Although Stephen King is primarily known for his novels, he is also an excellent short story writer, coming out every few years with a new collection. One of these, 1993's Nightmares and Dreamscapes, contains several good pieces, but by far my favorite (as well as one of my all-time favorite Stephen King stories) is Crouch End. Named for a London suburb, the setting of the story, it concerns itself with alternate worlds and the "thin places" on Earth through which passage is sometimes possible...
The story is told through a flashback at the local police station as young American tourist Doris Freeman is relating her harrowing ordeal to the officers on duty there. Doris, her husband Lonnie, and their two children are on vacation, first to England and later Barcelona. While in London Lonnie decides to visit a business contact living in Crouch End, and Doris is going with him in a cab, the kids having remained at the hotel with a sitter. It is getting late in the day as they arrive, and Lonnie has foolishly lost his friend's address. The cab parks near a phone booth and he goes there to make a call, and Doris soon follows after him. Lonnie gets his address, but as they both look back at the cab, it is gone...and then they notice that the scenery around them has changed as well. During the next few hours...well, this is where I get off the storytelling bus and you'll just have to get on yourself to see what happens...
Crouch End reminds me of times in my otherwise ordinary, mundane life in which I discern that things around me aren't quite "right"...that something undecipherable has changed and it's not necessarily for the better. Wanting to believe that I am a sensible person, I attribute these feelings to my own imagination and propensity for the dramatic...after all, I do like to read Stephen King's books. So no, I'm not talking about entering a parallel universe or crossing over into another dimension...although there are some areas around Gainesville that are frankly hair-raising in their creepiness, one of them being near my workplace and marked by a prevalence of strange people and an overriding sense of wrongness. I have also heard of haunted house stories from people whom I otherwise would regard as completely rational and grounded in reality. When I used to work the graveyard shift at my job, I would listen to a late-night radio talk show that catered to these kinds of thoughts...we humans do tend toward the melodramatic, don't we...
Crouch End is a tribute to the horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, and King references much of his material in this short tale. The two police officers, the seasoned Vetter and the novice Farnham, play an important role in how the story ends. Whether or not there is any true basis for the kind of scenario presented here is one thing: what I'm sure of is that there are many, many such places scattered all over the world that the locals regard in much the same, wary manner as those in Crouch End, even if everything is ultimately explainable in terms of our own reality...
Well, that's my "spooky" Halloween article, even if it is a couple of weeks early...
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