Showing results by narrator "Cathy Dobson" in All Categories

Charles Dickens' disturbing story detailing the memoirs of a deranged psychopath.

Elizabeth, a young wife and mother, waits for her husband Walter to come home from the coal mine. She attributes his lateness to him having gone drinking. As time goes on, she goes to look for him and alerts his colleagues. It transpires he has been killed in a pit accident. Elizabeth's mother-in-law helps her to wash the corpse after it is brought home from the mine. The reactions of the two women are in stark contrast - and the experience of laying out the body shows Elizabeth how she and her husband never really knew one another in life.

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.

Edward Frederic Benson (1867-1940) was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, archaeologist, and short story writer, best known for his evocative and beautifully narrated ghost stories. Expiation is a real gem of a ghost story. Two old friends rent a lonely house in an idyllic but remote part of Cornwall. But within a short time of their arrival, they become aware of a mystery about the house.

Edward Frederic Benson (1867-1940) was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, archaeologist and short story writer, best known for his spine-tingling and beautifully written ghost stories. The Room in the Tower is the most famous of these. It describes a horrific recurrent dream of nameless dread, occurring over a period of 15 years, in which the dreamer arrives at a peculiar house inhabited by a sinister silent family, where he takes tea on the lawn and is then shown to the room in the tower where something dreadful, malicious, and evil lurks...

Count Magnus is the story of an amateur scholar travelling in a remote part of Sweden, whose researches lead him to the mausoleum where the infamous Count Magnus is interred. As he researches the history of the long dead count, and learns more about his ill deeds and the mysterious "black pilgimage" from which he returned with something or someone evil...strange and horrifying events begin to overtake him.

Another collection of great classic novellas by superb storytellers, including Robert E. Howard, E. T. A. Hoffman, Edith Wharton, Bessie Kyffin-Taylor, F. Marion Crawford and more....

Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) was a prolific English writer, now best remembered for his science fiction novels and often credited as being the father of science fiction. 'The Valley of Spiders' is the creepy tale of three men who ride into a remote and deserted valley in pursuit of a fleeing woman they are tracking. Before long they discover that the valley holds a terrifying secret...it is the home of a myriad of huge spiders. Will any of them get out of the valley alive?

An enchanting collection of classic stories and rhymes for younger listeners. Warning - you may be tempted to stay up all night listening!

The Tales of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table are of Celtic origin. It is believed that King Arthur lived in the sixth century, just after the Romans withdrew from Britain. Minstrels and storytellers travelled through the land in the centuries after this, telling tales of chivalry and heroism, and the legends of King Arthur grew up across Britain and parts of Europe. Andrew Lang's collection of Arthurian legends is one of the most complete and comprehensive ever written and is more accessible than most.

Billeted away from the trenches for a week, Private Peter Galbraith suddenly finds himself separated from his retreating regiment and marooned in the town of Ypres in the face of the German advance. With the army gone, law and order has broken down in the town and looting and fighting is rife. Private Galbraith takes it upon himself to re-establish the rule of law in the town, and before long he becomes the acting provost and recognized King of Ypres. But he realizes that his conduct is likely to be seen in a different light by his superior officers.

When Gustavus Pulvertoft finds himself saddled with a horse with the power of human speech, he little imagines how quickly he will come a cropper. His courtship of the horse-loving Diana Chetwynd goes swimmingly so long as his talking horse is on good terms with Miss Chetwynd's grey mare... but when their trusty mounts fall out, a series of terrible events ensues which Pulvertoft is powerless to prevent. His determination to get revenge on the horse leads to his ultimate downfall.

"The Argonauts of the Air" is the tale of Monson, an eccentric millionaire with a passion for engineering, who is determined to invent the world's first flying machine. As his attempts run up against endless hurdles and delays, he becomes the laughingstock of London, but this only spurs Monson on to attempt the maiden flight of his marvellous machine.

Herbert George Wells (1866 - 1946) was a prolific English writer best known for his outstanding science fiction stories and novels. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times. 'The Crystal Egg' is a science fiction short story about an antiquarian dealer, Mr. Cave, who discovers that a crystal egg in his shop has strange properties. In certain light conditions it functions as a window on the planet Mars and he is able to observe the Martians and their bizarre cities and machines.

'Wailing Well' is the story of a group of boy scouts camping somewhere on the downs in the south of England who are warned not to go into a particular field which contains a single clump of trees. A local shepherd relates a strange story about the place, which he refers to as Wailing Well. He claims to have seen four skeletal figures walking through the field, three women and one man, all walking towards the clump of trees where the well is. One of the young scouts determines to investigate for himself....

'Good Lady Ducayne' is a sensational tale of a young woman, Bella Rolleston, who secures a job as a paid companion to a very elderly and wealthy aristocratic lady who offers her a handsome salary, a winter travelling on the Italian Riviera and the Italian Lakes and very little to do. It all seems too good to be true. And when Bella learns that the old lady's previous two companions died under mysterious circumstances and she herself is becoming paler and sicker...it does seem as though something sinister is afoot.

Arthur Somers Roche (1883-1935) was an American writer, best known for his fast-paced mystery thrillers. The Club of One-Eyed Men is an extraordinary crime story. The narrator is determined to turn himself into the master of all super-crooks if he can only find the right opportunity. Then suddenly one day in Paris, a strange set of circumstances which cannot be explained but can be no coincidence occur. He sees an American millionaire talking business with a notorious criminal in a Parisian nightclub.

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....

When the new captain takes over command of his first ship for the homeward voyage from the Gulf of Siam, he surprises his crew by taking the first nightwatch himself. While alone on deck he is surprised to find a lone swimmer in the sea who comes on board. The stranger is a murderer escaping justice, but is also eerily an almost exact doppelganger of the captain himself. Not only does he look identical, but the two almost seem to share the same thoughts and secrets. Rather than turn his fugitive-double over to the authorities, the captain hides him in his own cabin.

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction and a close associate of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. 'The Black Cap' is a sketch about a woman leaving her husband and eloping with her lover. But then her lover turns up at the station wearing a piece of totally inexplicable and unacceptable headgear....