I’ve just finished reading the wonderful English Heretic Collection by Andy Lane which puts cult films, Ballard, Lovecraft, psychogeography, myth, history and Crowley in a blender and spreads them liberally over English landscapes – particularly those of East Anglia.

Lane’s English Heretic project started as a reaction to the cozy commodification of history by English Heritage. He developed a series of Black Plaques from a multi media melange of text, music and image to celebrate eccentric anti heroes and the written and photographic component of those are collected in this volume along with other pieces.

I recently wrote a story for an anthology where Sherlock Holmes encounters the Cthulhu mythos which I set in Dunwich – about six miles down the coast from where I live. For those unfamiliar with the town, it was once the size of London and one of England’s busiest ports. Then a freak weather combination drowned most of the town under the waves earning it the name of England’s Atlantis.

There are many legends associated with Dunwich including one of East Anglia’s many sightings of Black Shuck – the devil in the form of a large black dog, the myth that the bell of the drowned church can sometimes be heard from under the ocean, and lots more. Like most places in the East its inhabitants suffered under the attention of Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General.

I don’t know if Lovecraft used the town’s name for a fictional location in New England knowingly but there are close links with the two regions as many early settlers came from this region and one of Hopkins targets fled to Salem where he was involved in the Witchcraft accusations there.

The combination of the name, the legends (including a Templar link) and the black dog made it the obvious place to base the story. As you can see from the shelf picture, I have enough reference books to make the research easy. Lane’s masterly volume has now joined them.