Halloween comes back, at least the scary tales.

I was working late tonight and was looking for some free audio fiction, specifically for Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat and I stumbled onto a very cool podcast.  Widget Walls runs a podcast at Needcoffee.com, and for the month of October, he ran a series called 32 Days of Halloween, where he ran stories of horror every day of the month.  Here I thought I was being cool with 8 days of Oct-TUBE-er Fest (9 days actually).  And Widget wasn't just linking to shots on YouTube; he was narrating and editing the stories for the podcast, every day.  He is a talented actor, and has a rich, but natural style of reading.

"What are the stories?" you ask. 

Well, Widget provided a treasure trove of Poe, featuring the stories/poems of "The Raven", "The Black Cat", "The Conqueror Worm" (for which he also provided video of him reading this from his cell phone at an open mic near Poe's grave site), "The Masque of the Red Death", "The Cask of Amontillado", "Ulalume: A Ballad",  "Hop-Frog", "The Premature Burial", and "The Fall of the House of Usher".

Other stories provided were: "The Music of Erich Zann", "The Cats of Ulthar", and "Hebert West, Re-animator" (in six parts) by H.P. Lovecraft; Chapter 10 of Mary Shelley's Frankenstien; "A Ghost Story" by Mark Twain;  "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll; "Porphyria's Lover" by Robert Browning; "A Dream" by Franz Kafka (recently translated from German); and several of Widget's own original stories from his website Something Else.

I don't know what I will think of the podcast for here on, but the 32 days of Halloween was a 100% Win
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As long as I'm promoting horror stories and podcasts, also go check out Psuedopod for Something There Is by Joe Nazare, a fitting sequel to Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado"; Escape Pod for Infestation by Garth Nix, a battle with hi-tech alien vampires and an unexpected religious twist; and the Drabblecast for The Great Old Pumpkin by John Aegard, which answers the question "What if Linus found what he was looking for?"