So has anyone here listened to this yet? Really excellent Radio 4 adaptation of
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward in a modern-day setting, in ten parts, framed as episodes from an investigative podcast:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06spb8w
The premise involves a man (British) and a woman (American), based in the UK, who do a weekly podcast called 'Mystery Machine', and who start out taking a suitably skeptical view (as is the Lovecraftian convention) about the mysterious disapparition of Ward from a locked asylum cell following a visit from his old psychiatrist and the revelation that he was secretly the descendent of a notorious occultist named Joseph Curwen. The story in this version only takes that as a starting point, however, and considerably extends the narrative reach, taking in both elements of the Cthulhu mythos not featured in the original novel and real-world historical facts, such as actual 20th-century cult figures (Crowley, Manson, LaVey) and the occult origins of Nazism in the Thule and Vril societies, and blends them seamlessly in exactly the same way Lovecraft did, casually mentioning Abdul Alhazred in the same breath as John Dee.
[SPOILERS]
The liberties taken with the story work well, as a rule. Ward is no longer a distant descendent of Curwen, but his grandson, and only a couple of decades separate the former's death (or rather disappearance) and the latter's birth. Curwen himself is no longer the main agent of sorcery but merely one of a large number of vessels of the soul of an ancient Mesopotamian wizard; there is no intimation that he is corporeally resurrected by Ward and the plot point of Ward happening to be Curwen's exact physical double (perhaps the silliest non-explicitly-supernatural bit in the original) is absent, as is Curwen's preternatural longevity. The way the documentary team's role gradually moves from merely investigative to playing an active part in the ongoing story unfolding across two continents is well handled, and some parts are genuinely tense, even scary. The inclusion of elements from other HPL stories doesn't seem gratuitous but fits well with the overall narrative - in particular, the ancient world-spanning secret cult is straight out of 'The Call of Cthulhu', which I find to be the most effective and scary aspect of that story, much more so than the slightly silly monster that Cthulhu himself turns out to be.
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The only bad thing I have to say about it is that the voice acting is a little over-done at points and, this being a BBC production with American characters, some of them are clearly voiced by British actors who haven't quite nailed the accent. But these are fairly minor quibbles. Highly recommended.