Pure Evil is one of our greatest fears. No appeals to reason, no pleas of mercy or forgiveness will have the slightest impact on the mind of the oppressor. These Evil entities, surely we can’t name them as beings, include all sorts of monsters, demons, devils, vampires and other assorted ghouls that care little about the fate of you or I.1 - Essence of Evil - Tales of Monsters, Demons, Devils, Vampires & more2 - The Call of Cthulhu - Part 1 by H P Lovecraft3 - The C...

Howard Phillips Lovecraft is among the greatest American masters of fantasy and the supernatural.Born in 1890, a native of Providence, Rhode Island, his health was uncertain from childhood and he led a sheltered early life. His semi-invalidism enabled him to read omnivorously, and as a shy imaginative child he began to invent what would in his adult life become a whole macabre fantastic world of his own, peopled by creatures out of his own weird imagination.As an adult he w...

Pure Evil is one of our greatest fears. No appeals to reason, no pleas of mercy or forgiveness will have the slightest impact on the mind of the oppressor. But in this volume our authors are rather more spiteful that we could at first imagine. Here they blight the lives of characters with Curses, Necromancy, Dark Magic and other assorted ghouls that care little about the fate of you or I.1 - Essence of Evil - Tales of Curses, Necromancy, Dark Magic & More - An Introduction2...

Two novels by the award-winning Canadian writer Carol Shields, dramatised for BBC RadioCarol Shields was one of Canada’s most renowned contemporary authors. Often compared to Jane Austen, her deft, witty and compassionate works depicting the everyday lives of ordinary people won her numerous literary honours. Included here are adaptations of her Pulitzer Prize-winning tour de force, The Stone Diaries, and her final novel Unless, which was nominate...

Literature is a world of words and wonder, able to take us on almost unimaginable journeys from the wild and fantastic to the grind and minutiae of life.An author’s ideas are his building blocks, his architecture of the mind, building a structure on which all else will rest; the narrative, the characters, the words - those few words that begin the adventure.In this series we look at some of our leading classic authors across two genres: the short story and the poem. In this...

BBC Radio drama adaptations of two action-packed adventures by James Fenimore CooperA founding father of American literature, James Fenimore Cooper was one of America's first professional novelists, and a pioneer of both the Western and the historical romance. Included here are his 1826 masterpiece The Last of the Mohicans and his 1821 classic The Spy, widely considered the world's first espionage novel.The Last of the Mohicans...

Science fiction is in many ways positive, uplifting and a vision of where we are headed. But in this volume our classic authors including Lovecraft, Wells, Hawthorne and others reveal its darker cousin; Horror. Now these malevolent terrors have made up their minds that blending themselves with Science Fiction might make their impact even more awful and frightening for us to bear.1 - Classic Sci-Fi Stories - An Introduction2 - The Call of Cthulhu - Part 1 by H P Lovecraft

Scientists are only interested in facts. Short story writers are only interested in fiction and how it can change one set of circumstances to another. Experiments in words may be common to both but when the scientist is our protagonist the journey can suddenly become quite disturbing.Join H P Lovecraft, Arthur Conan Doyle, Nathaniel Hawthorne and many others as they put scientists into the driving seat of stories that often have surprising outcomes.1 - Stories with The Scie...

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere.In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?The theme ...