I’ve set myself the task for 2024 of reading and then writing about 25 pieces of London fiction I haven’t read before. This is number 16 in the sort-of series.
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Crouch End. It’s a weird name, when you think about it. Perhaps that’s what Stephen King did one day (or night). He thought about the name and was inspired to imagine terrifying things happening there. Perhaps he looked up the toponymy of the name, thought by some to refer to the point where the influence of a church parish expired. Whatever, King devised a version of the place where dark forces mustered and made visiting Americans disappear.
It starts like this:
“By the time the woman had finally gone, it was nearly two-thirty in the morning. Outside the Crouch End police station, Tottenham Lane was a small dead river. London was asleep…but London never sleeps deeply, and its dreams are uneasy.”
The story was published in 1980. The version I stumbled across online informs us that it also appeared that year in a collection of short stories by various authors called New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, meaning it relates to a genre of fiction horror writer H.P. Lovecraft originated. Lovecraft subscribed to cosmicism, a philosophy that holds human beings to be insignificant.
How relaxed are you feeling so far…?
The woman mentioned in the opening line of King’s story is Doris Freeman, who is visiting London with her husband Lonnie Freeman and their two children.
She had been in the Crouch End cop shop because Lonnie had first seen something horrible down a hole while investigating a moaning sound coming from behind a hedge, and then gone missing from her side following unpleasant happenings in an underpass.
They had already encountered a deformed cat, a two terrifying children and a black cab driver who, having affably conveyed them from Haymarket, vanished just when they had needed him most. The purpose of their excursion was to pay a social call. Their children, happily, stayed at the hotel.
The London of King’s tale is described as “a great sprawling warren”, though Doris, early on, considered herself yet to visit a place “where people were kinder or more civilised”. That was before her peace of mind was disturbed by newspaper billboards announcing “60 lost in Underground crash” and she and Lonnie arrived in the “quiet London backwater” where leather-jacketed youths have the heads of rats.
Doris’s account of their mishaps does not greatly surprise local veteran PC Vetter, who informs his youthful sidekick PC Farnham, an ambitious newcomer to the station, that he’d seen “a lot of strange things here in Crouch End”. He may or may not include in that bracket another Met colleague, Sergeant Raymond, who “liked breaking pickpockets’ fingers like breadsticks”. But Doris knows only too well what Vetter means. Eventually, the sceptical Farnham will too.
But, hey, it’s not all smoking “runnels of black stuff” and “gray houses with high stoops and drawn green shades that seemed to stare at them like blind pensioners” in the Crouch End of old. There are phone boxes that work and have big, fat directories in them! There are folk at bus stops who offer you Player’s cigarettes to calm your nerves! And these days, Crouch End is the best place in the capital in which to live, according to the Sunday Times. But don’t expect me to go there for a while, if that’s OK.
John Vane is a pen name used by Dave Hill, editor and publisher of On London. Buy his London novel Frightgeist: A Tall Tale of Fearful Times here, here or here. Subscribe to his Substack too. Image of Crouch End from this YouTube audio reading.