Inspired by a recent post on morthil's blog concerning the famous poem about some pessimistic and death-bringing raven I once more became interested in literature-to-listen-to. The night I also watched some crappy movie, titled „Bram Stoker's Van Helsing“ which promises a lot but is nothing more but some stupid action-movie featuring a sexy fighting Transylvanian princess and a James Bond/Indiana Jones-like Van Helsing. Worst: the movie isn't only about Bram Stoker's Van Helsing (Bram Stoker actually never wrote something explicitly about Van Helsing, who is just some minor character in Dracula), but Marry Shelley's Frankenstein-Monster, some Werewolfs and other creatures of the night, that gather in the count's castle. All those stories are mixed up in a very stupid plot indeed.

Confused and frustrated I intended reading a bit of the classics afterwards and found some very strange jewels of audio-represented literature at Gutenberg-project.

Some very astonishing Audio-book versions of Bram Stoker's Dracula and Marry Shelley's Frankenstein are provided on the website of Gutenberg-project. What especially creates a very bizarre and somehow fitting atmosphere for those tales of monsters, that somehow sample technophobia in the dawn of technology, is the computer-generated voice that is “reading” the texts. Frankenstein's Monster himself seems to tell his story (even though the narrator is not the monster himself) and when the computer-voice intonates that in Transylvania time is running at a different pace, while the hero is leaving the well organized, pre-industrial zone of western Europe, en extra layer of horror is added to those victorian fantasies.
I wouldn't want to hear the whole books in that version but they are funny in a somehow metonymic and morbid way.
Besides I wasn't aware that there are so many audio-files at Gutenberg-project already.

There is also a human-read version of Shelley's Frankenstein, or modern Prometheus. I think I might try that one next time.