In this episode of Small Frights and other delights, I ready two classic stories from the pulp magazine "Weird Tales", H.F. Arnold's The Night Wire and Samuel Barbour Johnson's Far Below. Both are in a similar vein of dark, atmospheric horror.

The Night Wire (10:00) : https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/68555

In the Night Wire, in a skyscraper in a metropolis late at night, strange transmissions come into a radio operator's office from a far away land called Xebico detailing the unraveling of a city by supernatural causes.

Far Below (31:00) : https://archive.org/details/WeirdTalesV34N0119390607/page/26/mode/2up

In Far Below, a journalist visits with a squad of policemen guarding the New York City subway from an army of strange creatures that come out to terrorize the riders of the subway in the small hours of the morning.

Enjoy the stories! Enjoy your life!

In this episode I read one of my own short stories, the Boneyard. I wrote it for a scary short story competition at a local community college, Madison Area Technical College, and it got published in their yearly chapbook.

This story was inspired by my time living in rural Texas. In this story, a farm worker discovers that a strange orphan lamb isn't like the other lambs on the farm.

In this episode we finish off Arthur Machen's Novella "The Great God Pan". Villiers learns the fate of his friend Herbert, contacts Mr. Clarke, and follows a trail of death to the door of a prominent socialite. It's scary! It's twisted! But don't worry it's not that bad.

Link to the text:

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/arthur-machen/short-fiction

Link to weather.gov

https://www.weather.gov/

This is my frog candle. I like it.

https://www.bigdipperwaxworks.com/pure-beeswax-frog-candle-green/

Welcome to the first episode of Small Frights and Other Delights. In this episode I ramble on about why I'm doing the podcast, introduce Arthur Machen and Aubrey Beardsley, and read the first few parts of the Great God Pan by Arthur Machen, one of my favorite horror short stories.

In this story, a mad doctor tries to perform a surgery that will open up the mind of man to the ineffable spiritual world, his confidant reels from the witnessing of the surgery and then plunges back into the world of the occult through the memoirs of a man named Villiers. It's based in London. It's weird. You can imagine the vials and test tubes and damp English nights.

Here are the websites I mention in the episode

Standard eBooks: https://standardebooks.org/

The Great God Pan (Wikipedia) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_God_Pan

Aubrey Beardsley (Wikipedia) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_Beardsley