As many of you know, I got clobbered by multiple heart attacks a year or so back, as a consequence of which some of our regular features have become a little less regular than they once were. I regret that, so I'm happy to announce the return of a Steyn Club favourite. That's to say:
Welcome, belatedly, to the sixty-first audio adventure in our series Tales for Our Time.
For almost seven years, this feature has offered pertinent classics by great authors - H G Wells, Joseph Conrad, P G Wodehouse and dozens more. Today we are adding a new name to the ranks with his most famous short story: Edgar Allan Poe and The Masque of the Red Death, first published in 1842. As I discuss in my introduction, we had requests for this tale four years ago at the start of the Covid lockdown - and for fairly obvious reasons:
The "Red Death" had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men.
But the Covid and the lockdowns went away, and it seemed to me that Poe's story was emblematic in a more basic sense of the peculiar nature of our ruling class and their relationship to the world beyond their gates. To listen to me introduce and read The Masque of the Red Death, Mark Steyn Club members should please click here and log-in.
This short story is a one-off just to wet my whistle and not tax too much my poor old voice, which, between my health issues and certain medications, has not been in the best shape recently. However, next Friday - April 19th - we shall begin another full-length adventure by one of our most popular authors.
~We have all kinds of tales in our archives, from the social comedy of Jane Austen to futuristic fantasy from Rudyard Kipling. Tales for Our Time in all its variety is both highly relevant and a welcome detox from the madness of the hour: almost seven years' worth of my audio adaptations of classic fiction starting with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's cracking tale of an early conflict between jihadists and westerners in The Tragedy of the Korosko. To access them all, please see our easy-to-navigate Netflix-style Tales for Our Time home page. We've introduced a similar tile format for my Sunday Poems and also for our Hundred Years Ago Show.
As for my own contribution to the series, The Prisoner of Windsor is now available in the wider world, both in hardback and digital editions. And don't miss Out of Time.
We launched The Mark Steyn Club over six years ago, and I'm overwhelmed by all those members across the globe who've signed up to be a part of it - from Fargo to Fiji, Vancouver to Vanuatu, Cook County to the Cook Islands, West Virginia to the West Midlands. As I said at the time, membership isn't for everyone, but it is a way of ensuring that all our content remains available for everyone.
That said, we are offering our Club members a few extras, including our audio adventures by Dickens, Conrad, Kafka, Trollope, Gogol, Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, F Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, Baroness Orczy, Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson - plus various pieces of non-classic fiction by yours truly. You can find them all here. We're very pleased by the response to our Tales - and we even do them live occasionally, and sometimes with special guests.
I'm truly thrilled that one of the most popular of our Steyn Club extras these last six-plus years has been our nightly radio serials. If you've enjoyed them and you're looking for a present for a fellow fan of classic fiction, I hope you'll consider our special Club Gift Membership. Aside from Tales for Our Time, The Mark Steyn Club does come with other benefits:
~Exclusive Steyn Store member pricing on over 40 books, mugs, T-shirts, and other products;
~The chance to engage in live Clubland Q&A sessions with yours truly, such as this coming Wednesday's;
~Transcript and audio versions of The Mark Steyn Show and our other video content;
~My video series of classic poetry;
~Booking for special members-only events, such as The Mark Steyn Christmas Show, assuming I'm ever again well enough for such extravaganzas;
~Advance booking for other just-about-live appearances around the world, including our next Mark Steyn Cruise;
~Customized email alerts for new content in your areas of interest;
~and the opportunity to support our print, audio and video ventures as they wing their way around the planet.
To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you'll get access not only to The Masque of the Red Death but to all the other yarns gathered together at the Tales for Our Time home page.
One other benefit to membership is our Comment Club privileges. So, if you think The Masque of the Red Death is a badly read living death, feel free to have at it.
And do join us later this month for a brand new audio serialization in Tales for Our Time.
