Smart Talk on Harry Potter
B.J. Harrison has just put his latest up his latest reading and, joy of joys, it is The Music of Erich Zann by HP Lovecraft.
Download it and listen.
Find it HERE
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
I assume you’re already faint with hunger, Travis, since you wrote JB Harrison as opposed to BJ Harrison. But it’s a good sacrifice you’re making, food in exchange for Harry Potter. Besides, fasting is good purification for the soul. Think how much more spiritual you’ll be when next you read HPSS.
revgeorge,
That was me. My mistake which has been corrected. Thanks for pointing it out. I just need to think about M*A*S*H when I write about Mr Harrison.
Sorry. I should’ve looked at the byline. Still, it’s a noble thing Travis is doing.
It’s a GREAT story. I had emailed Mr. Harrison, and he told me he was planning to do it. “The Music of Eric Zahn” will most definitely be one of the five Lovecraft stories we read during Scary Story Month. (I recommended “Haunter of the Dark” to him as well, which we’ll be reading, but I don’t know if he’ll do two Lovecraft stories.)
Always a sucker for a horror story, I found it and read it on the Internet (I’m not one for audiobooks).
Not bad. Not bad at all. Probably the best HPL story I’ve read to date. I read a Wikipedia article that said that it was one of HPL’s favorites because:
” it avoided the overexplicitness that he saw as a major flaw in some of his other work.”
And that’s precisely what makes it work. Instead of trying to pile words upon words in an ultimately futile attempt describe the awfulness of the monsters beyond, in this story HPL describes an eerie place which is of this world, situates his two strongly drawn characters in it, and lets them react to the unknown beyond the window through the medium of music. And all this with an economy of words.
Neat.
It also begs to be made into a movie. I found a couple of shorts on YouTube, and also came upon this review by Richard Scheib, writing about an amateur Lovecraft film festival in Portland:
“The Music of Erich Zann (16 mins) (½) from Chicago-based John Strysik, suffers from amateurish photography, but is considerably redeemed by good performances from its two principals. There are some end optical effects which also give a fine, brief vision of Lovecraftian cosmic horrors. ”
Nice pick, Matthew.
Listened to this show last night. It’s a nice, short story which captures the mood without being too around the bend as far as supernatural horror goes. Essentially more of a man sees that which was not meant for men to see & has his mind broken type of story. Strange how most of Lovecraft’s stories end that way.
Very nice buildup to the revelation of the story but almost anticlimatic when you get there. Not knowing what is behind the curtains is much more frightening than when we actually get to see behind it through the narrator’s eyes.
‘Very nice buildup to the revelation of the story but almost anticlimactic when you get there. Not knowing what is behind the curtains is much more frightening than when we actually get to see behind it through the narrator’s eyes.’
Agree with you there, revgeorge ! I enjoyed that story very much, but thought that the story was a tad anticlimactic. Am looking forward to Lovecraft month though !