Liverpool Sound and Vision has a positive review of a production of a radically re-worked adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness”. No link, but a forum comment I found fully explains what it is. It’s a…

2019 audio drama, adapted in eight parts by Julian Simpson from the story by H P. Lovecraft. Henry Akeley has vanished from his home near Rendlesham Forest, and the podcasters investigate. Updated to the modern day, transplanted to England, and converted to an audio drama, but essentially rewritten from scratch

It doesn’t appear to be online, but Miskatonic University Podcast interviewed the maker.

New on YouTube, “Who The Hell Is Lovecraft?”, a 15 minute explainer for the clueless. Filmed ‘on location’ and with a clear narrator and some production values, a newbie might do a lot worse if they knew nothing at all about the man.

New on YouTube, an audio reading by ‘thehashisheater’ of several Lovecraft letters. Being “The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft & Clark Ashton Smith: The First Three Letters From Lovecraft”.

Also on YouTube, a new hour-long S.T. Joshi Interview.

Even more free audio in the form of LibriVox’s new Halloween 2023 Short Ghost and Horror Collection 070 includes R.E. Howard and 2 x H.P. Lovecraft, among others.

And finally, spotted on Honest Abe’s site… a 2023 ‘inspired by Lovecraft’ vinyl L.P. Definitely not free audio, at a hefty $61.

New on Librivox, for free and public domain, the audiobook for Incredible Adventures (1914) by Algernon Blackwood.

A scanned copy of Incredible Adventures is already available.

A British thesis holds a New Age review of the period, in passing…

[New Age, 6 July (1911), IX: 10, page 2. The New Age magazine discussed] the poetic failure to do justice to mystical subject matter [and stated it was] a symptom of all ‘transitional’ literature attempting to capture and represent the essence of the unseen. A review primarily of Algernon Blackwood’s Incredible Adventures (1914), but drawing on other comparable writers articulates the problem that the world created by Blackwood’s fiction is in constant flux: it is an ‘incalculable world’ such as the ‘logical mind of man, the mind of words, can have no intelligent contact’. Blackwood’s world remains alien to the reviewer of his fiction because no language, and by implication genre, has been found by which to adequately express the significance and substance of the unseen world. Hitherto a fantasy or metaphorical space in fiction, the unseen world was now being charted and co-opted by, for example, the life sciences and the sciences of the mind and a medical language being expanded with which to describe its structures and their meanings. In light of science’s demystification of occult psychical space, Blackwood’s magical composition is too vague for the modern reader and can carry therefore no weight of narrative meaning; the reliance for narrative drive on the tension between ‘white or black’ magic is further made irrelevant by the popular view of psychiatry as having triumphed over demonology.

Lovecraft, however, fully approved of the book’s subtlety and atmosphere…

In the volume titled Incredible Adventures occur some of the finest tales which the author has yet produced, leading the fancy to wild rites on nocturnal hills, to secret and terrible aspects lurking behind stolid scenes, and to unimaginable vaults of mystery below the sands and pyramids of Egypt; all with a serious finesse and delicacy that convince where a cruder or lighter treatment would merely amuse. Some of these accounts are hardly stories at all, but rather studies in elusive impressions and half-remembered snatches of dream. Plot is everywhere negligible, and atmosphere reigns untrammelled.” (Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”, Collected Essays)

If Blackwood’s story “A Descent into Egypt” interests you, but you find the plot “negligible”, then there’s a more jut-jawed Egyptian audio adventure from Dark Adventure Radio Theatre. They’re currently taking pre-orders for their new The Temple of Jupiter Ammon recording…

an original tale of two-fisted archaeology and adventure … expected to be released around December.

A few tips for audiobook playlists and bookmarking with newer version of the free AIMP audio player. A great player, but the UI is somewhat convoluted for most people — and post-2021 changes made it even more convoluted in key places.

1. Add the playlist files by drag-and-drop, and save the playlist, as you would in any audio player. Saving a playlist is done in AIMP by right-clicking in the sidebar and then “Send to other playlist” | “To New playlist”. Clunky and roundabout, but it works.

2. Many audiobooks then need a pause added between .MP3 tracks, if the tracks are chapterised. Otherwise the end of one chapter gabbles straight into the start of another without any pause. This pause can be manually set in the AIMP settings. Here’s how it’s done…

3000ms = a 3 second pause, added between each .MP3 track.

3. Bookmarking. Since the 2021 changes this is impossible for a newbie to find in the UI, and it’s almost impossible to discover how to do it from the official site/forum. Few users would think to right-click in the waveform itself as it’s playing, but that’s how it’s now done in newer versions of AIMP…

Easy, but only if you know how. The added bookmark will then show up in the list on the Bookmarks tab. Double-clicking the bookmark only starts the track at the beginning. Right-clicking and “Play selected files” starts it at the actual bookmark timestamp.

4. Finally, a security tip. If you already installed libwebp.dll in the AIMP program folder (C:\Program Files\AIMP), so as to get WebP image format support for cover artwork, then Google’s recent massive WebP security car-crash means you’ll need to replace the old .dll with the new safe libwebp.dll 1.3.2.

A new AI-voiced AI Lovecraft: Nyalarthotep on YouTube. One of the better voices, kind of like a somewhat harsh and staccato Gordon Gould (expert reader of Lovecraft for ‘Books for the Blind’, back in the day). But then, what can one expect… it is a robot. But such things might be fixed by downloading and then using a good desktop PC audio player (such as AIMP) to adjust speed, pitch etc.

I found the following to work well with AIMP and proper headphones:

Speed: 0.97

Pitch: -1.66 st

And this graphic equaliser setting…

Then it just needs the maker to do a re-recording of the few seconds where the AI stumbles over Lovecraft’s 18th century diction (TTS voices can usually handle a special in-text markup, which can help correct such things, or you can just ‘tweek du spellhing’). Plus a few spaces, added where the transition between sections is too abrupt.