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  Sredni Vashtar

  Saki (H.H. Munro)

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  More classic horror narrations on Jonathan's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@JonathanDunneHorrorAudiobooks 
  Title: Sredni Vashtar 
  Author: Saki (H. H. Munro) 
  Narrator: Jonathan Dunne 
  Original Publication: 1912 
  Public Domain: Yes 
  Series Placement: Timeless Terrors No. 79 
  Description: 
  Sredni Vashtar is one of Saki’s most unsettling and darkly ironic tales — a precise exploration of repression, power, and private vengeance. The story follows Conradin, a frail boy living under the rigid control of his guardian, Mrs. De Ropp, whose cold authority dominates his life. Deprived of affection and freedom, Conradin retreats into a secret world of imagination and ritual. 
  Central to this world is the shed at the bottom of the garden, where he keeps a ferret he worships as a personal god, Sredni Vashtar. Through quiet devotion and imagined rites, Conradin gives this creature the power denied to him, and the story unfolds with a calm inevitability toward a chilling climax. 
  Saki’s restrained prose makes the horror subtle yet potent, arising not from spectacle but from moral indifference and the consequences of cruelty. Narrated by Amazon-bestselling horror author Jonathan Dunne, this performance captures the story’s tension, irony, and quiet menace. 
  Sredni Vashtar remains a timeless reminder that even the smallest, most silenced lives can harbor forces capable of unsettling and irrevocable change.

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  We Have Always Been Who We Are

  Sofia T. Romero

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  From Pushcart Prize–nominated author Sofia T. Romero comes a breathtaking debut collection of interrelated stories suffused with magical realism. 
  In stories that evoke the haunting beauty of New England beaches and resonate with a bittersweet loneliness, Romero blurs the lines between life and death, reality and fantasy. A deceased woman counsels her son’s fiancée on how to be a good wife to him, with disastrous consequences. A mysterious, commanding cat appears in a young woman’s home, as inexplicable as the demise of her years-long relationship with her boyfriend. At turns humorous, sorrowful, and whimsical, this collection spans the familiar setting of a college-town supermarket and eerie dystopias that are not just postpandemic but postart. Romero masterfully conveys the follies of youth and the regrets of life, and a sense of loss—of a relationship, a child, a time before—pervades each page. 
  With this remarkable debut, Romero joins the ranks of writers such as Brenda Peynado and Marytza K. Rubio, offering a superb collection of speculative fiction with a distinctly Latina perspective. We Have Always Been Who We Are is at its heart a testament to the power of storytelling, and an invitation to develop our inner strength through the imagination.

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  Love - From their pens to your...

  Guy de Maupassant

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  Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was born on August 5th, 1850 near Dieppe in France.  
  Maupassant’s early life was badly torn when at age 11 (his younger brother Hervé was then five) his mother, Laure, a headstrong and independent-minded woman, risked social disgrace in order to obtain a legal separation from her husband. 
  After the separation, Laure kept custody of her two boys. With the father now forcibly absent, Laure became the most influential and important figure in the young boy's life.   
  Maupassant’s education was such that he rebelled against religion and other societal norms but a developing friendship with Gustave Flaubert began to turn his mind towards creativity and writing. 
  After graduation he volunteered for the Franco-Prussian war. With its end he moved to Paris to work as a clerk in the Navy Department.  Gustave Flaubert now took him under his wing.  Acting as a literary guardian to him, he guided the eager Maupassant to debuts in journalism and literature.  For Maupassant these were exciting times and the awakening of his creative talents and ambitions. 
  In 1880 he published what is considered his first great work, ‘Boule de Suif’, (translated as as ‘Dumpling’, ‘Butterball’, ‘Ball of Fat’, or ‘Ball of Lard’) which met with a success that was both instant and overwhelming.  Flaubert at once acknowledged that it was ‘a masterpiece that will endure.’ Maupassant had used his talents and experiences in the war to create something unique.  
  This decade from 1880 to 1891 was to be the most pivotal of his career.  With an audience now made available by the success of ‘Boule de Suif’ Maupassant organised himself to work methodically and relentlessly to produce between two and four volumes of work a year.  The melding of his talents and business sense and the continual hunger of sources for his works made him wealthy. 
  In his later years he developed a desire for solitude, an obsession for self-preservation, and a fear of death as well as a paranoia of persecution caused by the syphilis he had contracted in his youth.  
  On January 2nd, 1892, Maupassant tried to commit suicide by cutting his throat.  Unsuccessful he was committed to the private asylum of Esprit Blanche at Passy, in Paris.  It was here on July 6th, 1893 that Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant died at the age of only 42.

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  The Trembling of a Leaf - Little...

  W. Somerset Maugham

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  When noted English writer W. Somerset Maugham set off for the South Seas to regain his health, his experiences would become the bedrock for the stories represented here. These are among Maugham’s best work, as well as some of the best stories ever written about the exotic South Seas. 
  “Mackintosh” is a taut psychological study of two officials on a remote tropic island. “The Fall of Edward Barnard” is a story about what is important in life, a precursor to Maugham’s well-known novel, The Razor’s Edge. Love is always a subject of the tropics, and Maugham’s deft, ironic handling of the theme in “Red” and “Honolulu” is masterful. “The Pool” tells a poignant and tragic tale about the pitfalls for love across cultures. Maugham’s most famous story, “Rain,” about the ironic consequences of obsession, was adapted for both theater and film.

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  My Own True Ghost Story - From...

  Rudyard Kipling

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  Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born in Mumbai, India on 30th December 1865.   
  As was the custom in those days, he and his sister were sent back to England when he was 5.  The ill-treatment and cruelty by the Portsmouth couple they boarded with Kipling said contributed to the onset of his literary life.  
  At 16 he returned to India to work on a local paper where he was soon contributing and writing.  It also exposed him to the issues of identity and national allegiance which pervade much of his work.  
  In 1886, his ‘Departmental Ditties’, collection of verse appeared in print followed by 39 short stories for his newspaper over only 8 months.  These were then published as ‘Plain Tales from the Hills’, shortly after his 22nd birthday.  
  He continued his prolific pace of writing before being dismissed in a dispute and, taking his pay-off and the profits from the sale of some publishing rights, decided to return to London, travelling via Rangoon, Hong Kong, Japan and the United States, all the while writing articles, and arriving at Liverpool in October 1889. 
  Over the next two years he saw further works published as books and in magazines, as well as a nervous breakdown for which he was prescribed a sea voyage, to South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and India.  
  Happier times came with marriage to Caroline Starr Balestier in January 1892.  The honeymoon began in Vermont and ended in Yokahama where they heard their bank had failed.  They returned to Vermont and settled.  Caroline was now pregnant and he was planning the ‘Jungle Books’.  
  A failed arbitration between the US and England resulted in an argument between Caroline’s brother and Kipling, and then his arrest.  At the hearing he was mortified by the exposure of his private life and after settling the matter they returned to England and life in Torquay.  ‘Kim’ was published in 1902, and ‘Just So Stories for Little Children’, a year later.  
  In 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature with the citation “in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterise the creations of this world-famous author”.   
  When the Great War erupted, he scorned those who refused conscription.  His son enlisted and was killed at the Battle of Loos in September 1915, at 18, an exploding shell had ripped his face apart.  This death inspired Kipling’s writing thereafter, but the tragedy broke his life and by 1930 his prolific pen had almost ceased. 
  Rudyard Kipling died on 18th January 1936 from a perforated duodenal ulcer.  He was 70.  His ashes are buried at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

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  Federigo's Falcon - From their...

  Boccasio Giovanni

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  The bookshelves of European literature are incredible collections that have gathered together centuries of very talented authors.  From this continent their fame spread and whilst among their number many are now forgotten or neglected their talents endure.  Among them is Boccasio Giovanni.

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