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Lord Dunsany
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Update: I found my own answer. The TV episode happens to be a faithful rendition of Lord Dunsany's 1916 play, A Night at an Inn. The play as written is available at Gutenberg,org (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/...), but I liked reading the play most from the book provided at Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/anightata....
Reading the play is fast and easy, 20 minutes tops since it's a one-act. The virtue of having read the play first is that if one misses a word from the TV episode--the sound quality is not great--one knows basically what was said at the point of that missing word.
It truly is wonderful to see a Lord Dunsany play enacted faithfully like this!
Weird Fiction
Books mentioned in this topic
A Night at an Inn (other topics)The King of Elfland's Daughter (other topics)
The Gods of Pegana (other topics)
Lin Carter's Simrana Cycle (other topics)
Authors mentioned in this topic
Lord Dunsany (other topics)C.L. Moore (other topics)
Born in London, heir to an old Irish peerage, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany, FRSL FRGS (1878-1957) was commonly known as Lord Dunsany. An Anglo-Irish writer and dramatist, he published more than 90 books during his lifetime. His output consisted of hundreds of short stories, plays, novels, and essays. He gained a name in the 1910s as a great writer in the English-speaking world. Best known today are the 1924 fantasy novel The King of Elfland's Daughter, a former group read here, and his first book, The Gods of Pegana (1905), which depicts a fictional pantheon. We as a group have just read (May 2024) eight more of his stories, reprinted in Lin Carter's Simrana Cycle. Many critics feel his early work laid grounds for the fantasy genre.
I just found an unexpected use of Lord Dunsany's work. One of his stories serves as the basis of Season One, Episode Eight of the TV series Suspense, a 30-minute show, and titled "A Night at the Inn." It first aired April 26, 1949 and starred none other than Boris Karloff. It can easily be found on YouTube if you're interested. The show was not that exceptional itself, but I enjoyed it just for being based on a Dunsany story. Speaking of that, does anyone know where I can find that particular Dunsany short story? I'd like to read it now that I have viewed a version of it.