#49 Dark Shadows: The House by the Sea

My Randomoid Selectortron leaves Davros to commence his trial and lands me at...

Dark Shadows: The House by the Sea

Starring: Colin Baker as Gerard Conway, also delivering other characters' dialogue in narration
Format: Mostly single-actor narrated single CD (or download) with no episode breaks.
Silly? Yes, in a campy horror-movie way.
Standalone? This is the first part of Big Finish's 1973 Dark Shadows arc. Its ending points forward into subsequent stories and there are many rewards for knowledge of TV Dark Shadows events. Aesthetically, The House by the Sea does work as an experience in itself, if you don't mind something that's obviously a small step in a greater narrative. 
Recommended? Yes, unless you dislike hearing Colin Baker's voice.

My reactions to this story contain spoilers for it, and possibly mild spoilers for the rest of the 1973 arc.

Before listening

I've listened to The House by the Sea two or three times. It is the most Colin Baker-packed audio I have ever heard. Most or possibly all of it is a tape recorded by Colin Baker's character Gerard Conway in which he describes his experiences in Collinsport; most of the dialogue is being told by Gerard, doing different voices for different characters. In effect, Colin Baker plays a large number of characters. A couple other voices do show up on the tape, relatively briefly, so that it's not strictly a one-man show.
I like The House by the Sea a lot but it is a lot of Colin Baker, which might be a contraindication for some listeners. It is a well-told horror story with a good deal of black humor in it, and I am looking forward to hearing it again. I expect relistening will simply confirm my already-established opinion; possibly I'll notice 1973 arc connections I hadn't noticed before.

After listening

The House by the Sea is tremendously interconnected with other Dark Shadows plots. Gerard learns cryptic bits and pieces about many past events in Collinsport, and these events are all things that happened in the TV show. The tiny pieces that Gerard learns are enough to carry the story of The House by the Sea forward, since the practical upshot for Gerard is more in the combined magnitude of multiple hauntings and curses than in the details of any one haunting or curse. I would say that this story rewards knowledge of TV Dark Shadows rather than presuming that knowledge.
Elizabeth Collins is an important character in Dark Shadows, being the matriarch of the 20th century Collins. She's established in continuity as surviving through the 1990s, but her actress Joan Bennett is dead, making the character's continued presence with the Collins family difficult to portray. The equally important character of Barnabas was recast using a plot device to explain the change of voice, but Elizabeth is not a supernatural being and not as easy to recast that way. In The House by the Sea, since Gerard Conway is narrating his memory of conversations with other characters instead of recording their voices directly, we can have some Elizabeth Collins dialogue, which Colin Baker delivers as an Englishman doing an impression of a dignified elderly American woman. Knowing the character's significance, I find working her into the 1973 arc in this way to be a nice touch. It's a fairly small part of the audio but I think it's worth mentioning.
The audio picture in The House by the Sea is a bit strange in places: it is mostly straightforwardly Gerard talking into the tape recorder while we hear the sounds of the house (and ghosts) around him, but there are moments in which additional background audio is present which matches the events being narrated rather than the frame of Gerard narrating them. This seems to correlate to narrated events in which something supernatural was happening, rather than being simple filler for the audio presentation.
The ending of The House by the Sea moves one playing piece on the Collinsport board from where it was resting at the end of the TV series back into play for use in subsequent 1973 stories. It is clearly an incremental step and not a full narrative resolution, but it is also aesthetically a suitable ending point for this story and, from the narrow viewpoint of this particular audio, not necessarily a cliffhanger.
The House by the Sea is good. It improves with knowledge of the narrative tapestry of which it's a part, but it's atmospheric and engaging enough in itself. If you're comfortable having Colin Baker narrate at you for an hour, do listen.