James Herbert

Hello and welcome to ReadOn, the audiobook show recorded in association with RNIB Talking Books.

I'm your host Robert Kirkwood and today a spooky compilation with a media fan creator Laura Ellen Anderson, Stranger Times writer Quave MacDonald, Professor Richard Wiseman and from the ReadOn archives James Herbert.

Plus some new horror in the RNIB library.

All coming up on today's ReadOn.

Mostly, they don't need to be in that much of an order, I think, for people to get them, hopefully.

There are five Stranger Times books now in the RNIB library.

And next on this spooky read-on, let's open the read-on vault and listen back to the late, great James Herbert.

Swish, thwack, louder.

I like that a lot.

Pickle Sandwich 1981 said The Stone Child by Dan Plobocki or The Secret of Crickley Hall by James Herbert.

I'm not familiar with either.

Alex Piora said The Bewitching and TwoCrow48 said Let the Right One In.

That experience stayed with me for many years and I never did know exactly what I saw that night.

Then, I think it may have been last year, I read The Dark by James Herbert.

The deeper into the story I got, an icy chill ran through me once more, just as it had all those years ago.

James Herbert described a malevolent entity that was literally just the dark.

It was exactly what I'd seen.

So there you have it.

Oh, yeah.

King gets a name drop, but also, which made my heart warm, James Herbert gets a mention in there as well, my favorite author.

Aw.

That's nice.

Oh, really? Hmm.

So yeah, you, when you see that parody, you think, "Hang on a minute.

Where are the floating balls in James, in the James Bond film? Ah."

[laughs] Trent decides he's safer in the asylum, particularly once he's got this, this black crayon, the single black crayon that he's, he's requested, and drawn crosses over his skin, his clothing, the walls of the, the padded cell he's in.

How that was then connected to stories and language was my dad used to read to my brother and I, uh, well, and my sister, but separately, uh, most evenings.

And he read us a lot of the classic ghost stories, but it was, um, the M.R. James stories that-

Mm

... for me, I suppose I then started to attach the idea of, of storytelling, um, and writing about the supernatural, um, after being read those stories.

That's excellent

... often suspected was following me through the bush when I was wandering around on my own, or had I just caught glimpses of the feathered head between ferns.

So there were the, the M.R. James stories kind of working on all of these influences that I was picking up.

Mm.

Okay.

The film Jaws was adapted from a bestselling novel by which author? Peter Benchley- Richard Matheson, James Herbert, or Dean Koontz?

Dean Koontz?

No.

Wow.

James Her- James Herbert went to art college there.

Um, there's lots of other connections to it as well.

Rosemary Timperley, who was, in her day, was one of the great ghost story editors and writers.

Yeah, Dean Kuntz.

James Herbert.

Like, when you walked into a bookshop at this time, they front-loaded the horror.

Like, glossy horror.