Wednesday, July 04, 2018

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.185: The Whisperer in Darkness on The Graveyard Shift

Dudley Knight’s rich tones provide the narration for one of my favourite unabridged audio renditions of a Lovecaft tale: The Whisperer in Darkness, which Knight read as part of his Graveyard Shift radio show in the 1970s. The version of this which is freely available to download online sounds as if it has been recorded on to cassette tape, and direct from a transistor radio: the background hiss and crackle  which subsequently ends up accompanying Knight’s reading of the tale surprisingly adds to the sense of mystery and growing dread - as if the recording has been recovered from some lost archive of Old Time Radio from the Thirties or Forties, or that Knight is relaying the tale through an old-fashioned dial-up telephone from some the depths of some cosmc abyss. In any case, it s one of the most evocative readings of Lovecraft’s work I have yet heard.

All four hours or so of the reading are available here

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