Friday, October 27, 2006

Hugh B. Cave's The Prophecy

A Little about Hugh Cave.

I don't remember when I first heard of Hugh B. Cave but it was probably in the mid 1990s with the publication of Fedogan & Bremer's hardbacks THE DOOR BELOW and DEATH STALKS THE NIGHT. I bought both of them and started reading one of the stories in THE DOOR BELOW. I don't remember a lot of the details or even which story it is now (I'll have to go back through and check at some time), but I do remember it being so lurid and intense that I had to put it down. It was just too intense for me at the time. I, who live and breathe horror, had to stop reading because it was just too overwhelming to deal with.

It was a while before I tried Cave again with some different stories and have come to appreciate his overheated, feverish and even psychotic tales of everyday life gone really horribly wrong. There's something about how he can craft a story that might start out as a mundane, relaxing evening with friends having a nice dinner and conversation and turns into a bloodbath full of screaming and wretching horror by the end that is just fascinating and horrifying at the same time.

And that is what our experiment for today is about. The mundane gone wrong in horrible and terrifying ways. The Prophecy was originally printed in Black Book Detective Magazine, October 1934.

If you find this piquing your interest in Cave's writing I would suggest the two books mentioned above and also a larger book of collected horrors called MURGUNSTRUMM AND OTHERS which was originally a very rare hardback by Carcosa Press but is now out in a broadly available soft cover (and also HB version) from Wildside Press.

Further reading on Hugh B. Cave:
bio on wikipedia
listing of his short stories, which numbers over 1000
CAVE interview by Tim Dill
CAVE interview by Tracey Hessler

Ok, and now on with today's experiment
CLICK TO LISTEN TO THE PROPHECY
(RIGHT CLICK AND "SAVE AS" TO DOWNLOAD)

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