Cosmic Horror

"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…?"