Join us on Fri­day at a lit­tle after 12 noon or 4pm Pacif­ic time, 8pm or 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 pro­gramme will not begin 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: The Rats In The Walls by H P Lovecraft

“The Rats in the Walls” was writ­ten in August–September 1923. It was first pub­lished in Weird Tales, March 1924

Wikipedia says of H P Love­craft:

Howard Phillips Love­craft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937) was an Amer­i­can writer of weird and hor­ror fic­tion, who is known for his cre­ation of what became known as the Cthul­hu Mythos.

Born in Prov­i­dence, Rhode Island, Love­craft spent most of his life in New Eng­land. In 1913, he wrote a crit­i­cal let­ter to a pulp mag­a­zine that ulti­mate­ly led to his involve­ment in pulp fic­tion. Dur­ing the inter­war peri­od, he wrote and pub­lished sto­ries that focused on his inter­pre­ta­tion of human­i­ty’s place in the uni­verse. In his view, human­i­ty was an unim­por­tant part of an uncar­ing cos­mos that could be swept away at any moment. These sto­ries also includ­ed fan­tas­tic ele­ments that rep­re­sent­ed the per­ceived fragili­ty of anthropocentrism.

The Black Mass art­work was cre­at­ed by Ter­ry Lightfoot.