The House of Sounds by M. P. Shiel | Classic Ghost Stories | Edwardian Weird Fiction
The House of Sounds by M P Shiel
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The House of Sounds by M. P. Shiel is a short gothic story and one of the strangest supernatural stories of the Edwardian era, read here as part of the Classic Ghost Stories Podcast. If you enjoy free classic ghost stories, or you like the dread of Bram Stoker’s contemporaries, this tale of a brass house and a roaring sea is a good place to start.
On a nameless rock in the far northern sea, there stands a brass house half-drowned in cataracts and storm. An old friend answers a summons there and finds a family all but extinguished, a mansion chained to the island like a trapped animal, and a ceaseless roar that makes spoken words useless. In the dim corridors, clocks do not mark hours but generations, coffins are wired for news from the dead, and sound itself seems to press against the inner ear until thought begins to slip. As the weather worsens and the house trembles, it becomes less clear whether the danger lies in the sea outside, the machinery within, or in the strange, eager way his host keeps saying “Hark.” It suits a late-night listen, though it is more unsettling than cosy.
The House of Sounds was first published under that title in M. P. Shiel’s collection The Pale Ape and Other Pulses (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1911), as a revision of his earlier tale “Vaila” from Shapes in the Fire (1896). Among Edwardian stories of the supernatural it is widely reprinted, notably in the S. T. Joshi-edited collection The House of Sounds and Others (Hippocampus Press, 2005).
M. P. Shiel (Matthew Phipps Shiell, 1865–1947) was a British writer of West Indian birth, best known for his weird tales and early science-fictional “scientific romances.” Admired by later writers of the macabre, he remains one of the more singular ghost story authors of his period, with ornate prose, apocalyptic visions, and an intense fascination with doom, decadence, and altered states of mind.
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