Sleep No More was an NBC Radio program which ran for 26 episode between 1956 and 1957. It featured a series of readings by Nelson Olmsted of primarily suspense and supernatural stories. It was a minimalist production, with background music and character voices, with all parts being played by Olmsted. the half-hour show would sometimes feature two stories an episode, with a total of 34 stories presented over the 26 episodes. The tine constraints of the half-hour show at times worked against the effectiveness of the tales, cutting the plot and incidences to the bone.
Stories featured over the run of the show were by such authors as Edgar Allen Poe, Virginia Swain, Rupert Croft-Cooke, Anton Chekov, A. M. Burrage, George Moore. Guy de Maupassant, Emile Zola, Paul Ernst, Irvin S. Cobb, Zona Gale, H. G. Wells, James Thurber, Dorothy B. Hughes, David Grubb, Christopher Isherwood, Katherine Anne Porter, Ambrose Bierce, Michael Fessier, Ellis St. Joseph, Charles Dickens, McKnight Malmar, Algernon Blackwood, Cornell Woolrich, George G. Toudouze, John Collier, Jack London, Walker G. Everett. and Nelson S. bond and William F. Harvey, the authors featured in this episode.
"Mr Mergenthirker's Lobblies" was first published in Scribner's Magazine, November 1937. It was selected for inclusion in Edward J. O'Brien's The Best Short Stories of 1938, and was the title story in bond's first short story collection. It has been reprinted many times. Bond went on to write three additional stories about the Lobblies and adapted the original story for a play in 1957. The story was filmed twice as a television movie, once in 1947 and once in 1948It was also filmed for The Philco Television Playhouse in 1949; Kraft Theatre in 1951 (and a sequel, "Lobblies Never Lie," in 1953); and as an Austrian television movie, Die Kobibs'chen des Mr. Miggletwitcher (1969). The story was also the basis of a radio series (sorry, no information available).
"A newspaper reporter is startled when a prospective informant, Mr. Mergenthwirker, tells him the source pf all his information is actually an invisible pair of 'lobblies' named Jakepath and Henry."
"August Heat" was first published in William Fryer Harvey's 1910 collection Midnight House and Other Other Tales . Considered a classic horror story it has been reprinted numerous times; ISFDb lists over forty anthologies in English alone, and The FictionMags Index lists over 45 anthology and magazine reprints. The story has been adapted for television at least three times -- for Danger (1950), On Camera (1955), and Great Ghost Tales (1961), The story was also adapted at least three other times for radio -- twice for Suspense (1945 and 1948), and Hallmark Playhouse (1949). There was even a comic book adaptation of the story that appeared in DC Comics' Secrets of the Sinister House #12, July 1973.
"During an oppressive heat wave, an artist is inspired to create hiss finest work -- a hurried sketch of a criminal in the dock immediately after a judge has pronounced sentence. He is somewhat startled, later that day, to meet a man who looks exactly like the man in his sketch."
Enjoy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMgZax74np0&list=PLAqoiMHG3Z0JlORVMPxKTRbJ33SKzZrWR
Vanguard Records, the mostly folk with some jazz and other items company, put out a double-album of SLEEP NO MORE readings on vinyl, which my mother thought looked weird and so wouldn't front me the money to buy it when I was ten. It gives you some sense of how sad that made me that I remember this clearly...didn't actually hear SLEEP NO MORE for several more years, but i certainly recognized the writers cited on the sleeve.
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