Flashback Radio: "Evening Primrose"

For the month of October and the Halloween season, I thought it would be fun to revisit some classic Old-Time Radio horrors. My friend and former podcast co-commentator, Jason, was up for it. We started with "The Thing on the Fourble Board."

“Evening Primrose” first aired on Escape on November 5, 1947. It proved so popular it was repeated on September 12, 1948 and August 25, 1949.  This dark fantasy story of a poet who, fed up with the modern world, goes to live in hiding in a department store, only to find there's already a whole wainscot society living there. I society who employ the shadowy Dark Men to keep their existence hidden.

The teleplay is based on a 1940 short story by John Collier. It was also adapted into a musical by Stephen Sondheim, starring Anthony Perkins, in 1966 as an episode of ABC Stage 67.

Trey: I first encountered the story in Dennis Hartwell's seminal 1987 horror anthology The Dark Descent. It's perhaps less pure horror story than some of the others we've listened, but I think suitably uncanny for the season. What did you think?

Jason: Suitably peculiar! The story's atmosphere of strangeness was enhanced by the now-distant cultural norms of decades long gone, the past being a foreign country, as they say. 

The elements of world building presented were, for me, the most interesting aspects of this tale. 

This society of nocturnal free-loaders is noted as accumulating in their secret havens following periods of economic upheaval and seem symptomatic of modernity. Their cultural enforcers, the mysterious dark men, could plausibly have been with us since about the same time as the proliferation of department stores in the US, with the funeral industry becoming a widespread phenomenon at approximately the same time in the late19th century. 

I particularly enjoyed the revelation that the society of store-dwellers were socially stratified by the perceived status of their home shops. 

The next time convenience or necessity drives me into a Walmart, or some similar purveyor of goods, I will have a close look at the nooks and crannies. I have joked in the past about Walmart adding a funerary department to its extensive list, so it can truly provide cradle-to-grave services, but if such a thing should ever come to pass, I'll know what's really going on.

Trey: Keep us updated! Yeah, the worldbuilding was good. I particularly liked the hints that the store-dwellers had become something other than completely human, much in the same way subterranean peoples tend to change or "degenerate" in the works of Machen, Lovecraft, or Howard.