Brichester is a fictional town invented by Ramsey Campbell, the main community of his Severn Valley environment. It is the setting of several of his Mythos-related short stories.
Campbell depicts it as an ordinary town where the weird is always threatening to break through: "These days Brichester has an impressively mundane surface," he writes in "The Franklyn Paragraphs", "but I still sense that it may crack."
In "The Enchanted Fruit", Campbell describes "the daily press of Brichester, the false harsh rainbow of packed cars", and "churches robbed of dignity by plummeting iron balls" (though the protagonist also recalls "streets where some lone house had struck him speechless with its silent pride, the noble bearing of its age and history").
Brichester is said to have a wide variety of media outlets, including a daily newspaper, The Brichester Herald, advertised as "Brichester's Evening Voice", and a radio station, Radio Brichester.[1] It also has a weekly paper, the Brichester Weekly News.[2] Ingels, a reporter for the Herald, complains that the town lacks a television studio.
Brichester's Ultimate Press published an important manuscript by the medieval heretic Johannes Henricus Pott, a new 12th volume of the Revelations of Glaaki, and an entire line of bondage-related pornography.[3] Brichester also has the True Light Press, though this is merely cultist Roland Franklyn's self-publishing operation.[4]
Errol Undercliffe notes of Brichester Central Library, "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".[4]
The town's Cooperative Hall is the site of "Brichester's First Be-In--Free Flowers and Bells!" (One of the bands that plays the be-in is the Faveolate Collosi,[5] an allusion to Campbell's story "The Mine on Yuggoth".) Brichester also has a Co-operative Social Club.[6]
The main green area of the town is the Brichester Central Park.[7]
Brichester University[]
Brichester has a sizable university, where, Campbell says, "they were familiar with things whose existence is not recognized by science."
While in "The Enchanted Fruit," Campbell mentions "the hard bleached University smashing and swallowing ornate facades", in The Darkest Part of the Woods, Brichester University's architecture is depicted as more traditional, with a "long, lofty Gothic facade, and high pointed windows."
The library once kept copies, in a locked case, of "the Necronomicon, 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.[8]
There is a science-fiction shop, Worlds Unlimited, near the University campus "in the dilapidated Victorian streets which have become the student quarter."[9] 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."[10] 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."
Mercy Hill[]
Mercy Hill, a Brichester neighbourhood with "ribs of terraced streets" 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 behind the houses, 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)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 the site of a 19th-century prison.[8] Mercy Hill Hospital is the name of the institution where, in 1961, Roy Leakey sought a mercy killing from Dr. James Linwood, an advocate of euthanasia.[2] Edward Taylor was taken to Mercy Hill Hospital, shortly after his failed 1924 ascent of the Devil's Steps, and ever since then, his X-ray scans have been placed in a restricted file.[11] 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 straight 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.
Lower Brichester[]
The seedier side of town is known as Lower Brichester, a neighborhood described as "the sort of miniature cosmopolis one finds in most major English towns: three-story houses full of errant lodgers, curtains as varied as flags at a conference but more faded, the occasional smashed pane, and the frequent furtive watchers."[4] In "The Tugging", a tale with an apocalyptic theme, the neighborhood 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 completely 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".
Lower Brichester's Pitt Street is the former address of Errol Undercliffe (1937-1967), a writer who specializes in "contemporary treatments of traditional macabre themes."[4] 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.[1]
Lower Brichester is the location of a bookshop known only in the story as American Books Bought and Sold. This store was the site of a manifestation of the entity Y'golonac.[3]
Behind the Mythos[]
Brichester plays the same role in Campbell's stories that Arkham does in Lovecraft's. It is largely based on the post-war Liverpool of Campbell's youth; he has acknowledged that "my invented town of Brichester, originally intended as the Severn Valley equivalent of Lovecraft's Arkham, was Liverpool by now in all but name."
Footnotes[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Campbell, "The Tugging."
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Campbell, "The Moon-Lens."
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Campbell, "Cold Print."
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Campbell, "The Franklyn Paragraphs."
- ↑ Campbell, "Potential."
- ↑ Campbell, "The Interloper."
- ↑ Campbell, "Made in Goatswood."
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Campbell, "The Horror from the Bridge."
- ↑ Campbell, The Darkest Part of the Woods, chapters 3-4.
- ↑ Campbell, The Darkest Part of the Woods, Chapter 10.
- ↑ Campbell, "The Mine on Yuggoth."