BBC built a library full of dead people

BBC Studios Audio announced “The Haunted Library” this week, a new scripted horror podcast narrated by Colin Morgan and Katie Leung.

Instead of inventing another cinematic universe, they are raiding the old shelves.

The series will adapt classic gothic and horror literature, beginning with Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.” Future stories will include “Frankenstein,” “The Turn of the Screw,” “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” “Carmilla” and “The Invisible Man,” along with shorter works by Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, Algernon Blackwood and M.R. James.

Morgan serves as principal narrator, with Leung appearing as a guest narrator.

Two episodes will arrive each week, and the series launches globally on September 21 across major podcast platforms. UK listeners will also find it on BBC Sounds, while episodes will be available on YouTube. Apple Podcasts will offer early access and ad-free listening through a paid Haunted Library Plus subscription.

Audio is honestly perfect territory for M.R. James and Algernon Blackwood.

Those stories were born long before movies trained audiences to expect something jumping into frame every seven minutes. Half their power comes from somebody calmly describing an impossible thing until your own imagination supplies whatever should be standing outside the window.

And “Carmilla” deserves every new audience it can get. Sheridan Le Fanu wrote his lesbian vampire novella in 1872, more than twenty years before Bram Stoker published “Dracula.”

So yes, BBC. Turn the lights off and start reading.