How I Got To Lovecraft Step One: Stephen King

Why do I want to write in H.P. Lovecraft’s world?

I blame Uncle Steve.

Stephen King has been in my life for as long as I can remember. From Carrie all the way to Holly Gibney in The Outsider, he has kept me spellbound for more than forty years. But one of his short stories reached down and touched me in a very deep, primal way. 

Crouch End.

The tale is fairly straightforward. An American couple visiting London is late for dinner with a friend. They hail a taxi, only to realize they have lost the friend’s address. When they stop to call for directions from a phone booth (oh, those pre-cellphone, GPS days), the taxi driver speeds off.

They are stranded in a strange neighborhood where nothing looks right.

Even the sky is an eerie, gelatinous red.

Fast-forward a few hours.

The wife bursts into a police station screaming about monsters and a missing husband.

A young constable takes her statement. When the woman leaves, the policeman turns to his superior with a ‘what was she smoking?’ look.

The detective leans back in his chair and utters the words that would change my life.

“Sometimes I wonder about Dimensions. This fellow Lovecraft was always writing about Dimensions. Dimensions close to ours. Full of these immortal monsters that would drive a man mad at one look.”

What?! 

Del Rey Cover Art by Michael Whelan

Ok, Uncle Steve. Homicidal cars, rabid dogs, alien clowns…I’ll buy those. But monsters that drive a man mad with one look? Monsters that travel across dimensions and reach into our world? I couldn’t resist. I chased down the Lovecraft lead. I found his stories in a series of 1980’s Del Rey paperbacks. Lurking beneath these amazing covers were tales of other-worldly creatures living on the edge of space. Of a god-like monster slumbering in an underwater city somewhere in the South Pacific.

Then I came across these words, from a man I knew I would never call Uncle Howard.

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live in a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”

We shouldn’t voyage far, I thought, but we do.

And Lovecraft was going to tell me all about it.

I couldn’t wait.

A Rare Unthreatening Day In Crouch End

FUN FACT: Did you know that Crouch End is an actual place in North London? It was where the 2004 zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead was filmed.