Given the length of this story, I recorded it over the course of three days, one chapter at a time. Any changes in voice quality from chapter to chapter is a result of this multi-stage recording.
0:00:00 Chapter 1
0:11:28 Chapter 2
0:29:44 Chapter 3
0:54:19 Chapter 4
1:15:54 Chapter 5
1:28:13 Chapter 6
Hopefully my attempt at a southern accent isn't too bad. While I am a damned yankee, I have lived in the south for over 20 years now, so I'm not completely clueless as to this accent, but hearing it and speaking it are two entirely different matters.
Although, because I couldn't be entirely sure about the quality of my southern accent, I decided to drop it after the first chapter. The point is made that the character is a southerner, and pretty much the entire rest of the story is just him talking, and I just can't do the accent for that much text, especially if I might have it wrong in some terrible or insulting way.
On the other hand, I make no apologies at all for my butchery of French names :-P
The ending of the story is quite a tell of the authors' own attitudes. Especially for Lovecraft, a master of cosmic horror, falling back to such a boringly mundane thing that we're all supposed to be so horrified of? Tsk. I'm not entirely convinced that 80 years ago people would have been so shocked or horrified by such a reveal. Oh well.
The pictures used are:
Chapter 1: "Auburn, Natchez, MS" by E.L. Malvaney, used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/). It's like this is the exact house the authors were visualizing when they described the house in the text.
Chapter 2: "Vue de la Sorbonne côté de la Place", 18th century engraving by Jean-François Janinet.
Chapter 3: "veranda view" by Leo Reynolds, used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/). Both conversations in this chapter take place on the veranda!
Chapter 4: "medusa barbie" by vikki23, used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/). I couldn't find a satisfactory picture of a woman with a knee-length black hair in a single braid. I'm rather surprised by that. No good depictions of Queen Berenice either. Nor even any satisfactory public domain or Creative Commons depiction of a medusa where the hair wasn't overtly snakes. *sigh* So this is what we are reduced to. Sorry about that.
Chapter 5: A folded-out engraving showing witches' sabbat, by Laurent Bordelon (1710), from the University of Glasgow Library, used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/). I'm guessing that at least a portion of Marsh's painting would have included something like this.
Chapter 6: "Historic home on Louisiana plantation damaged in fire" by Magnolia State Live. I liked that this photo had a tennis court in it, as a tennis court on the premise is specifically mentioned in an earlier chapter.
The follow along: https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/mc.aspx
