Devil bargains, drained pools and doomsday, read aloud.
Edgar reads classic fiction and verse by writers including Washington Irving, Mary Shelley, John Cheever and W.E.B. Du Bois, all presented as literary horror. Before each reading, a spoken setup names the story's central idea, sometimes with a pun, and then the text takes over.
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Incremental Doom is a narration podcast in which Edgar reads classic literary fiction and verse chosen to unsettle. The label is horror, but the recent run is wider than that word suggests. Devil bargains sit beside suburban disquiet, an immortality experiment that brings sorrow, a gallows poem and an apocalypse on Broadway. Two New England tales, Washington Irving's 'The Devil and Tom Walker' and Stephen Vincent Benet's 'The Devil and Daniel Webster', ran as a diabolical double feature, and its setup notes that neither was written by Nathaniel Hawthorne or Stephen King. Episodes tend to begin this way. Edgar names the story's central idea in a spoken preamble, sometimes with wordplay: a tempter keen to be a great lender, contracts that contract around the people who sign them. Then the text takes over. The preambles also connect old stories to present concerns. Mary Shelley's 'The Mortal Immortal' is framed against modern ambitions to defeat aging, and Maurice Ogden's 'The Hangman' is introduced as an unfortunately timely poem about creeping oppression, fear and indifference. Some choices stretch the category in useful ways. John Cheever's 'The Swimmer' follows a man heading home across his neighborhood by way of other people's pools. At one point he reaches a pool that has been drained, with a for-sale sign nailed to a tree out front. W.E.B. Du Bois's 'The Comet', a story from 1920, came as part of a mini-series of apocalyptic tales, and its introduction points to the grinding conditions of race and class it depicts. In it, a man who has seen no other living soul since the catastrophe races toward Harlem with the one woman he has found. The Shelley piece is narrated by a man marking his 323rd year, so the dread comes from living too long rather than from dying. Irving's Tom Walker comes home with the print of a finger burnt into his forehead. Beyond the episodes, the show's Substack offers paid supporters the music files used in episodes, Edgar's commentary on the stories' themes, and production notes. Episodes generally close on the paired slogan Incremental Doom, Exponential Entertainment. What a listener gets is a reading list performed aloud. The framing points at why each story still unsettles, then gets out of the way.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants classic short fiction and poetry read aloud, with the theme named up front before the story starts. Also a good fit for someone happy to hear John Cheever and W.E.B. Du Bois read as horror alongside Washington Irving and Mary Shelley.
What sets it apart: Incremental Doom takes its horror from a wider literary shelf than genre fiction, and Edgar's setups tie old texts to present-day worries such as defeating aging or creeping oppression. Once the preamble ends, the story itself carries the episode.
Unsettling entertainment via classic tales of literary horror and suspense, narrated by your host, Edgar. incrementallyyours.substack.com
A minister puts on a black veil; suddenly your imagination is doing the frightening.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A midnight bargain meets Daniel Webster's calm defense, a kitchen table, and a devil with a collecting box.
Incremental Doom gives The Devil and Daniel Webster a steady, plainspoken frame, holding close to the uneasy bargain that has trapped Jabez Stone.
Tom Walker's bargain turns greed into a shadow over a haunted New England swamp.
Washington Irving's "The Devil and Tom Walker" makes a New England swamp feel both cramped and mythic, a place where greed does not simply tempt people but waits for them.
A suburban swim becomes a quiet, unsettling journey through memory, time, and locked doors.
Incremental Doom follows John Cheever's "The Swimmer" as a midsummer dip turns into a strange suburban passage. A man sets out to get home by crossing one neighborhood pool after another, buoyed at first by bright weather and the residue of a party.
A 323-year-old narrator learns that an elixir can outlast its promise and leave love behind as memory.
Mary Shelley's "The Mortal Immortal" treats the wish to defeat age as a troubled bargain with time. Incremental Doom follows a narrator in his 323rd year, watching for signs of decay while still unsure whether Cornelius's elixir made him immortal or only left his fate…
A comet leaves New York silent with the dead, forcing racial division into the open.
A comet leaves much of New York silent with the dead, and Jim, a messenger overlooked by the living, crosses the emptied city with a white woman after both seem to survive.
Classic horror, read aloud by a rotating fireside cast.
Patient tales from the uneasy dark.
Incremental Doom reads Washington Irving's "The Devil and Tom Walker," a New England devil-bargain tale set near Boston and Charles Bay.
Incremental Doom's second episode reads Stephen Vincent Benet's "The Devil and Daniel Webster," opening with the New England legend that says Daniel Webster's voice still rolls through Marshfield thunderstorms.
Incremental Doom reads John Cheever's The Swimmer, and Edgar opens by calling it a story that moves from the whimsical to the ominous.
The host introduces the podcast and reads a poem about a hangman bringing fear and oppression to a town.
Incremental Doom reads Mary Shelley's "The Mortal Immortal," a gothic story about a man who says he has completed his 323rd year on July 16th, 1833.
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Incremental Doom presents “Speech Sounds” by Octavia Butler, a dystopian story after an illness removes language.
Incremental Doom adapts Roald Dahl’s 1946 story "Skin," about Drioli, a tattooist who remembers befriending the young painter Haim Soutine in 1913.
Incremental Doom presents Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil,” in which Reverend Mr.
Incremental Doom reads Stave IV of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, following Ebenezer Scrooge as the silent Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows him future scenes.
Host Edgar reads a chilling excerpt from Frederick Douglass's autobiography describing his brutal treatment by slaveholder Mr.
This episode continues a four-part horror tale about a pair of aristocratic twins and their ominous upbringing.
Narration of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman Brown', a classic horror story about a man's encounter with evil in Puritan New England.
A narrated horror story about a man named Michael enduring life in hell, waking to the sounds of demonic loudspeakers and nightly raids.
Narration of Ambrose Bierce's horror story 'The Moonlit Road' from the perspective of Joel Hetman Jr., recounting his mother's murder.