The Severn Valley is the setting of several fictional towns and other locations created by horror writer Ramsey Campbell. Part of the Cthulhu Mythos started by H.P. Lovecraft, the fictional milieu is arguably the most detailed mythos setting outside of Lovecraft Country itself. Horror fiction is, broadly, fiction in any medium intended to scare, unsettle or horrify the reader. ... John Ramsey Campbell (born January 4, 1946 in Liverpool) is a British writer, who is considered by many literary critics to be one of the greatest masters of horror fiction. ... Cthulhu mythos (often capitalized: Cthulhu Mythos) is the term coined by the writer August Derleth to describe the shared elements, characters, settings, and themes in the works of H.P. Lovecraft and associated writers. ... Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937) was an American author of fantasy, horror and science fiction, noted for combining these three genres within single narratives. ... Lovecraft Country is the New England setting, combining real and fictitious locations, used by H.P. Lovecraft in many of his weird fiction stories, and later elaborated by other writers working in the Cthulhu mythos genre. ...

Real-world location

The River Severn is an actual river in southwestern England. Campbell's stories mention various real-world locales, including the Cotswold Hills, ^[1] Berkeley, and the A38 motorway. ^[2] These references place "Campbell Country" in the southern part of Gloucestershire, roughly between the cities of Gloucester and Bristol. The Severn bridges crossing near the mouth of the River Severn The River Severn (Welsh: Afon Hafren) is the longest British river, at 354 kilometres (219 miles) long; it rises at an altitude of 610 metres on Plynlimon near Llanidloes, in the Cambrian Mountains, Mid Wales, and it passes through... Royal motto (French): Dieu et mon droit (Translated: God and my [birth]right) Englands location (dark green) within the British Isles Languages English (de facto) Capital London de facto Largest city London Area – Total Ranked 1st UK 130,395 km² Population – Total (mid-2004) – Total (2001 Census) – Density Ranked... The Cotswolds are a range of hills in central England, sometimes called the heart of England, a hilly area reaching over 300 m or 1000 feet. ... Location within the British Isles. ... A38 passing under M50 in Worcestershire The A38 is a major trunk road in England. ... Gloucestershire (pronounced ; GLOSS-ter-sher) is a county in South West England. ... Gloucester (pronounced ) is a city and district in south-west England, close to the Welsh border. ... Bristol is a unitary authority with city and ceremonial county status in South West England. ...

Ramsey Campbell

Campbell invented his locales when, as a 15-year-old Lovecraft fan, he submitted Lovecraftian pastiches, set in Lovecraft's New England, to Arkham House's August Derleth. "Derleth told me to abandon my attempts to set my work in Massachusetts," Campbell wrote in the introduction to his collection Cold Print, and he accordingly rewrote his stories with an English setting. His short story "The Tomb-Herd", for example, was originally set in Lovecraft's Kingsport, Massachusetts. It was transposed to the Cotswold town of Temphill when it appeared as "The Church in High Street", Campbell's first published story, in the 1962 Arkham House anthology Dark Mind, Dark Heart. The states of New England are Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. ... Arkham House is a weird fiction specialty publishing house founded by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei. ... August William Derleth (February 24, 1909 – July 4, 1971) was an American writer and anthologist. ... Official language(s) English Capital Boston Largest city Boston Area  - Total  - Width  - Length  - % water  - Latitude  - Longitude Ranked 44th 10,555 mi²; 27,360 km² 183 mi; 295 km 113 mi; 182 km 13. ... Kingsport is a fictional town in the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. ...

In that story, Campbell refers to hints "of actual worship of trans-spatial beings still practiced in such towns as Camside, Brichester, Severnford, Goatswood and Temphill," indicating that he had already conceived of most of the principal locations of his Severn Valley setting. At the time, the teenaged Campbell had never been to the actual Severn Valley; the imaginary landscapes he described may relate more to the post-World War II Merseyside scenes he was familiar with. He recalled in an interview: The Great Old Ones (also Old Ones or Cthulhu Cycle Deities) are a group of fictional deities in the Cthulhu mythos of H.P. Lovecraft. ... Combatants Allies: • Poland •UK & Commonwealth • France/Free France • Soviet Union • United States • China . ... Merseyside is a metropolitan county, located in the North West of England. ...

There was probably a period when I was reading and trying to imitate Lovecraft, whilst equally exploring what was then a considerably ruined Merseyside landscape. Whole slews of ruined streets, which I was perfectly happy to wander through on my way to odd, out of the way cinemas. And because I saw the city all around me as this kind of gothic, almost supernatural landscape, I think a lot of that fed into my writing. ^[3]

Campbell's first collection of short stories, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (1964), was filled with stories that take place in the Severn Valley setting, including "The Room in the Castle", "The Horror From the Bridge", "The Insects From Shaggai", "The Render of the Veils", "The Inhabitant of the Lake", "The Moon-Lens", "The Mine on Yuggoth", "The Plain of Sound", and "The Stone on the Island". His next collection, Demons by Daylight (1973), though described by Campbell as a conscious effort to throw off Lovecraft's influence, again used this Cthulhu Mythos-linked setting for several tales: "Potential", "The Sentinels", "The Interloper", "The Enchanted Fruit", "Made in Goatswood" and a metafictional examination of Campbell's own Lovecraftian beginnings called "The Franklyn Paragraphs". Metafiction is a kind of fiction which self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction. ...

After Demons by Daylight, Campbell returned to the Severn Valley sporadically, in such works as "Dolls" (in 1986's Scared Stiff), "The Tugging" (The Disciples of Cthulhu, 1996) and the 2003 novel The Darkest Part of the Woods. In 1995 he contributed a rather tongue-in-cheek story set in the Severn Valley, "The Horror Under Warrendown", to Made in Goatswood, a collection of stories by various writers set in Campbell's fictionalized Gloucestershire.

Locations

Some of the major sites of Campbell's Severn Valley include Brichester, Goatswood, Temphill, Severnford, Clotton and Camside.

Brichester

Brichester is the main town of Campbell's Severn Valley, the setting of several tales and often a background element of stories that take place elsewhere. (It plays the same role in Campbell's stories that Arkham does in Lovecraft's.) "These days Brichester has an impressively mundane surface," Campbell writes in "The Franklyn Paragraphs", "but I still sense that it may crack." Arkham is a fictional city in Massachusetts. ...

"The Enchanted Fruit" portrays "the daily press of Brichester, the false harsh rainbow of packed cars", and "churches robbed of dignity by plummeting iron balls" (though the protagonist recalls "streets where some lone house had struck him speechless with its silent pride, the noble bearing of its age and history").

Brichester has a wide variety of media outlets. "The Moon Lens" refers to the Brichester Weekly News. "The Tugging" establishes that the town also has a daily—The Brichester Herald, advertised as "Brichester's Evening Voice"—as well as a radio station, Radio Brichester. A reporter for the Herald, Ingels, is that story's main character; he complains at one point that the town lacks a TV studio. "The Franklyn Paragaphs" gives Brichester a horror fanzine, Spirited, while "Potential" describes an underground paper, the International Times.

"Cold Print" refers to Brichester's Ultimate Press, who are described as publishing the medieval heretic Johannes Henricus Pott, ^[4] a new 12th volume of the Revelations of Glaaki, and a line of bondage-related pornography. Brichester also has the True Light Press, mentioned in "The Franklyn Paragraphs", which turns out to be Roland Franklyn's self-publishing operation. Many fictional works of arcane literature appear in the Cthulhu mythos of H. P. Lovecraft. ...

Brichester Central Library appears in "The Franklyn Paragraphs", where Errol Undercliffe notes of it, "You couldn't get farther from a Lovecraft setting." It does, however, carry a copy of Roland Franklyn's We Pass From View--as well as Ramsey Campbell's The Inhabitant of the Lake.

"Potential" opens at the town's Cooperative Hall, site of "Brichester's First Be-In—Free Flowers and Bells!" (The name of one of the bands that plays the be-in, the Faveolate Collosi, alludes to Campbell's story "The Mine on Yuggoth".) The Co-operative Social Club is also referred to in "The Interloper".

Brichester University

While "The Enchanted Fruit" mentions "the hard bleached University smashing and swallowing ornate facades", in The Darkest Part of the Woods, Brichester University's architecture is more traditional, with a "long lofty Gothic facade and...high pointed windows". An "echoing vaulted sandstone corridor" leads from "the towering front doors of the university". ^[5]

One of the first mentions of Brichester University is in "The Horror From the Bridge", where it is said "they were familiar with things whose existence is not recognized by science." In that story, Philip Chesterton, formerly a librarian at the British Museum, takes a job in the university's library in 1901 in order to keep an eye on strange goings on in Clotton. The library once kept copies, in a locked case, of "the Necronomicon, the Revelations of Glaaki, De Vermis Mysteriis, and other titles as ominous", but in the 1960s "a Muslim student...spray(ed) them with lighter fluid and set fire to them," destroying them completely. ^[6] The main entrance to the British Museum. ...

In "The Mine on Yuggoth", Brichester native Edward Taylor enrolled in the university in 1918, where he "led a witch cult, centering round a stone slab in the woods off the Severnford road." Taylor, along with other participants including "the artist Nevil Craughan and the occultist Henry Fisher", were subsequently expelled.

There is a science-fiction shop, Worlds Unlimited, near the University campus "in the dilapidated Victorian streets that had become the student quarter". ^[7] In the same neighborhood is the Scholar's Rest: "Beneath a jauntily sagging slate roof the squat sandstone building faced the university campus.... Each window of the pub held a swelling like a great blind eye.... (T)he dim low-timbered interior was lined with old books." The pub's strongest ale is called Witch's Brew. ^[8] Another near-campus dining option is Peace & Beans, a vegetarian restaurant with "rough wooden tables" and a clientele of "students and a few health-conscious oldsters". ^[9]

Mercy Hill

Mercy Hill, a Brichester neighbourhood with "ribs of terraced streets", ^[10] stands out in Campbell's world for its "mundanity", as he describes the scene in "The Franklyn Paragraphs":

In the streets couples were taking their ice-creams for a walk; toward the Hill tennis-balls were punctuating their pauses, girls were leaping, bowls were clicking and from the houses behind a procession was bearing trays of cakes to the pavilion.

In the same story, however, at the "bottom of Mercy Hill" is Dee Terrace, the address of the house of Roland Franklyn, which is described as "look(ing) like Satan was in residence": A sixteenth century portrait of John Dee, artist unknown. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

(A)n extra room had been added on the left, and its windows had been blocked out with newer brick; all the curtains, except those of one ground-floor window draped in green, were black. The house looked deserted, the more so for its garden, which could not have been tended for years; grass and weeds grew knee-high.

Mercy Hill is mentioned in "The Horror From the Bridge" as the site of a 19th century prison; in "The Moon Lens", Mercy Hill Hospital is the name of the institution where, in 1961, Roy Leakey seeks mercy killing from Dr. James Linwood, an advocate of euthanasia. The story "The Mine on Yuggoth" records that Edward Taylor was taken to Mercy Hill Hospital after his 1924 ascent of Devil's Steps, and that ever since his X-rays have been kept in a restricted file. A euthanasia machine. ...

Franklyn is buried in the graveyard next to Mercy Hill Hospital, where

(w)illows, their branches glowing stippled curves, were spaced carefully toward the Hill out of which the cemetery was carved; in the hill itself were catacombs, black behind ivy or railings, and above stood the hospital, a grey reminder of hope or despair.... The avenues were guarded by broken-nosed angels yearning heavenward; one showed a leprous patch where her left eye and cheek had sloughed away. Urns stood here and there like empty glasses at a sick bed.

In The Darkest Part of the Woods, its said that

Lower Brichester

The seedier side of town is known as Lower Brichester, a neighborhood described in "The Franklyn Paragraphs" as "the sort of miniature cosmopolis one finds in most major English towns: three-storey houses full of errant lodgers, curtains as varied as flags at a conference but more faded, the occasional smashed pane, the frequent furtive watchers." In "The Tugging", a tale with an apocalyptic theme, the neighbourhood is depicted as being in an advanced state of "dereliction":

Dogs scrabbled clattering in gouged shop-fronts, an uprooted streetlamp lay across a road, humped earth was scattered with disembowelled mattresses, their entrails fluttering feebly. He passed houses where one window was blinded with brick, the next still open and filmy with a drooping curtain.... (W)hole streets were derelict...gaping houses and uneven pavements.... Houses went by, shoulder to shoulder, ribs open to the sky, red-brick fronts revealing their jumble of shattered walls and staircases.

The observer finds himself sympathizing with the district's "abandonment, and indifference to time".

In "The Franklyn Paragraphs", Lower Brichester's Pitt Street is the address of Errol Undercliffe (1937–1967), a writer who specializes in "contemporary treatments of traditional macabre themes". In "The Tugging", it's the location of the Brichester Arts Lab, a program run by Annabel Pringle that practices "associational painting"—a technique that uses free association to discover images, starting with suggestions from the I Ching. Free association (Psychodynamic theory) is a technique used in psychology, devised by Sigmund Freud. ... Alternative meaning: I Ching (monk) The I Ching (Traditional Chinese: 易經, pinyin y jīng; Cantonese IPA: jɪk6gɪŋ1; Cantonese Jyutping: jik6ging1; alternative romanizations include I Jing, Yi Ching, Yi King) is the oldest of the Chinese classic texts. ...

"Cold Print" places in Lower Brichester a bookshop known only as American Books Bought and Sold. This store was the site of a manifestation of the entity Y'golonac. Ygolonac (the Defiler) is a fictional deity in the Cthulhu mythos of H.P. Lovecraft. ...

Lakeside Terrace

North of Brichester is the body of water referred to in the story "The Inhabitant of the Lake". Supposedly once a meteor crater, the lake is surrounded by a series of houses, called Lakeside Terrace, built to serve as dwellings for a small cult who worshipped the extraterrestrial being Glaaki. Led by one Thomas Lee and remaining at the lake from 1790 until shortly after 1865, the cult received the Revelations of Glaaki as dream-sendings, and published an expurgated nine-volume set from an original 11-volume manuscript. Long after the cult's disappearance, painter Thomas Cartwright took up residence at Lakeview Terrace, where he worked on the painting The Thing in the Lake before his mysterious demise. Glaaki is a fictional character in the Cthulhu mythos of H. P. Lovecraft. ...

The Devil's Steps

As described in "The Mine on Yuggoth", the Devil's Steps are a "rock formation beyond Brichester" that

stretched fully 200 feet up in a series of steps to a plateau; from some way off the illusion of a giant staircase was complete, and legend had it that Satan came from the sky to walk the earth by way of those steps.... In the center of the plateau stood three stone towers joined by narrow catwalks of black metal between the roofs.... The (central) tower was about 30 feet high, windowless and with a strangely angled doorway opening on stairs leading into blackness.

At the top of the tower is a dimensional gate to the planet Yuggoth. The towers are surrounded by an "alien species" of fungus, with "a grey stem covered with twining leaves" that uncurl toward approaching visitors. Yuggoth, in the Cthulhu Mythos, is the name by which the extraterrestrial Mi-go know the planet Pluto, where they are believed to have established a colony. ...

Goatswood

Goatswood, first detailed in the story "The Moon-Lens", is an isolated town surrounded by woods to the east of Brichester. The narrator of that story is struck by the town's atmosphere: "The close-set dull-red roofs, the narrow streets, the encircling forests—all seemed somehow furtive." As in Lovecraft's Innsmouth, the residents of Goatswood have a distinctive, offputting appearance; a typical resident is described as "revoltingly goatlike", resembling "a medieval woodcut of a satyr", and clad in "grotesquely voluminous" garments. Innsmouth is a fictional place, created by H. P. Lovecraft. ... In Greek mythology, Satyrs (Σάτυροι - Satyri) are mythological half-man and half-goat nature entities that roamed the woods and mountains, and were the companions of Pan and Dionysus. ...

The most prominent feature of Goatswood is the titular Moon-Lens: A "metal pylon, 50 feet high, rose from the center of the square. At the top (is)...a large convex lens surrounded by an arrangement of mirrors, and all hinged on a pivot attached to the ground by taut ropes." It is said by a perhaps unreliable character to have been built by the Romans. Principal sites in Roman Britain Roman Britain refers to those parts of the island of Great Britain controlled by the Roman Empire between 43 and 410. ...

Goatswood is sometimes an unavoidable connection on the train route from Exham to Brichester. The infrequent visitors to Goatswood, "The Moon Lens" reveals, eat at the Station Cafe and stay at the Central Hotel.

In a later story, "Made in Goatswood", the village has more to offer to outsiders: a curiosity shop with a toad-like proprietor whose "hands were brown and crinkled as the paper in which he wrapped the parcels", selling disturbing lawn ornaments; a fruit stand in a "canvas stall like a shrine" where fruit resembling peaches are offered by a girl whose "eyelids lowered wickedly". There's even a red light district, Fitzroy Street, on the edge of town:

(B)efore the woods closed in, a last street of dingy houses lay exhausted between gardens high with grass, uneven with rocks, and on the corner a newspaper-shop, its cramped windows full of yellow cards; baked mud preserved the tracks of cars.

"The Franklyn Paragraphs" mentions a number of places visited by "the circle of young men" around occultist Roland Franklyn—Goatswood among them.

In the "woods toward toward Goatswood" is a clearing, according to "The Insects of Shaggai", where a "meteorite" fell in the 17th century; a coven that subsequently worshipped there was executed by real-life witchfinder Matthew Hopkins. In the clearing may be found a mysterious gray cone, home to the titular creatures; the story "The Moon Lens" alludes to this artifact. [[Image:Matthewhopkins. ...

These woods also feature in "The Enchanted Fruit", whose protagonist at first finds them enticing—"Each corridor of trees seemed made to be explored, each green shadow promised mystery"—and later forbidding: "A screen of leaves seemed secretive; parted, it revealed only vistas of dim branches." In the forest, he finds a tree whose "rich trunk, dark yet warm, stood alone on a mound of autumn built high from the edge of the glade"; he eats the fruit of this tree, "large as apples, soft and shaped as peaches", to his immediate delight and later regret.

Temphill

Temphill is the main setting for "The Church in High Street", Campbell's first published Severn Valley story. There it is described as a "decaying Cotswold town" and "a place of ill repute". Describing the town, the narrator notes that

around the blackened hotel at the center of Temphill, the buildings were often greatly dilapidated...gabled dwellings, often with broken windows and patchily unpainted fronts, but still inhabited. Here scattered unkempt children stared resignedly from dusty front steps or played in pools of orange mud on a patch of waste ground, while the older tenants sat in twilit rooms.

The church of the title is set on a hill near the center of town, around which the town was built. It is said to exist "conterminously" with a temple of Yog-Sothoth. It is described: Yog-Sothoth (The Key and the Gate) is a fictional character in the Cthulhu mythos of H.P. Lovecraft. ...

The steps...rose between green ruins of brick walls to the black steeple of a church among pallid gravestones.... The tottering gravestones, overgrown with repulsively decaying vegetation, cast curious shadows over the fungus-strewn grass.

Those who penetrate the catacombs beneath the church—reached via a trap door under the first set of pews—find themselves unaccountably unable to leave the town, as if the streets were turning back on themselves.

In "The Church on High Street", Temphill is home to John Clothier, "a man possessed of an extraordinary amount of ancient knowledge", and to Albert Young, a young man working on a "book on witchcraft and witchcraft lore". In the subsequent story "The Horror From the Bridge", Temphill is where James Phipps acquires "extremely rare chemicals", as well as his mysterious wife.

"The Franklyn Paragraphs" lists Temphill as one of the places that "the circle of young men" around Roland Franklyn visit. Franklyn's widow, complaining about the horrors he had put her through, says, "He took me down to Temphill and made me watch those things dancing on the graves."

Severnford

Severnford, a community on the River Severn almost directly northwest of Brichester, is described in "The Plain of Sound" as a dull place to visit:

Once one leaves behind the central area of Severnford where a group of archaic buildings is preserved, and comes to the surrounding red-brick houses, there is little to interest the sight-seer. Much of Severnford is dockland, and even the country beyond is not noticeably pleasant to the forced hiker.... (S)ome of the roads are noticeably rough.

The forced is a reference to the fact there is only one bus daily from Severnford to Brichester, which leaves in the morning; if visitors miss it, walking may be the only alternative. It is a full morning's walk away, and the route is not well-marked. ^[11] (The motor route between Brichester and Severnford passes by "(h)ills...like sleeping collosi".) ^[12]

One attraction is the Inn at Severnford, a facility in central Severnford which is said to be "one of the oldest (inns) in England". However, in 1958 it was found to be "temporarily" closed to the public, reportedly because of repeated vandalism. ^[13] A caricature of Gustave Courbet taking down a Morris column, published by Le Père Duchêne illustré magazine Vandalism is the conspicuous defacement or destruction of a structure or symbol against the will of the owner/governing body. ...

Severnford and its outskirts are the main setting of Campbell's "The Room in the Castle", in which the Anglican church in Severnford is noted for having "a stone carving depicting an angel holding a large star-shaped object in front of a cowering toad-like object." The Elder Sign is a fictional icon in H.P. Lovecrafts Cthulhu mythos. ...

The castle of the title is a ruined mansion on the outskirts of town, past Cotton Row: "It was set on the crest of the hill, three walls still standing, though the roof had long ago collapsed. A lone tower stood like a charred finger against the pale sky." It was once the home of Sir Gilbert Morley, described as an "18th-century warlock" who imprisoned the Great Old One Byatis in the castle's basement. Byatis, the Serpent-Bearded, is a fictional deity from Ramsey Campbells 1961 short story The Room in the Castle. Spoiler warning: Byatis was a Great Old One, his idol brought down to Earth by the Deep Ones. ...

Campbell returned to Severnford in the story "Potential", a setting in which "(t)he streets were lit by gaslamps, reflected flickering in windows set in dark moist stone." The climactic scene of that story is set in a disused Severnford pub called The Riverside, used as a sort of clubhouse by cultists who listen to Penderecki and read Roland Franklyn and Ultimate Press pornography. There is a suggestion that the Severnford authorities are complicit in the cult's activities: "Oh, the police know about this," one cult member says. "They're used to it by now, they don't interfere." Krzysztof Penderecki (born November 23, 1933) is a Polish composer of classical music. ...

About two-and-a-half miles (by foot) out of Severnford, after passing a "thickly overgrown forest, where (one) would certainly have become further lost," and crossing "montonous fields (without) seeing a building or another human being," one comes to "an area of grassy hillocks", followed by a region of "miniature valleys". It is in one of these that the title phenomenon of "The Plain of Sound" was encountered, next to a house once inhabited by former Brichester University professor Arnold Hird. The peculiar auditory phenomenon can become a gate to the Gulf of S'glhuo.

In the story "The Faces at Pine Dunes", Severnford is named by the fictional book Witchcraft in England as one of several centers of witchcraft activity—apparently the only place in the Severn Valley so listed.

The Island beyond Severnford

The island beyond Severnford is referred to in the title of the story "The Stone on the Island". Notes found in the story describe it:

Approx. 200 feet across. roughly circular. Little vegetation except short grass. Ruins of Roman temple to unnamed deity at centre of island (top of slight hill). Opp. side of hill from Severnford, about 35 ft. down, artificial hollow extending back 10 ft. and containing stone.

Island continuously site of place of worship. Poss. pre-Roman nature deity (stone predates Roman occupation); the Roman temple built. In medieval times witch supposed to live on island. In 17th cen. witchcult met there and invoked water elementals. In all cases stone avoided. Circa 1790 witchcult disbanded, but stray believers continued to visit.

In the 19th century the island became associated with a series of shocking mutilations. Victims, only some of whom survive the ordeal, began with witchcult follower Joseph Norton in 1803, followed by Severnford clergyman Nevill Rayner in 1826, an unnamed prostitute in 1866 who was taken to Brichester Central Hospital, the folk customs investigator of 1870 Alan Thorpe, a Brichester University student in 1930, and Mercy Hill paranormal researcher Dr. Stanley Nash and his son Michael (the latest victim) in 1962. Roman or Romans may refer to: History Ancient Rome Roman Kingdom (753 BC to 509 BC) Roman Republic (509 BC to 44 BC) Roman Empire (44 BC to AD 476) Roman citizen Byzantine Empire (330 to 1453), also known as the Eastern Roman Empire or the Empire of the Greeks... European witchcraft is witchcraft and magic that is practiced primarily in the locality of Europe. ... In mysticism, mythology and alchemy, an elemental is a creature (usually a spirit) that is attuned with, or composed of, one of the classical elements: air, earth, fire and water. ... see also Holy Orders The following terms have traditional meanings for the Anglican Church, and possibly beyond: A churchman is in principle a member of a church congregation, in practice someone in holy orders. ... Prostitution is the sale of sexual services (typically manual stimulation, oral sex, sexual intercourse, or anal sex) for cash or other kind of return, generally indiscriminately with many persons. ... Folklore is the body of verbal expressive culture, including tales, legends, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs current among a particular population, comprising the oral tradition of that culture, subculture, or group. ... Anomalous phenomena are phenomena which are observed and for which there are no suitable explanations in the context of a specific body of scientific knowledge, e. ...

"The island beyond Severnford" is visited by Franklyn's circle in "The Franklyn Paragraphs". The island is reachable via "a small hut" "on the edge of the docks" that advertises, "Hire a boat and see the Severn at its best!" ^[14]

Clotton

Clotton, the scene of Campbell's "Dunwich Horror" pastiche, "The Horror From the Bridge", is a small town set where the river Ton flows into the Severn. Only a "few leaning red-brick houses...remain of the uptown section of the once-prosperous town"; the rest of the town was deliberately destroyed in 1931, for reasons explained in the story. The town's most noteworthy feature, also dating to 1931, is a "20-foot high concrete building...on the bank of the Ton", with an "eldritch sign clumsily engraved on each wall". The Dunwich Horror is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft. ...

The town was once home to James Phipps, "a gaunt pallid-faced man with jet-black hair and long bony hands" who died in 1898, aged well over a century, and his son Lionel Phipps (1806–1931). Both were odd individuals given to "unorthodox scientific researches" and nocturnal excavation. They lived on Riverside Alley, "a little-tenanted street within sight of a bridge over the Ton".

Outside of Clotton, according to "The Horror From the Bridge", there is a "pit on a patch of waste ground on what used to be Canning Road, near the river," containing "roughly-cut steps, each carrying a carven five-pointed sign, which led down into abysmal darkness." In "The Franklyn Paragraphs", which mentions Clotton as another place visited by the Franklyn circle, Franklyn's widow notes that "we went down the steps below Clotton."

Camside

Camside is home to the occultist Henry Fisher, who summons the Elder God Daoloth in the story "The Render of the Veils". ^[15] The town's paper, the Camside Observer, is mentioned in that story, as well as in "The Room in the Castle", which also notes that the town was the home of James Phipps, until he was expelled in 1800 for practicing weird science, resettling in Clotton. Daoloth (nickname: the Render of Veils or the Parter of Veils) is a fictional character, one of the Outer Gods from H. P. Lovecrafts Cthulhu Mythos pantheon. ...

In "The Mine on Yuggoth", Edward Taylor is committed to the Camside Home for the Mentally Disturbed in 1924, after his ascent of the Devil's Steps.

References

Anthologies

• Aniolowski, Scott David (ed.) (1995). Made In Goatswood, Oakland, CA: Chaosium. ISBN 1-5688-2046-1.

• Campbell, Ramsey (1987). Cold Print, 1st ed., New York, NY: Tom Doherty Associates. ISBN 0-8125-1660-5.

• Campbell, Ramsey (1993). Cold Print, London: Headline. ISBN 0-7472-4059-0.

• Campbell, Ramsey (1973). Demons by Daylight, Sauk City, WI: Arkham House.

• Campbell, Ramsey (1964). The Inhabitant of the Lake and Other Less Welcome Tenants, Sauk City, WI: Arkham House.

• Campbell, Ramsey (2002). Scared Stiff: Tales of Sex and Death, New York, NY: Tom Doherty Associates. ISBN 0-7653-0004-4.

Web sites

• A Demon by Daylight: Cold Print Talks to Ramsey Campbell on Three Decades of Horror. URL accessed on March 9, 2006.

March 9 is the 68th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (69th in Leap years). ... 2006 (MMVI) is a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

Footnotes

1. ↑ "The Church in High Street"
2. ↑ "The Room in the Castle"
3. ↑ Cold Print (website), "A Demon by Daylight"
4. ↑ Pott's untitled manuscript is mentioned in "The Mine on Yuggoth".
5. ↑ The Darkest Part of the Woods, Chapter 1
6. ↑ The Darkest Part of the Woods, Chapter 20
7. ↑ The Darkest Part of the Woods, Chapter 3-4
8. ↑ The Darkest Part of the Woods, Chapter 10
9. ↑ The Darkest Part of the Woods, Chapter 11
10. ↑ The Darkest Part of the Woods, Chapter 1
11. ↑ "The Plain of Sound"
12. ↑ "Potential"
13. ↑ "The Plain of Sound"
14. ↑ "The Stone on the Island"
15. ↑ Fisher was expelled from Brichester University in "The Mine on Yuggoth".