figure in the aesthetic movement. 'Marsyas in Flanders' is a strange tale of an ancient carving of the crucified Christ - minus its arms and cross - which washes up in the 12th century on a beach in Flanders.

Poe's famous detective story which is credited with inspiring an entire genre. The first case of the celebrated private detective, Dupin. When two women are found murdered in the most gruesome and mysterious circumstances in their apartment in the Rue Morgue, the Parisian police are baffled. Not only is one of the corpses stuffed feet first up a chimney in a room locked from the inside, but the other is hideously mutilated and lying in the yard outside.

W. W. Jacobs (1863-1941) is best known as a writer of humorous stories and the crafter of the most grisly of horror stories. The following four stories belong firmly in the latter category.

The stuff of nightmares! A terrifying collection of stories about haunted rooms, strange beds, terrifying dreams and sleepless nights. Listen at bedtime if you dare!

The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague. Never more so than in this collection of 30 weird and macabre tales.

The much loved chronicler and observer of all that is unusual, John Timbs describes a selection of the oddest sights and anecdotes of the 18th and 19th centuries.

A vintage collection of some of the greatest short stories ever written

Mrs Henrietta Dorothy Everett (1851-1923) was one of the most renowned Victorian horror writers, often publishing her spine-tingling tales under the pen name Theo Douglas. The Death Mask is one of the weirdest and most chilling of her short stories. It tells the tale of a widower who had made a peculiar promise to his late wife on her deathbed. At face value it had seemed such a simple thing... just to cover the dead woman's face with a particular cloth.

Giles is out of work and deep in debt after being cheated by a business partner. He is desperate to find a way to support his wife Eleanor and his daughter Anna, but he has no obvious marketable skills or talents. His one wealthy relative lends him tiny sums, and is so unpleasant over it that Giles scarcely dares borrow more. Then one day, Giles finds a wallet packed with banknotes in the back of a taxi.

Francis Marion Crawford (1854-1909) was an American writer famed for his classic weird and fantastic stories. One of his most famous tales is 'The Screaming Skull' - a terrifying ghost story based on a true horror legend of a hideous murder which is avenged from beyond the grave.

Lettice Galbraith is as mysterious as the stories she wrote. She appeared on the literary scene in 1893 with a rash of short stories and one novel, published another story four years later, and then disappeared without trace. Yet despite the brevity of her presence on the literary stage, her supernatural stories have remained popular to this day. "The Missing Model" is a strange tale - a cross between a ghost story and a crime mystery.

One of Stacy Aumonier's best-loved short stories, telling the story of a surprising evening with Colin St Clair Chasseloup: "the kind of man who always looked as though he had just had a cold bath, done Swedish drill, and then passed through the hairdresser’s on his way to your presence." Chasseloup and the narrator are dragged along by their wives to a concert which interests neither of them. Both men make their escape from the concert, and decide to go for a drink, forgetting that it is a Sunday night and the pubs are closed.

O. Henry was the pen name of William Sydney Porter (1862-1910), an American writer of outstanding short stories, known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization, and surprise endings. In The Cop and the Anthem, a New York tramp, Soapy, is determined to be arrested and sent to jail on 'The Island' for three months during the coldest part of the winter. But it proves astoundingly difficult to get arrested...however hard he tries, no policeman seems inclined to take him into custody.

On the surface, Immensee is a simple love story, of an old man, Reinhardt Werner, remembering Elisabeth, the lost sweetheart of his youth, who married his best friend, Erich. Reinhardt had neglected their relationship when he had gone away to university, and after two years when he failed to write to Elisabeth, she gave up waiting and accepted a marriage proposal from Erich, a wealthy young farmer with a fine house on the shores of the Immensee.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was the pre-eminent figure in late nineteenth century detective fiction. A physician by profession, he soon found such popularity as a writer of detective stories that his writing was far more profitable than his medical practice. "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle" is a classic Sherlock Holmes story in which the Commissionnaire brings Holmes a hat and a goose which have been dropped by a man on the street, during an attempted mugging.

An engaging collection of short stories from some of the world's greatest racconteurs. Included are 'My Favorite Murder' by Ambrose Bierce; 'The Black Poodle' by F. Anstey; 'The Doll’s House' by Katherine Mansfield; 'The Monkey's Paw' by W. W. Jacobs; 'The Mortal Immortal' by Mary Shelley; 'A Curious Dream' by Mark Twain; 'Regret' by Kate Chopin; 'One Thousand Dollars' by O. Henry; 'The Dreamer' by W. W. Jacobs; 'The Fly' by Katherine Mansfield; 'The Inconsiderate Waiter' by J.M. Barrie; and 'The Purloined Letter' by Edgar Allan Poe.

Seven short story masterpieces by the acknowledged master of the short story, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: 'The Parasite', 'The Mystery of Sasassa Valley', 'The Man with the Watches', 'A Pastoral Horror', 'The Slapping Sal', 'Lot No. 249','The Ring of Thoth'.

Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne (1866-1944) was a British writer of popular adventure fiction and fantastic literature. "The Mummy of Thompson-Pratt" is a strange supernatural tale of Gargrave, a young egyptologist at Cambridge University who manages to reanimate the 3,000-year-old mummy of Menen-Ra via the man he has identified as a direct descendent of the ancient egyptian. The descendent is the young gad-about-town Thompson-Pratt.

Amyas Northcote (1864-1923) was an English writer and a contemporary of M. R. James. He is best known for his ghost stories. 'The Young Lady in Black' is an eerie tale of a woman who died, leaving one crucial task in her life unfinished. The tale poses at the outset the question of whether the dead can return to earth to bring incomplete tasks to their conclusion...and the weird circumstances of this story appear to confirm the theory.

The Baroness recounts a hunting story with a twist. Instead of a fox, the quarry turns out to be an escaped hyena, which adopts her and Constance Broddle and leads them to cover up a heinous killing. Hector Hugh Munro at his most macabre.