Join us on Fri­day at a lit­tle after 12 noon or 4pm Pacif­ic time 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. Our thanks as always to John Whit­ing, pro­duc­er of many of these record­ings, and of course to Erik Bauers­feld him­self.

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.

13 August: Shiddah & Kuziba by Isaac B. Singer

Shid­dah: Pat Franklyn
Kuz­i­ba: Erik Bauers­feld
Nar­ra­tor: Bernard Mayes

Tech­ni­cal Pro­duc­tion by: John Whit­ing
Adapt­ed and Pro­duced by: Erik Bauersfeld

A Moth­er dev­il and her baby trav­el to the earth’s sur­face and are lost to their own eter­nal fire­side below. On the sur­face they await a time when the light of the uni­verse will be extin­guished, when God and Satan will become one.

Wikipedia says of Isaac B. Singer:

Isaac Bashe­vis Singer (Novem­ber 11, 1903 – July 24, 1991) was a Pol­ish-born Jew­ish-Amer­i­can writer who wrote and pub­lished first in Yid­dish and lat­er trans­lat­ed him­self into Eng­lish with the help of edi­tors and col­lab­o­ra­tors. He was award­ed the Nobel Prize for Lit­er­a­ture in 1978. A lead­ing fig­ure in the Yid­dish lit­er­ary move­ment, he was award­ed two U.S. Nation­al Book Awards, one in Chil­dren’s Lit­er­a­ture for his mem­oir A Day Of Plea­sure: Sto­ries of a Boy Grow­ing Up in War­saw (1970) and one in Fic­tion for his col­lec­tion A Crown of Feath­ers and Oth­er Sto­ries (1974).

The Black Mass art­work was cre­at­ed by Ter­ry Lightfoot.