You look at Sergeant Gordon sometime, Farnham, and ask yourself why his hair is dead white at forty. So I have my lager, and then I’m not so scared. There are more strange things happen right here in this quiet six or eight blocks than anywhere else in London, I’ll take my oath. If you’re here half as long as I’ve been, you’ll see your share, too. But I’ve seen a lot of strange things in Crouch End. He thought Crouch End was suburban and, tell the truth, dull as dishwater. “You think Crouch End’s a very quiet place, don’t you?”įarnham shrugged.
#Stephen king crouch end online Pc
His face was deeply lined and his nose was a map of broken veins-he liked his six cans of Harp a night, did PC Vetter. He peered at Farnham through a haze of drifting smoke. “There’s a good boy.” He lit it with a wooden match from a bright red railway box, shook it out, and tossed the match stub into Farnham’s ashtray. “Give us a fag, Farnham,” Vetter said, looking a little amused. “Perhaps so, sir,” he said, “but, respectfully, I still think I know a piece of whole cloth when I see one. He was twenty-seven, and it was hardly his fault that he had been posted here from Muswell Hill to the north, or that Vetter, who was nearly twice his age, had spent his entire uneventful career in the quiet London backwater of Crouch End. “You don’t mean you believe any part of it?” “It’ll go in the back file,” Vetter agreed, and looked around for a cigarette. “She was an American woman,” he said finally, as if that might explain the story she had told. “This one’ll look odd come the morning light,” PC Vetter said. He looked at the typewriter and the stack of blank forms on the shelf beside it. PC Vetter closed his notebook, which he’d almost filled as the American woman’s strange frenzied story had poured out. London was asleep-but of course, London never sleeps deeply, and its dreams are uneasy. Outside the Crouch End police station, Tottenham Lane was a small dead river. He is a one-man boom in the publishing of horror in our time.īy the time the woman had finally gone, it was nearly two-thirty in the morning. And he is so exceedingly generous in his support of the work of other writers that his name stands behind (or on the paperback cover) of many books every year by others. At this writing King is just past forty and already a phenomenal worldwide success, and the evolution of the horror novel has been advanced more by his works than those of any writer in the history of the genre. In Lovecraft there is only one reality, cosmic and evilly inhuman. And he does so here only by adopting the borrowed posture of “The Call of Cthulhu,” that the elder gods are real, distinguishing his own approach by maintaining that they are real in an other or alternate universe connected to ours only at spots such as Crouch End in London. Todd’s Shortcut” to a concern with alterations in base or consensus reality. This story is the closest King approaches, except in the odd, surreal “Big Wheels,” and perhaps in “Mrs. While Stephen King’s “The Mist” is the premier example to date in his works of a story concerned with shifting realities, “Crouch End,” King’s Lovecraftian Cthulhu mythos story, occupies a more borderline position. He is in fact the Dickens of the contemporary horror field: his unparallelled popularity and moral stance, his irrevocable commitment to popular culture and commerce, his flair for storytelling and entertainment, his seemingly tireless energy, his rejection by the majority of the guardians of high art. It is a tribute to King’s range of talent that he, like Dickens, can work outside his ordinary metier upon occasion.
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