The Novel of The Black Seal

By: Arthur Machen

Narrated by: Felbrigg Napoleon Herriot

When Ms Lally walked out into the cold night devoid of hope, hungry and penniless, she expected to find a quiet place to lie down and die. What she found was a benefactor, an academic with a mysterious passion and secret knowledge of a hidden world beyond the realms of known science.

The Novel of the Black Seal is cited as one of the primary influences on H. P. Lovecraft and his tales. It does indeed carry many of the themes covered by such famous stories as 'The Dunwich Horror', 'The Whisperer in Darkness', and 'The Colour out of Space'.

Public Domain (P)2017 Felbrigg Napoleon Herriot

Mr. Herriot Struggles a Bit

Mr. Herriot (not the Vet, the Narrator) has some problems with this one. The first one being that he is an Australian Narrator trying to read a Welsh author. Now, he can't help being Australian, poor chap, but the accent is going to be off and he doesn't do dialect well. Or at all, actually. So characters all sound the same (and Australian) in a story written, as I said, by a Welshman and set (primarily) in London and Wales. Also, his performance contains what should have been out-takes. H mispronounces words and place names and inverts the word order a couple of times. The story is one of the classics of horror and well worth your time. If you've never read or heard it (and, especially have never read the novel of which it forms one chapter...THE THREE IMPOSTERS...then you have some real chills ahead in the IMPLICATIONS of this story which, together with his story THE SHINING PYRAMID will have you wondering about the Welsh Countryside a LOT 😵 Again, Mr. Herriot stumbled a bit on this one but if you can ignore that (as we are used to ignoring typos in print media for the sake of a good yarn) then you can still enjoy Mr., Machen's tale of Terror.