Severn Valley (Cthulhu Mythos) - Ramsey Campbell

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.

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:

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.

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".

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 an anthology of horror fiction called Made in Goatswood.