Doris returns to America with her children, where she attempts suicide and spends time in a mental hospital, but eventually learns to live with the memory of Crouch End and is released. The official investigation into his vanishing can find no leads, and Vetter reaches retirement age soon after he dies of a heart attack in his home six months later. Vetter returns from his walk just minutes later and can find no clue to his whereabouts. Farnham turns the corner at the bottom of the street and walks out of sight of the station - and is never seen again. Leaving the station empty, he walks down the street in search of Vetter, and notices that something seems strangely different about the neighborhood, most notably that the streetlights at the bottom of the street have all gone out. Vetter goes out for a walk and, after contemplating the story for a while, Farnham wonders what has become of him. He speculates about other planes of existence, and of Crouch End perhaps being a location where the divide between our world and an alien, demonic world is somehow lesser.
Newcomer Farnham dismisses the story as a delusion caused by mental illness, but Vetter, who has policed Crouch End for decades, is not so sure, remembering a number of similar missing-person cases from years gone by. After that, Doris remembers nothing else, until she woke up huddled in an entrance way back in the real world. The monster has seemingly consumed Lonnie, alongside countless others whose spirits are now trapped in its body, and whose faces Doris glimpses trapped in the body of the being. Eventually, Doris once again encounters the two disfigured children, who summon an enormous, hideous, otherworldly being from beneath the ground of Crouch End (implied to be the Lovecraftian goddess Shub-Niggurath). After encountering something unseen beyond a hedge, Lonnie becomes unhinged, and eventually disappears while the couple is walking through a tunnel, leaving Doris alone and scared out of her mind as the surroundings become increasingly bizarre and alien even the night sky no longer shows Earth's stars, but some unknown alien sky. While looking up the employer's address in a phone book, the cab they had hired mysteriously disappears, and the entire neighborhood becomes strangely deserted and alien, with the sole exception of a cat with a scarred face, and two children, one of whom has a deformed hand. Nearly hysterical, Doris arrived in the station speaking of monsters and supernatural occurrences.ĭoris relates how she and her husband got lost while searching for a potential employer's house in Crouch End. They discuss the case of Doris Freeman, a young American woman who came in to report the disappearance of her husband, lawyer Lonnie Freeman. 8.Police constables Ted Vetter and Robert Farnham are working the night shift at a small station in the London suburb of Crouch End.
Early death aside, here's a look at how those eight episodes compare.
Eight episodes were produced, and despite ratings that ranged from good to impressive, a second season was never picked up.
Related: What Stephen King Thinks Of Every Adaptation (Movies & TV Shows)įor now, King fans only have Nightmares & Dreamscapes to watch, which aired on TNT in the summer of 2006. Yet despite Hollywood's renewed willingness to snap up any King project they can, a new King anthology still hasn't been greenlit. King himself is also a likeable, interesting speaker and general personality, and would make an excellent host for such a show if he saw fit to do it, perhaps explaining the story's inspiration after it had concluded. The fact that there's only ever been one anthology show created to adapt King's work exclusively is another surprise, as again, he has enough worthwhile short stories to power a decade's worth of 13-episode seasons, and that's being conservative. Too often King's shorts have been stretched into a feature length film, and that rarely works out. After all, King has written a veritable mountain of short stories during his career, many of which scream out for an adaptation befitting of their brief length. While there have been quite a few TV show adaptations of King's work, it's surprisingly rare how many are part of anthology shows.
Stephen King's short stories were once adapted into a TNT anthology series called Nightmares & Dreamscapes, and here's how the episodes stack up.