Imprisoned with the Pharaohs

Written by H. P. Lovecraft and Harry Houdini

Narrated by Cathy Dobson

Harry Houdini's greatest escape ever. While visiting Cairo as a tourist, Houdini and his wife are shown around the pyramids by a mysterious and slightly sinister guide who has a strange hollow voice and looks like an old pharaoh.

What starts as a strange traveller's adventure to witness a duel at midnight on the summit of one of the pyramids, turns into a nightmare as Houdini is seized, tied up and lowered on a rope far into the bowels of the earth to an unknown tomb where the oldest and most sinister of the Egyptian Pharaohs dwell.

While Houdini is more than capable of escaping his bonds....can he escape the putrid undead Pharaohs and their servants?

Will he ever find his way out of the undiscovered tomb through the labyrinth of passages? Can he discover the true origin of the terrible Sphinx? Will he even get out of the tomb alive?

Ghost written by H. P. Lovecraft. Unsuitable for claustrophobics, people of a nervous disposition, or people with a vivid visual imagination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Red Door Consulting
• Release date: Dec 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781467675673

H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an American author of science fiction and horror stories. Born in Providence, Rhode Island to a wealthy family, he suffered the loss of his father at a young age. Raised with his mother’s family, he was doted upon throughout his youth and found a paternal figure in his grandfather Whipple, who encouraged his literary interests. He began writing stories and poems inspired by the classics and by Whipple’s spirited retellings of Gothic tales of terror. In 1902, he began publishing a periodical on astronomy, a source of intellectual fascination for the young Lovecraft. Over the next several years, he would suffer from a series of illnesses that made it nearly impossible to attend school. Exacerbated by the decline of his family’s financial stability, this decade would prove formative to Lovecraft’s worldview and writing style, both of which depict humanity as cosmologically insignificant. Supported by his mother Susie in his attempts to study organic chemistry, Lovecraft eventually devoted himself to writing poems and stories for such pulp and weird-fiction magazines as Argosy, where he gained a cult following of readers. Early stories of note include “The Alchemist” (1916), “The Tomb” (1917), and “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (1919). “The Call of Cthulu,” originally published in pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928, is considered by many scholars and fellow writers to be his finest, most complex work of fiction. Inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Lord Dunsany, Lovecraft became one of the century’s leading horror writers whose influence remains essential to the genre.

Reviews for Imprisoned with the Pharaohs

[shimmin_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very pleasing adaptation of one of my favourite Lovecraft tales. The actors do very well, though a couple of times I found Ward and Houdini hard to distinguish due to similar voices. The production is excellent and everything can be clearly heard, while sound effects add a lot of depth and action to the story.The adaption is on the whole excellent. That being said, I think it shares a drawback with the Mountains of Madness adaption in being sometimes a little too true-to-life. The opening segment featuring the variety show is surely realistic, but I found it overlong, and though convincing it isn't particularly interesting in itself. I felt like this could have been far shorter; this section alone lasts a full five minutes and is entirely irrelevant to the rest of the story. In general I felt like things took a while to get going.The first fifteen minutes or so of the story is new material made up for the audio adaptation, which I'm basically neutral about. It adds on a sort of prequel, which offers an explanation for some of the story's events which were originally pretty inscrutable. It adds a different twist, which I wouldn't call either an improvement or a detriment, it's just different. Very well done, though. Similarly, the adaptation gives Houdini a companion in his misadventure, which has the great advantage of allowing dialogue, but does remove some of the ambiguity from events. As a dramatised version with little narration we lose a lot of the descriptive passages, which is a bit of a shame as they're rather good and eerie; in particular, the lengthy descriptions of Houdini's descent into the underworld are heavily cut. However, they would be hard to do without resorting to just large blocks of narration. On the whole I felt they did a very good job of translating first-person inner monologue and musing into a third-person radio play without losing either the plot or the flavour of the original. The whole family enjoyed the atmosphere and tension of the story, and were thrilled with the excellent props that come with it. We listened to this in three blocks on three successive evenings, and I heartily recommend this strategy. A very worthwhile purchase indeed (though mine was a present).