41 stories · Episode 1 free
Press play. Lose the night.
Thrillers, horror, mysteries and stranger things. Episode 1 of every story plays free right here: no account, under 10 minutes. The rest continues in the Talecast app, coming soon.
Thriller
Thriller 5 episodes
2 a.m. A call from a dead man’s line, and a whisper with plans for a girl.
Episode 1 free · 7 min
Thriller 5 episodes
The overnight coach to Glasgow. Her little brother boards with a rucksack and won’t look at her.
Episode 1 free · 8 min
Thriller 5 episodes
A lame horse, a Saturday night race, and his brother in the saddle. Nobody else has noticed.
Episode 1 free · 7 min
Horror
Horror 5 episodes
Dawn: her forty hives are draped in mourning. Somebody has told the bees a lie she can’t take back.
Episode 1 free · 7 min
Horror 5 episodes
Something is knocking at the byre door, and every hawthorn on the road is in blossom. In October.
Episode 1 free · 7 min
Horror 4 episodes
He can name the pitch of every sound in the swamp. Tonight one of them is wrong.
Episode 1 free · 7 min
Mystery
Mystery 5 episodes
His stolen puppets are back on the beach after midnight, and someone is doing his voice.
Episode 1 free · 7 min
Mystery 5 episodes
Someone is setting the Pine Barrens alight at dusk, and her nephew is taking the blame.
Episode 1 free · 7 min
Mystery 5 episodes
Fifty-one years, every game balanced to the yard. Now the record doesn’t add up.
Episode 1 free · 8 min
Sci-fi
Sci-fi 4 episodes
Dad calls twice from the storm. Same voice. Only one of him knows the word.
Episode 1 free · 8 min
Sci-fi 5 episodes
Paid to keep a warning alive for ten thousand years. Forty years on, whose words is she saying?
Episode 1 free · 7 min
Sci-fi 5 episodes
A dying auctioneer gets his voice back through an implant. It says things he never meant.
Episode 1 free · 8 min
Fantasy
Fantasy 5 episodes
Something is breathing inside the castle wall. Her brother has started breathing with it.
Episode 1 free · 8 min
Fantasy 4 episodes
He has to auction off the man who gave him his voice. Then he reads the last lot on the bill.
Episode 1 free · 8 min
Fantasy 5 episodes
She forced an old blood-stopping verse on her soldier brother. Now his letters say it works.
Episode 1 free · 7 min
Fables
Fables 5 episodes
The government has him down as dead. One by one, the world starts to agree.
Episode 1 free · 7 min
Fables 5 episodes
The aspens he carved still talk in his voice, and they’re telling her what he never meant her to hear.
Episode 1 free · 8 min
Fables 4 episodes
Whatever a full house shouts three times comes true. Tonight he has one line.
Episode 1 free · 7 min
Mythology
Drama
Drama 4 episodes
The champion steer failed its DNA test. Every word of her statement was true. That was the problem.
Episode 1 free · 7 min
Drama 5 episodes
Two names, half-carved on the back of his mother’s grave: his, and the man he has loved for 53 years.
Episode 1 free · 8 min
Drama 5 episodes
His father’s last day with the band. The son is hiding what happens tomorrow morning.
Episode 1 free · 7 min
Comedy
Comedy 5 episodes
Every Saturday he tries to sell the plot beside his wife. Every Saturday the same man bids one dollar.
Episode 1 free · 7 min
Comedy 4 episodes
Thanksgiving turkey hotline. He says he’s Kyle. She says she’s Deb. Both are lying.
Episode 1 free · 8 min
Comedy 5 episodes
A ten-year-old writes to her MLA. The only answer comes from a caseworker telling one kind lie.
Episode 1 free · 8 min
Romance
Romance 5 episodes
A thousand-foot ore boat, a mail bucket on a rope, and a letter from someone who listens to her read the weather.
Episode 1 free · 7 min
Romance 5 episodes
Nine days every June. Her family never stays anywhere, and his land is the only place he’s been.
Episode 1 free · 7 min
Romance 5 episodes
Thirty years keeping score from the pavilion. Then an umpire starts signalling everything twice.
Episode 1 free · 8 min
Literary
Literary 4 episodes
The bell is ringing from a signal box bulldozed seventeen years ago. In her father’s rhythm.
Episode 1 free · 7 min
Literary 4 episodes
England v Germany, 1996. His wife can’t see him anymore, and she leaves at kick-off.
Episode 1 free · 7 min
Literary 4 episodes
She has photographed every moment her family owns. Today, everybody’s in on a secret but her.
Episode 1 free · 8 min
Literary 4 episodes
Behind a screen-wire mask, nobody can tell who he is. Not even the godfather about to fall for him.
Episode 1 free · 8 min
Literary 5 episodes
Clear sky, and sixty-two hundredths in the rain gauge. Every morning since she signed.
Episode 1 free · 8 min
Adventure
Adventure 4 episodes
Flood stage on the Mississippi. She needs one signature, and he has been taking something from her.
Episode 1 free · 7 min
Adventure 5 episodes
The dam will drown her hollow, so she’s moving her house up the ridge with a mule and some lard.
Episode 1 free · 8 min
Adventure 5 episodes
Forty miles across the moors in the dark. Only one of them knows what happened last time.
Episode 1 free · 7 min
Historical fiction
Historical fiction 5 episodes
Peshtigo, October 1871. Thirty-three feet down and still dry. Sunday is coming.
Episode 1 free · 8 min
Historical fiction 5 episodes
Thirty-one years in that kitchen. Now she needs one signature from a woman who would sooner burn Washington.
Episode 1 free · 7 min
Historical fiction 5 episodes
The night Italy enters the war, the café windows go in. Then a sergeant arrives with a list.
Episode 1 free · 7 min
Historical fiction 4 episodes
A dry autumn, a smouldering swamp, and a calendar moving toward one Sunday in October.
Episode 1 free · 7 min
Coming soon
New originals. Sleep while you can.
Around a hundred new thrillers, horror stories and mysteries, each produced as a full-cast audio drama: a different cast for every story, with sound design and music.
Thriller
At 3 a.m. a 911 dispatcher takes a whispered call from a little girl. The address is her own house.
Crime
At his Deaf twin’s first tattoo, an interpreter hears the artist confess to three murders. Now he has to warn her without the killer reading his hands.
Thriller
A true-crime podcaster finds an episode on his feed he never recorded. His newborn is crying in it.
Horror
Snowed in at a farmhouse viewing with her son, an estate agent realises the kind buyer knows the house far too well.