AMBIENT ARCANA

Bonne année! Joyeux 2024!
We start our Third Season with a fiery French tale of one woman’s burning need to find balance in a hostile universe. It’s Guy de Maupassant’s torrid tale of red hot revenge! -
“Mother Sauvage.”
All Music and Music & Audio Production by Bob Familiar
Narrated by Veronica and Joey Pesce, Bob Familiar, and Jim Billbrough
Recorded by Joey Pesce and Bob Familiar
If you think we judged Robert W. Chambers a bit harshly on his anti-German attitudes here’s a link to his WWI novel “In Secret” at Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5748
Not to be confused with a recommendation.
 
Some useful links:
 
https://youtube.com/@bobfamiliarmusic
 
https://bobfamiliar.bandcamp.com/
 
https://www.facebook.com/ambientarcana
 

 Once again we travel to the magical land of Tibet for the Holiday Season.
 In this year’s Yuletide offerings a painter and a carpenter commit supernatural postal fraud, a donkey and a rock get arrested for assaulting a jar of oil, a pair of crippled birds dispense great wealth and harsh justice, a sociopathic rabbit distributes stolen goods with murderous intent, and a goiter at a ghost party is about as welcome as a fruitcake. It’s Albert Leroy Shelton’s posthumously publish page turner - “Tibetan Folk Tales”
All Music and Music&Audio Production by Bob Familiar
Narrated by Bob Familiar and Jim Billbrough
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 In this episode of Ambient Arcana we explore the mysteries of ‘Siberian Magic’ and the unexpected social challenges that having one’s hostess turned into a wolf can put upon a party guest - It’s “The She-Wolf” by Saki (H.H. Munro)
Music and Music&Audio Production by Bob Familiar
Narrated by: Jace Wilson, Shannon Wilson, Mandy Familiar, Bob Familiar, and Jim Billbrough
“The She-Wolf” was published in the short story collection “Beasts and Super-Beasts” by Saki back in 1914. While searching for this month’s story we came across an excellent audio version of this book on LibriVox narrated by Justin Brett.
Here’s a link to that book on LibriVox:
https://librivox.org/beasts-and-super-beasts-by-saki/
 
And here’s a link to the Project Gutenberg version of the book:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/269/pg269-images.html

Nothing says Halloween quite like Trick or Treating in an ancient swampy cemetery in shadow haunted Florida!
It’s H.P.Lovecraft’s grim tale of grave robbing gone wrong -  “The Statement of Randolph Carter.”
 
All Music and Music & Audio Production by Bob Familiar
Narrated by Bob Familiar and Jim Billbrough
Recorded Almost Live at Sounds Familiar Studios

 In this episode we dust off our vestigial sense organs and fire up our Pineal Glands to take a mind bending peak beneath the thin veil of our reality in H.P. Lovecraft’s psychedelic mad scientist revenge romp - “From Beyond!”
 
Music and Audio Production by Bob Familiar
Narrated by Bob Familiar and Jim Billbrough

This month we take a trio of trips into the Infinite Unknown with weird fiction icon Howard Phillips Lovecraft-
“Ex Oblivione,” “Nyarlathotep,” and “The Book.”
All Music & Music and Audio Production by Bob Familiar
Narration by Jim Billbrough
 
For further exploration of Lovecraft and his works we suggest checking out these websites:
The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society
https://www.hplhs.org/
And
Strange Studies of Strange Stories
(Formally The HP Podcraft Literary Podcast)
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/strange-studies-of-strange-stories/id1638947147
Or the older, more Lovecraft-centric version of the podcast, which is still active at this time:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-h-p-lovecraft-literary-podcast/id369757090
And there’s even a YouTube Channel:
https://youtube.com/@witchhousemedia?feature=shared

A small sampling of Inuit, Yup’ik, and Unangax folktales collected by American and European Scholar-Explorers in the late 19th and early 20th century. Even in this muted form, sometimes translated through two or three languages, these stories still retain the power, beauty, and humor of the original folktales.
The word Eskimo has long been known to be a misnomer, even as far back as the mid 19th century. Since most of the material used here came from Ethnological surveys that sought to be as specific as possible the term occurs rarely in the collected stories and is mainly used in the titles of the works. 
All Music & Music and Audio Production by Bob Familiar
Narration by Jim Billbrough

 Biercemania!
Three dark and evocative tales by surprise ending aficionado Ambrose Bierce:
"The Boarded Window," "John Mortonson's Funeral," and "The Applicant."
All Music and Audio Production by Bob Familiar
Music by Man Tray and Bob Familiar
All stories read by Bob Billbrough
 
 

We finish our coverage of Lafcadio Hearn’s tales from ghostly Japan with three more stories: “The Corpse-Rider” from the book Shadowings and “Jiu-Roku-Zakura” and “A Dead Secret” from Kwaidan.
Music and Audio production by Bob Familiar.Read by Bob Familiar, Jim Billbrough, and Special Guest Narrator Rick Weidner.

  We return to the works of Lafcadio Hearn with the first of two full length episodes of strange and unusual stories from his adopted country of Japan.
 “Diplomacy” and “Riki Baka” from the book “Kwaidan” and “Fragment” from “In Ghostly Japan”
We also introduce a new reader, Rick Weidner, who provides some much-needed low end to the narrations.
Music and Audio Production by Bob Familiar
Read by Bob Familiar, Jim Billbrough, and Rick Weidner