Ghost Stories and Audiobooks: A Guest Post from Erik Larson, Author of No One Goes Alone
Audiobook $20.00
No One Goes Alone: A Novel
No One Goes Alone: A Novel
By
Erik Larson
Narrated by
Julian Rhind-Tutt
,
Erik Larson
In Stock Online
Audiobook $20.00
No One Goes Alone is an audiobook original ghost story rooted in history perfect for people who want a thrilling and chilling fictional tale of the supernatural but grounded by real people and real events. Below, you’ll find Erik Larson’s inspiration behind the story as well as why he felt it was destined for an audiobook format rather than a physical book.
No One Goes Alone is an audiobook original ghost story rooted in history perfect for people who want a thrilling and chilling fictional tale of the supernatural but grounded by real people and real events. Below, you’ll find Erik Larson’s inspiration behind the story as well as why he felt it was destined for an audiobook format rather than a physical book.
Have I ever seen a ghost? No. Would I like to? Yes. (I think.) But that had nothing to do with why I wrote No One Goes Alone.
I love a good ghost story, so one day back in 2006, during a national tour for my nonfiction book,Thunderstruck, I decided to write one of my own, the kind of story I myself would like to read. I had time for the enterprise. Book tours are marked by periods of boredom, punctuated by, for me, the terror associated with flying in small aircraft from venue to venue. I also had a trove of unused material on hand that I had collected while researching the book, which chronicles the strange intersection in the careers of Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of wireless, and Hawley Harvey Crippen, England’s second-most famous murderer.
In its earliest days, wireless was deemed so utterly spooky that it was thought to provide a gateway to the afterlife, a charmingly bizarre notion that prompted me to explore the Victorian-era’s obsession with the occult. I stumbled upon the Society for Psychical Research, a decidedly sober organization devoted to the scientific investigation of allegedly supernatural events. Its president, for a time, was William James, the pioneering Harvard psychologist. I was delighted to learn that the SPR even had a Committee on Haunted Houses, which investigated, and debunked, hundreds of reported residential hauntings.
An idea popped into my head: I’d write a ghost story with footnotes, a wholly fictional tale underpinned with historical fact. I had no plans to publish the story, other than possibly displaying it on my website. Over the years, I tinkered with it (procrastination being my superpower) until something remarkable happened. No, I was not visited by a ghost. Rather, the publishing industry underwent a change that created what I considered to be the ideal vehicle for my story—the so-called “audio original.” I say ideal because I truly believe that ghost stories are best told aloud, preferably beside a crackling fire, as tree branches claw at the windows.
The result was No One Goes Alone, which centers on an expedition, led by a fictive version of William James, to investigate troubling events on an island off the coast of Cornwall. The story no longer has footnotes, because my daughter who directs podcasts assured me footnotes would be too awkward to narrate. Instead, I appended a brief essay on sources, which I narrate myself, though with far less skill than the book’s primary narrator, the brilliant Julian Rhind-Tutt.
Perhaps it’s unkind of me, but I do hope the story causes you many sleepless nights and drives you to doublecheck your basement door—because that is indeed the place where all horrors reside.