Gothic fiction read in a grave key.
The Weird Tales Podcast is a long-form fiction reading series built around horror, crime, and supernatural dread. Recent episodes linger in Fleet Street, where Sweeney Todd, Mrs. Lovett, Joanna, and Sir Richard Blunt move through a tightening melodrama of violence, concealment, and discovery.
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The Weird Tales Podcast is a deep archive of narrated gothic and weird fiction, delivered with the patience of a staged reading. It does not hurry. The sampled run follows chapters from a Sweeney Todd serial, where Fleet Street, Bell Yard, St. Dunstan's, and Mrs. Lovett's establishment form a small geography of dread. The atmosphere is thick with suspicion. Todd is presented as both grotesque and calculating, a barber whose crimes are followed not only by fear, but by careful attempts to arrange the world into a plausible lie. That gives the readings their particular pressure. A murder is not merely committed; it is explained, disguised, and morally weighed by a narrator who keeps returning to the blackness beneath respectable surfaces. The show gives equal space to pursuit. Sir Richard Blunt, Crotchet, King, Morgan, and others circle the evidence, while Joanna, Arabella Wilmot, Big Ben, and the Oakley household carry the emotional cost of the mystery. The result is melodrama in the old sense: heightened, deliberate, and openly invested in innocence, villainy, terror, and fate. There is grim comedy as well. Beadles, churchwardens, lodging-house scenes, and shop talk lend the horror a bustling social texture before the blade or the vault reasserts the danger. The pacing rewards listeners who enjoy long approaches to decisive moments. Dialogue is often performed in full, and the narrator's asides explain motive, irony, and moral consequence with grave relish. Nothing feels conversational or improvised. The show is closer to sitting beside a fire with a lurid serial than to hearing a modern horror discussion. Its recent chapters are especially suited to listeners drawn to Sweeney Todd, gothic crime, hidden rooms, guilty schemes, and suspense that advances by recognition rather than surprise. The unease comes from watching people walk nearer to what the audience already suspects. That old dramatic irony is the engine. The Weird Tales Podcast preserves it with a formal, steady hand.
Made for: Best for listeners who want horror and gothic crime as sustained narration rather than discussion. It especially suits fans of slow-burn melodrama, Sweeney Todd, and morally charged suspense.
What sets it apart: Its strength is the unbroken literary mode: long scenes, full dialogue, and narrator-driven dread without host banter or interview framing. The show lets period melodrama remain strange, severe, and theatrical.
Tycho Alhambra is a lover of the weird and bizarre. Here are his readings of his favorite Weird Fiction. Lovecraft, Machen, Poe, Blackwood, Chambers. They're all here.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Tycho Alhambra gives classic tales of supernatural dread and criminal intrigue the patient, direct treatment their serialized plots reward.
Tycho Alhambra turns classic supernatural fiction into intimate narrated fiction, moving between Alexei Tolstoy's vampiric dread, Robert Louis Stevenson's moral bargain and the criminal world surrounding Sweeney Todd.
Sweeney Todd schemes while a vampire knocks, and your respectable evening loses its alibi.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A gothic tangle of disguise, secrecy, and a barber's unease.
This chapter stays close to Joanna's private panic and Ben's blustering attempts to help, keeping the household confusion in sharp view. Big Ben's revenge leaves no real damage, yet it still sets Mrs. Oakley against him and leaves Mr. Oakley resigned.
A missed bolt, an aunt's fortune, and a late-night coach keep the dread personal.
Tobias's escape from Mr. Fogg's establishment is shaped by a chain of close calls: the missed bolt, the door that opens when it should not, and the promise of vengeance that follows him out.
A patient, polite exchange that slowly reveals how polished greed can sound.
The story turns a dark, courteous conversation into something that feels rotten at the core. It keeps close to secrecy, damages, money, and trust, so the menace never needs to shout; it sits there in the polite wording and the careful bargaining, which gives the scene its weight.
A child's funeral, a clouded moon, and a hermit's warning keep the dread steady.
The Weird Tales Podcast stays in the shadow of a child's funeral, where footsteps around the house and a voice at the window turn grief into something colder.
A patient reading that lets Kokua's choice settle into something bleak and lasting.
Part three of The Bottle Imp narrows in on Kokua and turns Stevenson's bargain into something painfully intimate. Tycho's reading gives the voyage, the old man's kindness, and the bottle's curse room to breathe, so the tension builds less from pace than from the slow…
Serialized pulp radio drama: Red Panda battles android-army supervillain Captain Clockwork in 1930s Toronto.
Mike Muncer and a different guest dissect two horror films per episode, by subgenre.
Joe Lipsett and Trace Thurman find queer subtext in everything from Anaconda to The Mummy.
This episode of the Weird Tales Podcast presents a reading of Alexei Tolstoy's horror story 'The Family of the Vourdalak', set in 1815 Vienna during the Congress of Vienna, where aristocratic characters gather for storytelling in a castle.
The host shares a mysterious story from the Colin Malletrap Museum about a document called 'The Fire at the Palinaeum', which involves unverifiable references to theaters and people, suggesting it might be connected to fantasy literature.
This is part two of Alexei Tolstoy's 'The Family of the Vourdalak,' read by Tycho Alhambra.
In part three of Robert Louis Stevenson's 'The Bottle Imp,' Kiawe and Kokua travel to Tahiti to sell the cursed bottle but face rejection and isolation.
This episode of the Weird Tales Podcast features a reading of the horror story 'The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster' by H.R.
This episode narrates a story from H.P.
Todd answers his murder conviction for Francis Thornhill by insisting, “I did not kill the man,” and calling the case “a vile conspiracy.” After Todd invokes dead witnesses and Lovett, the judge says the jury's guilty finding leaves sentencing to the court.
Todd dismisses Mrs.
This episode depicts a tense confrontation between John Mundell and a tailor or artist over debts and a suit of clothes, hinting at underlying criminal themes.
A barber named Todd deals with a suspicious customer while preparing to visit an ill gentleman for a shave and wig dressing.
Johanna seeks advice from various confidants about her love situation, ultimately turning to Arabella Wilmot despite her potentially poor counsel.
Sir Richard leads the churchwarden and beadle down into dark vaults, where fear and confusion ensue as they struggle to follow him.
Sir Richard Blount investigates a foul-smelling vault beneath St Dunstan's church, dismissing witnesses to uncover a potential mystery.
The household remains in confusion.
Tobias lies pale and unconscious at Colonel Geoffrey’s house after the harm caused by Sweeney Todd.
Mr.
Mr.
Joanna Oakley anxiously meets a messenger in a garden who delivers sad news about Mark Ingestry, leading to her emotional breakdown.