7.2 /10 1 Votes
Language English Originally published 1980 Country United States of America | 3.6/5 Goodreads Publication date 1980 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Published in New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1st release),Nightmares & Dreamscapes Similar Stephen King books, Other books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Crouch End is a horror story by Stephen King, originally published in New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1980), and republished in a slightly different version in King's Nightmares & Dreamscapes collection (1993). It contains distinct references to the horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft.
Contents
A television adaptation aired July 12, 2006 on TNT, as part of Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King. A song by British black metal/dark ambient band The Axis of Perdition uses excerpts from the story as lyrics.
Plot
Police constables Ted Vetter and Robert Farnham are working the night shift at a small station in the London suburb of Crouch End. They discuss the case of Doris Freeman, a young American woman who came in to report the disappearance of her husband, lawyer Lonnie Freeman. Nearly hysterical, Doris arrived in the station speaking of monsters and supernatural occurrences.
Doris relates how she and her husband got lost while searching for a potential employer's house in Crouch End. As they wandered the streets, their surroundings seemed to grow strange and threatening, before they encountered what appeared to be monstrous alien creatures. Lonnie was consumed by an enormous, hideous, otherworldly being implied to be the malevolent Lovecraftian goddess Shub-Niggurath, after which Doris fled and somehow found herself somehow back in the "normal world" again. Newcomer Farnham dismisses the story as a delusion caused by mental illness, but Vetter, who has policed Crouch End for decades, is not so sure, remembering a number of similar missing-person cases from years gone by. He speculates about other planes of existence, and of Crouch End perhaps being a location where the divide between our world and an alien, demonic world is somehow lesser.
Vetter goes out for a walk and, after contemplating the story for a while, Farnham wonders what has become of him. Leaving the station empty, he walks down the street in search of Vetter, and notices that something seems strangely different about the neighborhood. Farnham turns the corner at the bottom of the street and walks out of sight of the station - and is never seen again. Vetter returns from his walk just minutes later and can find no clue to his whereabouts. The official investigation into his vanishing can find no leads, and Vetter reaches retirement age soon after; he dies of a heart attack in his home six months later. Doris returns to America with her children, where she attempts suicide and spends time in a mental hospital, but eventually learns to live with the memory of Crouch End and is released. The story ends with the statement that there are still strange occurrences in Crouch End, and that, very occasionally, people are known to "...lose their way. Some lose their way forever."
Adaptations
The short story was adapted into an episode of TNT's Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King, starring Eion Bailey and Claire Forlani. Virginia Heffernan of The New York Times said that it "has a simpler charm" than previous episodes and that the couple's terror at being lost makes "a grand subject for horror." Bryan Pope of DVD Verdict rated the episode D+ and stated that the story doesn't work on television. Christopher Noseck of DVD Talk panned the episode in part because of the special effects, which he called "laughable".
The audiobook version of this story was narrated by actor Tim Curry.