A Thing About Cars!

"A Thing About Cars!" is a Cthulhu Mythos-connected short story by Brian Lumley that first appeared in his collection The Caller of The Black (Arkham House, 1971). It makes reference to Ramsey Campbell's Severn Valley Mythos setting, one of the first stories not by Campbell to do so.
==Synopsis==
After a pair of automobile-related tragedies destroys a man's life, his brother visits the midlands village of Boresby to make sure that he's all right.
== Setting==
The story is set in Boresby, a Midlands village noted for its "tall, gnarled oaks letting through only a minimum of sunlight to weirdly dapple the road":
The village proper is "no more than a quarter mile in length, a single street wherein the oaks in their turn gave way to high, stark garden walls of buttress-like outer proportions suggestive of immense thickness." Beyond "shady gates" can occasionally be seen "steeply sloping, thatched roofs." "Many of the great walls, moss- and ivy-grown, leaned perilously towards the road with no sidewalks lining them, so that the trees overhanging from the unseen gardens" give the impression of "immense jaws ready at any moment to snap shut."
The "ancient village post-office" offers one of the few opportunities to encounter a living creature. A mile or so outside of the village is a "great forest" officially closed to motor traffic, and an abandoned quarry filled with junked cars.
Boresby is located "between a certain triangle of ancient but updated towns in the Midlands," in "an area of some hundred square miles simply abounding with tiny villages of hoary antiquity exuding an ancient nastiness." The village has a sense of "a lurking and centuried outsidedess." a "feeling of dark, oppressive effusions...as if all the poisons of unknown centuries had found a temporary outlet in that soul-disturbing region."
The village is cited as an example of a "quiet backwater surviving modernity, defying time and sometimes, when the setting is just right, radiating an aura out of tune with the day and age which...might in certain perspective appear ominous and even frightening." 
It's compared to similar places "in the Severn Valley—Goatswood and Temphill spring unpleasantly to mind—and others in the North and North-East, like Harden on the coast and Tharpe-Nettleford on the North Yorkshire border." Boresby is "one of those places, like Temphill or Harden, where almost anything might happen; an area literally exuding strangeness, to which all manner of strangeness might therefore be expected to be drawn."
Goatswood and Temphill are creations of Ramsey Campbell, introduced in "The Moon-Lens" and "The Church in High Street," respectively. Harden appears in Lumley's own "Aunt Hester," "Dagon's Bell," and "Rising with Surtsey."
==Publication History ==
After its appearance in The Caller of The Black, "A Thing About Cars!" was reprinted in The Last Rite (Jwindz Publishing, 1992) and Beneath the Moors and Darker Places (Tor, 2002). It was translated into French in 1986 as "Un fou du volant."
Category:Brian Lumley works
Category:Expanded Mythos Works