The Black Mass 10: The Witch Of The Willows by Lord Dunsany
Join us on Friday at a little after 12 noon or 4pm Pacific time (8pm and midnight in the UK) for another episode in the landmark radio drama series The Black Mass, created by the late Erik Bauersfeld and his colleagues at the Pacifica radio station KPFA in Berkeley, California, over fifty years ago. In 30 chilling tales of mystery, imagination and the human mind, The Black Mass brings you some of literature’s most haunting stories, by masters of the craft — many of whom are best-known in other fields.
Note that the episode will not start until the track playing at the top of the hour has finished, so the actual start time of the episode will be a few minutes after the hour.
Today: 10: “The Witch Of The Willows” by Lord Dunsany
Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany (24 July 1878 – 25 October 1957), was an Anglo-Irish writer and dramatist whose work, mainly fantasy, appeared under the name Lord Dunsany.
More than 90 books were published in his lifetime. Both original work and compilations have continued to appear. Dunsany’s œuvre includes many hundred published short stories, as well as plays, novels and essays. He gained great fame with his early short stories and plays, and in the 1910s was seen one of the great living writers of the English-speaking world; he is known best today for his 1924 fantasy novels The King of Elfland’s Daughter and The Gods of Pegāna, where he devised his own fictional pantheon and laid the groundwork for the fantasy genre.
He was the inventor of an asymmetric version of chess called Dunsany’s chess. Born and raised in London to the second-oldest title (created 1439) in the Irish peerage, Dunsany lived much of his life at what may be Ireland’s longest inhabited house, Dunsany Castle near Tara. He worked with W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, received an honorary doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin, was chess and pistol-shooting champion of Ireland, and travelled and hunted extensively. He died in Dublin from appendicitis.
The Black Mass artwork was created by Terry Lightfoot.