Podcast Episode 6: The Cask of Amontillado

The Cask of Amontillado, by Edgar Allan Poe

This was the Library of Babel special Halloween episode. The Cask of Amontillado is my favorite Poe tale, and is frequently read at the annual Halloween story-reading event in my apartment. The story is well-paced, with just the right blend of dread and suspense building throughout till the chilling conclusion.



Notes:
I'm still freaked out about whether the "ll" in "Amontillado" should be pronounced as an "l" or a "y." I'm fairly certain it's a "y." (I think it's a Spanish name, that is.)

I believe we're in the end stages of the death of the podcast introduction, which has now evolved into a simple vocabulary lesson (though that's helpful for just about any Poe story, so I think it was a good choice). For some reason, I neglected to define niter, which appears throughout the middle section of the story, begriming the walls and serving as an indicator that they are in a damp place, bad for someone with a cough, and which, in my experience, most modern readers have never heard of.

I take back what I said about music levels in my last entry. Here the music is usually pretty un-intrusive in terms of volume, though I think there's probably way more music than there needs to be. I'm not sure it really adds anything in most of the places it's present. Occasionally you get the slightly unsettling effect I was probably going for. I appear to have been trying to use it as a substitute for sound effects for things like chains clanking and so forth, which may or may not have been successful.

I think my vocal work on this episode is pretty decent, insofar as I clearly tried to create different voices; the narrator is just my normal speaking voice, and Fortunato is a slightly lower register, speaking slowly and slightly slurred. I've never been drunk, nor do I have much experience with drunken people, so it may be an understandably poor imitation of drunkenness. I do think the ending is pretty creepy, which is the really important thing. 

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