Whether Silvia Richards was aware of it or not, this would be one of, if not the, first Mythos tome invented by a woman author. An interesting addition was the source for an “alternate formula”: Falconer’s Mystical Formulae of the Middle Ages. As a screenplay, there’s a rather admirable skill in boiling Lovecraft’s narrative (all ~17,500 words of it) down to something that could play in less than twenty-four minutes (a half-hour timeslot has to leave room for commercials) her abridgement was probably about 6,000 words (24 pages) total. Notably, she retains most if not all of the audio cues-animal noises and suchlike-which the story contains, which translate well into the new medium.Īs a production, the radioplay is interesting for the effort to reproduce the accents, the sounds of whipporwills, the pronounciation of the odd names. Richards retains all the essential plot points of Lovecraft’s story and several key passages, although much of his language is lost in abridgement and change in presentation.
Henry Armitage narrates the entire story, as though reporting in live from Dunwich (here pronounced correctled as Dunnich). Wells’ The War of the Worlds, as a mock news-broadcast, but the asides for vividly audio-acted scenes and music make it much more of a dramatization. It begins like Orson Welles’ infamous 1938 broadcast of H. Silvia Richards’ screenplay makes many necessary adaptations for a radio drama. It did not originally feature stories involving science fiction or the supernatural, but increasingly featured more and more such adaptations during its run. The show was called Suspense and began broadcasting in 1940, lasting until 1962. On Hallowe’en night (although many newspapers list it as playing on 1 November), a radio adaptation of “The Dunwich Horror,” written by Silvia Richards, was performed by Ronald Colman.
The following year, “The Dunwich Horror” lent its name to a paperback edition The Dunwich Horror (1945, Bath House), an armed services edition The Dunwich Horror and Other Weird Stories (1945). Despite wartime paper shortages, the story was reprinted in the omnibus Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (1944). It was not republished until a decade later, when Arkham House brought out the first collection of Lovecraft’s fiction, The Outsider and Others (1939). Lovecraft was first published in Weird Tales (Apr 1929).
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