The Empty House

Tales from another age. Isolation eloquently captured, menace in abundance. A reality to listen to.

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Haunted Nights

a great listen, great narration and a great variation in stories. #bedtime #scarey #cosy #openfire

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4 people found this helpful

A bit hard going, but ok.

Stories included are:

The Empty House: 'An abandoned house whose horrific past is re-enacted for those who dare visit' - my favourite story on the audio book; genuinely unsettling and disturbing.

The Willows: 'A terrifying trip down the Danube river', slow and dull

The Listener: 'A tale of paranoia, mental deterioration and all-consuming feelings of doom', slow and dull

The Wendigo: 'A malevolent half-beast creature who abducts a member of a hunting party' - the hardest story for me to follow, seems to have a lot of 'filler' too long and drawn out with a rather anti-climactic ending.

I found this audio book a struggle, I don't know if it was the narrator or the stories but I kept finding my mind wandering and having to rewind a section to listen again. I may be that both the narrator and stories would have benefited from different material and talent respectively.

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2 people found this helpful

Old fashioned but masterful

These stories are now quite dated but manage to be terrifying. The use of language to evoke atmosphere is brilliant. It's easy to see how these stories have formed the inspiration for much modern horror. The Listeners perhaps inspired the Ring series, and The Willows some Stephen King. The narrator is good but sometimes struggles with foreign and regional accents.

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Beware of the Wendigo!

These are old-fashioned (19th or early 20th century stories) expertly narrated by Hugh Ross, evoking a bygone world of hunters, explorers and mythical creatures. The first story, the Empty House, created an atmosphere of terror but ended rather abruptly, and the explanation had already been given away.
From there on in, though, the ante was upped, and the final story, the Wendigo, was spine-chilling, dealing with the legend of the Wendigo, a spirit or mythical creature of the North American and Canadian wilderness. The Willows, although very long, creates a similar atmosphere of terror, dealing with purely supernatural events that have no rational explanation.
Summary: If you like old-world ghost stories and haven't come across Algernon Balckwood before, give this a go. You won't regret it, though you might not sleep afterwards!

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15 people found this helpful

Struggled through it.

I have listened to a lot of horror books from classical horror tales such as h.p. lovecraft and frankenstein to more modern books such as the exorcist. Sadly I really struggled with the works of Algernon Blackwood, I found them to be neither scary or even compelling. I can not understand why i have been led to belive how they are so highly rated as most of the titles contained within this collection are entirely uneventful. As it stands i can not recommend purchasing these books unless you are already familiar with the authors work, in which case the performance by the narrator was quite good, his speech was clear throughout and used enough variation in accent and tone to differentiate between characters by voice alone.

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4 people found this helpful

Alone in the Dark

There are books that consume you and take you to the heart of darkness. Others are just silly fun about ghosts that go bump in the night. This books is certainly in the former category. In it are stories that take you to weird places but they are so realistic that it’s almost incomparable to anything else I have ever read. “The Willows” and “The Wendigo” were two stories that stayed with me long after I had finished them. Their sense of realistic nature and of the malevolence of its beauty and power stayed with me. Nature can be our friend, but it can be a terrible foe should it choose to see us as such. A powerful foe, a foe that is indifferent to us. Algernon Blackwood wrote some of the best weird tales ever, certainly up there with E. F. Benson and M. R. James. Highly recommend this book to anyone who loves ghostly tales.

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2 people found this helpful

Lovely narrator but extremely boring book.

If you love stories that just waffle on endlesysy (in a flowery but difficult to follow way) and come to abrupt and pointless ends then this is the book for you. If not, maybe give it a miss.

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3 people found this helpful