Showing results by narrator "Cathy Dobson" in All Categories

Edward Frederic Benson (1867 - 1940) was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, archaeologist and short story writer, best known as the true master of the gothic ghost story. "The Step" tells the bizarre and terrifying tale of a British money-lender in Alexandria who is aware of uncanny footsteps following him as he walks home from his club at nights. Initially he ignores the footsteps... then he plucks up courage to challenge the invisible follower...

English novelist and journalist Wilfrid Ewart (1892-1922) survived the battlefields of the First World War only to die a few years later in Mexico City where near midnight, he stepped out onto his hotel balcony to observe the New Year's festivities and was killed by a stray bullet fired by a reveler below. This is Ewart's firsthand account of his first visit to the trenches in February 1915.

A wonderful collection of classic stories on the theme of love. A must-listen for the incurable romantic.

A fascinating collection of travellers' tales, featuring weird innkeepers, ghouls and ghosts, robbers and murderers, card sharpers and confidence tricksters, dead bodies in odd places....the very thing for anyone busy planning a vacation this year....

Six of Wilkie Collins' best short stories: "The Dead Hand", "The Devil's Spectacles", "Major Namby", "Nine O'Clock", "A Terribly Strange Bed", and "My Black Mirror".

Henry Lawson's poignant tale of a woman bringing up her four children alone in the Australian outback. When her family is threatened by a venomous snake that has invaded their home, she (with the help of Alligator, the family's dog-of-all-breeds) must find a way to defend her children.

"A Witch in the Peak" tells the story of a moneylender trying to recover a debt from an old woman who has been recently widowed. She throws him out of her house with a curse...and what happens next terrifies the man almost to death.

In the macabre tale The Other Side, Stenbock explores the werewolf theme in the sinister setting of a village on the edge of a stream. On the side where the village is, everything is peaceful and pleasant. But on the other side, where the forest is, there are werewolves, witches, and other sinister beings. When the young boy Gabriel is tempted to cross the brook to pick a beautiful and mysterious blue flower, he finds himself in a beautiful but terrible nightmare in which he is in the thrall of werewolves and other mysterious inhuman beings.

Hector Hugh Munro, who wrote under the pseudonym "Saki" tells the tale of a modern werewolf. "There is a wild beast in your woods" observes the artist Cunningham to his friend van Cheele. It turns out that Cunningham is right. The next day, van Cheele finds a naked feral child in the woods, who speaks in a very disturbing way about eating flesh and hunting four-footed at night. Strangest of all is an uncanny remark about having eaten child's flesh recently.

A brilliant and humorous short story by Wilkie Collins, in which an elderly lady, whose Victorian sensibilities on morals and propriety are finely honed, finds herself living next door to Major Namby, the ultimate neighbour from hell.

A remarkable short story by the Nobel Literature Prize winner W. B. Yeats, steeped in Irish magic and folklore. When Red Hanrahan, the itinerant schoolmaster, drops into a remote barn where Irish farm labourers are drinking and singing, he receives a message from his sweetheart to make haste to her. Her mother has died and she must marry at once or be turned out of her home. Red Hanrahan gets up to start immediately, but a strange old man sitting by the door delays him by starting a game of cards with him.

A fabulous collection of stories about the fabulously rich, the grindingly poor, sudden wealth, odd inheritances, greed and generosity.

A scintillating collection of tales with unexpected endings.

Be careful what you wish for. W.W.Jacob's famous horror story about the monkey's paw, a talisman which has had a spell cast on it, enabling three people each to have three wishes... which come true with devastating consequences.

Five classic examples of the sheer comic genius of Mark Twain. "The One Million Pound Bank Note", "The McWilliamses and the Burglar Alarm", "The Stolen White Elephant", "Cannibalism in the Cars", and "The Awful German Language".

When a passing magician tells the old Bee-Man of Orn that he has at some time been transformed from another state, he sets off to discover his own origins. Was he formerly a nobleman? A dragon? A giant? After much searching and many adventures, where his faithful bees help him, he finally discovers the truth. And it is not what either he or the magician expected....

First published in 1911, Katherine Mansfield's collection In a German Pension was inspired by her extended stay in a spa town in Bavaria in 1909, during which she suffered a miscarriage. The collection brought her instant fame and popularity as a short story writer, particularly as her amusing - though less than favourable - caricatures of the Germans were very popular at that time.

When the villainous Mr. Hyde embarks on a series of heinous crimes in London, he proves elusive to the authorities. What is more puzzling is the peculiar last will and testament drawn up by the mild mannered and amiable scientist, Dr. Jekyll, leaving everything he owns to the disreputable Mr. Hyde in the case of his own death or disappearance. As Robert Louis Stevenson's tale unfolds from his masterly pen, the listener is drawn into the mystery and waits with bated breath for the denouement. Gripping!

When a stranger turns up at Shepherd Fennel's party, held in honour of his daughter's christening, he is welcomed and treated to home-brewed mead, a pipe and tobacco and a seat by the fire. When a second, altogether more sinister stranger arrives, he too is welcomed, although he makes rather too free with the host's liquor and sings a song revealing his terrible secret. When a third stranger arrives in the midst of the second stranger's song and taking one look into the room, flees in terror, the guests are mystified.

When the young bank clerk Charlie Mears comes up with an innovative idea for a new story, he has no notion just how amazing his tale is. Inspired by dreams which are memories of former lives, he takes us back to the vivid and brutal world of ancient Greece. But Charlie's own literary skill is not equal to the task of writing his novel. His friend must take on the challenge of extracting the finest tale in the world from the reluctant and ever-distracted brain of the young clerk.