Crouch End (short story)

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.

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 visions.

Doris relates how she and her husband were searching for a potential employer's house in Crouch End, but as they did so, they became lost. As they wandered the streets, their surroundings seemed to change subtly and become infested by what appeared to be monsters. Doris escaped with her life, but her husband was consumed by an enormous, hideous, otherworldly being implied to be the malevolent Lovecraftian goddess Shub-Niggurath. Newcomer Farnham dismisses the story as rubbish, but Vetter, who has policed Crouch End for decades, is not so sure, remembering similar missing person cases from years gone by. He speculates about other dimensions, and of Crouch End perhaps being a place where the divide between our world and another more demonic world is at its weakest.

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. Just moments before Vetter returns, Farnham walks around the street corner and is never seen again. Vetter retires soon after, and dies of a heart attack six months later. Doris returns to America with her children, where she attempts suicide and spends time in a rest home. The story ends with the statement that there are still strange occurrences in Crouch End, and that people are known to occasionally "...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."^[1] Bryan Pope of DVD Verdict rated the episode D+ and stated that the story doesn't work on television.^[2] Christopher Noseck of DVD Talk panned the episode in part because of the special effects, which he called "laughable".^[3]

The audiobook version of this story was narrated by actor Tim Curry.^[4]

See also

• Stephen King short fiction bibliography

References

External links

• Crouch End at the Internet Movie Database