A full reading of the 10,000 word “Out of the Aeons” by H. P. Lovecraft, one of his best ghost-written tales and with the best reader that I could find offering it for free online. It’s a May 2018 reading by Ian Gordon.

The first half is Lovecraft doing Lovecraft-by-numbers for a revision client, but the second half is excellent. To fully enjoy the story, it helps to know the historical context. While today archaeology is rarely a topic for newspapers, and thus all the press palaver in “Out of the Aeons” may seem jarringly absurd to the modern reader, in the 1930s archaeology was front-page news.

The reading is delivered rather too fast for me, and is also a bit sibilant in high-response headphones. As an MP3 download, in the AIMP player a slower speed of O.92 is ideal. This speed setting also deepens the voice, moving the reading rather nicely from ‘peeved professor’ toward ‘Wayne June’ and the Bass-Boost slider can also increase this effect a little. The graphic equaliser settings for removing the sibilance are…