Audio of Weird: The Red Room (H.G. Wells, 1896)
Listen to a classic ghost story from the father of science fiction
Not content with founding pretty much every science fiction sub-genre known to humanity, H.G. Wells (1866-1946) was also a dab hand at writing fantasy and horror short stories.
A painter encounters a devilish critic in The Temptation of Harringay (1895), a sinister body-swap takes place in The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham (1896), paranormal investigators dabble in astral projection in The Stolen Body (1898), Lovecraftian beings observe us through dimensional peepholes in The Plattner Story (1896), childhood fantasy turns to dark obsession in The Door in the Wall (1906) and a weedy phantom is encouraged to pull himself together in The Inexperienced Ghost (1902).1
(The good doctor Rebekah King provides a delightful read-through of The Inexperienced Ghost, which you can listen to right here.)
The Red Room is perhaps Wells’s finest ghost story, first published in 1896 in sci-fi and horror-friendly British periodical The Idler (who also published several of William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder stories).
It’s been much anthologised and was given the Jackanory treatment by Freddie Jones in the first episode of BBC kids’ show Spine Chillers (1980).
It’s the simple yet resounding tale of a young Victorian who dares spend the night in a certain room in (the fictitious) Lorraine Castle - a neat slice of gothic horror, expertly paced and ending on a surprisingly irrational note from an author famed for his rationality.
I’m reading this from one of the first ghost story anthologies I ever owned: Haunting Ghost Stories, first published in 1980 and edited by Deborah Shine with gnarly illustrations by Reg Gray. My favourite bit from the endpapers was the little skeleton hanging from the pendulum of a clock.
I’m pretty sure I got this for Christmas, along with Steve Jackson’s downright satanic Fighting Fantasy gamebook House of Hell (1984) and my long-since treasured cassette of The Ghost Hunter with Stephen Kendall-Lane.
Listen closely and you may hear the creak of an aged spine, mine as well as the book’s.
I’m not a professional audiobook reader, by the way, so apologies for any tongue-tangles, fumbles, pops and crackles that I didn’t have time to edit out.
I’m just giving this a go for the craic.
By the way, this isn’t my regular speaking voice, which usually sounds like that of a distressed chimneysweep. This here’s my posh voice, which I reserve for lodging complaints over the phone and speaking to my betters.
Enjoy and stay weird.
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Wells also foreshadowed the B-movie creature features of the 1950s with the blood-sucking plant of The Flowering of the Strange Orchid (1894), the giant bats of In the Avu Observatory (1894) and the man-eating squid of The Sea Raiders (1896).