Radio 4’s new H.P. Lovecraft adaptation will give you the chills

Of all the many things I’ve learned from the radio so far this decade, the most deranging is that the universe is the dream of the god Azathoth. Not unreasonably, Azathoth yearns to wake up and visit his creation. In The Whisperer in Darkness (Radio 4), a crusty coven of drug-addled neopagans seek to realise this wish by summoning Azathoth through a mystic portal they’ve opened — just off the B1084 in Suffolk.

Fools! Don’t they realise that they risk unleashing forces they don’t understand? Waking Azathoth would mean there will be no dreamer to dream the dream and so not just Suffolk but all reality would be obliterated as a result.

When a former member of this neopagan coven disappears in mysterious circumstances, our heroes Matthew Heawood and Kennedy Fisher investigate, and find a conspiracy embroiling witches, drugs, secret government operations and, less surprisingly, tailbacks on the A12.

Such, at least, is the premise of Julian Simpson’s virtuosic ten-part adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s horror novella from 1930. Simpson shifts the action from 20th-century New England to 21st-century East Anglia, and in so doing makes the latter appear even weirder than it did in W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.

Effectively, Simpson redescribes Suffolk as an occult epicentre. Dunwich, the port lost to the North Sea, is imagined as wiped out by medieval demons rather than rising tides. The many witches who populated Suffolk before James I’s goons wasted them become tools in necromancer John Dee’s cunning plan to push the Armada off course and win his queen’s gratitude. Wartime nuclear-weapons testing on Orford Ness and the 1980 Rendlesham Forest incident when a UFO was spotted near an air base also figure in the drama.