Richards retains all the essential plot points of Lovecraft’s story and several key passages, although much of his language is lost in abridgement and change in presentation. Henry Armitage narrates the entire story, as though reporting in live from Dunwich (here pronounced correctled as Dunnich). Wells’ The War of the Worlds, as a mock news-broadcast, but the asides for vividly audio-acted scenes and music make it much more of a dramatization.

It begins like Orson Welles’ infamous 1938 broadcast of H. Silvia Richards’ screenplay makes many necessary adaptations for a radio drama. It did not originally feature stories involving science fiction or the supernatural, but increasingly featured more and more such adaptations during its run. The show was called Suspense and began broadcasting in 1940, lasting until 1962. On Hallowe’en night (although many newspapers list it as playing on 1 November), a radio adaptation of “The Dunwich Horror,” written by Silvia Richards, was performed by Ronald Colman. The following year, “The Dunwich Horror” lent its name to a paperback edition The Dunwich Horror (1945, Bath House), an armed services edition The Dunwich Horror and Other Weird Stories (1945). Despite wartime paper shortages, the story was reprinted in the omnibus Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (1944). It was not republished until a decade later, when Arkham House brought out the first collection of Lovecraft’s fiction, The Outsider and Others (1939).

Lovecraft was first published in Weird Tales (Apr 1929).

The Dunwich Horror by H.P. Lovecraft