Showing results by narrator "Cathy Dobson" in All Categories

The "Red Death" had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal - the redness and the horror of blood. To avoid the terrible plague which is devastating his kingdom, Prince Prospero locks himself with 1000 revellers in his castle and holds one hedonistic party after another. For months they celebrate their crazed feasts, until one night a stranger appears at the festivities... a stranger who strikes fear into the hearts of all present. Terrifying!

A glittering collection of classic short stories. 1. "The Hoop" by Fedor Sologub; 2. "Miracles" by Barry Pain; 3. "In a Far-off World" by Olive Schreiner; 4. "The House of Cobwebs" by George Gissing; 5. "A Dream of Wild Bees" by Olive Schreiner; 6. "A Very Black Business" by Ernest Bramah; 7. "The Missing Years" by Barry Pain; 8. "The Pig and Whistle" by George Gissing; 9. "A Soothing Dream" by Fedor Sologub; 10. "Life’s Gifts" by Olive Schreiner...and many more.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1822-1881) was Russia's greatest mystic who wrote of the contest between the rebellious uncertain human and the mystery of divine omnipresence which is revealed to the enlightened in the midst of life's bitterest wrongs and suffering. His work is defined by a pity and compassion which shines from all his writing.

Invited to a ball at the Ministry of Public Instruction where her husband works, Mathilde is in despair about how to look the part. She manages to persuade her husband to give her 400 francs for a new dress. But she also would like some jewellery to complete the outfit. Although their budget cannot stretch to this, Mathilde is able to borrow a diamond necklace from an old schoolfriend who is wealthy. But while she dazzles everyone at the ball, disaster is waiting in the wings...

Ellis Parker Butler (1869-1937) was an American author of more than 30 books and more than 2,000 stories and essays. He is best known for his famous short story "Pigs Is Pigs", in which a bureaucratic stationmaster insists on levying the livestock rate for a shipment of two pet guinea pigs, which soon start proliferating exponentially.

One of the hobbies of Charles Lindley Wood, 2nd Viscount Halifax, was the collection of gruesome tales of the supernatural. These stories were told to him by friends, acquaintances and sent to him by strangers, and he duly recorded them in a book over the course of his long life - he lived to be 94. This is the complete collection in one volume.

A creepy collection of 50 classic ghost, horror and mystery stories which will keep you up all night. 1. "The Well" by W. W. Jacobs; 2. "This Is All" by Barry Pain; 3. "The Beast with Five Fingers" by W. F .Harvey; 4. "The Reticence of Lady Anne" by Saki; 5. "The End of a Show" by Barry Pain; 6. "The Dabblers" by W. F. Harvey; 7. "The Room in the Tower" by E. F. Benson; 8. "August Heat" by W. F. Harvey; 9. "The Idiot" by Arnold Bennett; 10. "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe...and many more.

A gripping collection of classic stories in which the central figures are highly dangerous female characters - ranging from the creepy and unsettling to the utterly terrifying.

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet and novelist. The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat is one of Kipling's rare humorous stories. A group of friends out for a motor jaunt find themselves up on a trumped up speeding charge exacerbated by some outrageously insulting sarcasm from a country town magistrate. The group pit their ample wits and resources to exact their extraordinary revenge....

O. Henry was the pen name of William Sydney Porter (1862-1910), an American writer. O. Henry's short stories are loved for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization, and surprise endings. The Ransom of Red Chief is a tale of a kidnapping. A couple of desperados abduct the 10-year-old son of the richest man in a village in the Deep South. But the pair soon discover that they have taken on far more than they had bargained for.

A quartet of short stories by the British master of the macabre, Hector Hugh Munro, better known under his pseudonym “Saki”. This collection brings together four of his most macabre tales, all of which will surprise the listener with an uncanny twist at the end.

Adeline Virginia Woolf (January 1882-1941) was an English writer and one of the preeminent modernists of the 20th century. Her stories often appear as streams of consciousness as the writer's attention is drawn by things around her, memories and insights which bubble up in her brain and interruptions from the outside world. Includes 'A Haunted House', 'The Mark on the Wall', 'The String Quartet' and 'Kew Gardens'.

Margaretha Geertruida Zelle (1876 – 1917), better known by the stage name Mata Hari, was a Dutch exotic dancer who was convicted of being a spy and executed by firing squad in France during the first World War. Sir Basil Home Thomson, KCB (1861 – 1939) was a British intelligence officer, police officer, prison governor, colonial administrator, and writer.

Harry Houdini's greatest escape ever. While visiting Cairo as a tourist, Houdini and his wife are shown around the pyramids by a mysterious and slightly sinister guide who has a strange hollow voice and looks like an old pharaoh. What starts as a strange traveller's adventure to witness a duel at midnight on the summit of one of the pyramids, turns into a nightmare as Houdini is seized, tied up and lowered on a rope far into the bowels of the earth to an unknown tomb where the oldest and most sinister of the Egyptian Pharaohs dwell....

A spine-chilling collection of fantastical and enchanting classic short stories. 'The Wolf Book' by Henry Chapman Mercer; 'Absolute Zero' by Morgan Robertson; 'An Uncommon View of It' by W. C. Morrow; 'The Baumoff Explosive' by William Hope Hodgson; 'Absolute Evil' by Julian Hawthorne; 'The Dolls' Castle' by Henry Chapman Mercer; 'The Legend' by Edith Wharton; 'A Tropical Horror' by William Hope Hodgson; 'Castle Valley' by Henry Chapman Mercer; 'Passing of a God' by Henry S. Whitehead.

New Zealand-born Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction and a close associate of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. 'The Woman at the Store' is a sinister tale about a woman living at a remote farm and general store in New Zealand with her small daughter and sheepdog...and a dark secret....

"The Door in the Wall" is the strange supernatural tale of a young boy who finds a door in a wall which leads to a beautiful magical garden full of wonderful people, animals and flowers. The rest of his life is spent searching for the door and the magical world again...but the door reveals itself again only at the most inconvenient moments, when he cannot spare the time to go through it. Until one night, finally, he finds the door again and goes back through....

William Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was an English novelist, playwright, and author of short stories. Mad Monkton is a bizarre ghost story. It is said that a strain of hereditary madness blights the Monkton family, heirs to the huge domain of Wincot Abbey. Rumours in the neighbourhood are that Alfred, the youngest scion, has inherited this insanity. His odd behaviour certainly points that way. Alfred is engaged to his childhood sweetheart, Ada Elmslie.

The Balloon Hoax was first published in The Sun newspaper in New York in 1844. Originally presented as a true story, it detailed European Monck Mason's trip across the Atlantic Ocean in only three days in a hot air balloon. The story turned out to be a hoax and the paper published a retraction two days later (rumoured to also have been written by Poe himself) admitting the deception.The story ignited a fever of excitement in New York: Poe himself claimed that the Sun building was "besieged" by people wanting copies of the newspaper.

A wonderful anthology of fifteen of the great classic Novellas. 1. Immensee by Theodor Storm 2. The Jew's Beech Tree by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff 3. The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad 4. The Withered Arm by Thomas Hardy 5. Mad Monkton by Wilkie Collins 6. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson 7. The Lifted Veil by George Eliot 8. England my England by D. H. Lawrence