EDGAR ALLEN POE TALES OF TERROR, Read By Nelson Olmstead, Vanguard Records, VRS 9007. Price about $4.95
Vanguard hasn’t let loose a re-issue of this oldie but moldy for a few years now, but copies of it are still to be dregged from the Spoken Word sections of most large metropolitan record stores. Generally for about $4.95, this record can be yours, for what it’s worth,
It’s really grim, the way there’s little good horror and monster and science fiction stuff available in records, and so much stuff glutting the record stalls, now, that masquerades as music (1 won’t name any particular type, for we all feel any music but our own favorite stuff is a charade). Maybe with “American Pie” tricking everyone into hypnotically chanting that catchy tuneful lyric, “This’ll be the day that I die!” the mood might be set for a mass revival of interest in that writer who died a thousand deaths (even before Roger Corman came along), in his writings and in tragic real life, the ever-popular (and ever dying) late, great Edgar Allen Poe.
Olmstead edited and read the six stories on the record in a manner which, if Poe could hear them, would probably make him die again. For editing the stories down to listenable 8-minute segments, Olmstead did very well, and should be commended … but as for his reading of them? Well, some of you might like it, but then, there’s no accounting for taste. Olmstead HAS A WAY of READing EVery OTHer SYLLABLE in AverRY dra-MAH-tic WAY! If YOU get WHAT I MEAN!!!
Olmstead worked on radio, reading literature over the airwaves to 100’s of thousands of American homes from 1939-49. He was a pretty big celeb, but listening only to his work with Poe, one wonders why. But listening to a companion album, SLEEP NO MORE! FAMOUS GHOST AND HORROR STORIES (to be reviewed another issue), one can understand why. Poe’s writings don’t take well to the overly emotive hamming of Olmstead. They are written in a subtle descriptive prose rich in language-quirks and rhythms, and able to cast glimmers of queasy horror and hidden spectral mysteries on the insweep of the palsy-shaken turn of phrase … the words are in themselves dramatic enough, mellowly so, and call more for a calm, mellifluous-to-sonorous reading voice … a shell-shocked numbed voice laden with stunned foreknowledge of the terrifying inevitable… but NOT the hysterical histrionics of Nelson Olmstead. Not on Poe!
Yet, there are probably many who will disagree with me, or say that Olmstead’s TALES OF TERROR are Great Camp, or something like that. Well, you can’t have your camp and read it, too. There are many subtle mental horrors to Poe’s writing that are better read and not heard. I’ll take a book, any day. If it’s Poe. Olmstead reading Agnew or Martha Mitchell is a Horror record I might well invest another $4.95 in… but not too soon. Only when they’ve been gone from the scene for about as long as old Edgar A. Poe has … and not until!
The stories read on the album are: The Pit and the Pendulum; a Cask of Amontillado; The Fall of the House of Usher; The Tell-Tale Heart; The Masque of the Red Death; and The Strange Case of M. Valdemar. And Corman almost did better
Chuck McNaughton