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 Outsider by H P Lovecraft

“The Out­sider” is a short sto­ry that Love­craft wrote between March and August 1921, it was first pub­lished in Weird Tales, April 1926. In this work, a mys­te­ri­ous indi­vid­ual who has been liv­ing alone in a cas­tle for as long as he can remem­ber decides to break free in search of human con­tact and light. “The Out­sider” is one of Love­craft’s most com­mon­ly reprint­ed works and is also one of the most pop­u­lar sto­ries ever to be pub­lished in Weird Tales.

“The Out­sider” com­bines hor­ror, fan­ta­sy, and goth­ic fic­tion to cre­ate a night­mar­ish sto­ry, con­tain­ing themes of lone­li­ness, the abhu­man, and the after­life. Its epi­graph is from John Keats’ 1819 poem “The Eve of St. Agnes”.