Camside

Camside is a fictional town in England, created by Ramsey Campbell as part of his Severn Valley setting. In the introduction to his collection The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, Campbell describes the place as "a rather unimportant town between Berkeley and Severnford, once visited by a man intent on seeking out the god Byatis, but otherwise undistinguished." By "unimportant", Campbell appears to mean that is the home of relatively few horrific entities; it is the location of several institutions that seem to play vital roles in the everyday life of the Severn Valley region, but it often appears in Campbell's stories to contrast its relative normalcy with the weirdness going on around it. 
Camside is first mentioned in passing in "The Church in High Street" as one of a number of Severn Valley towns where "the actual worship of trans-spatial beings [is] still practiced"; it also has a hospital where narrator Richard Dodd wakes up after his attempts to flee from Temphill. 
Camside plays a slightly larger role in "The Room in the Castle", the story that Campbell alludes to when he says that Camside was visited by a seeker after Byatis; the narrator of that story learns of that ancient entity from his friend Scott, who lives in the town. But the ruined castle where the main action of the story occurs is located across the river from Severnford.
Helping Scott with an article he is writing for the Camside Observer is what gets the narrator interested in Severn Valley lore in the first place--so Camside is at least large enough to support a newspaper. The paper is mentioned again in "The Render of the Veils" and "The Plain of Sound". 
"The Render of the Veils" may record the one genuinely uncanny event in Campbell's fiction that takes place in Camside. The occultist Henry Fisher, who ropes Kevin Gillson into a disastrous summoning of the Outer God Daoloth in that story, lives in a block of flats on Tudor Drive (or Tudor Street) in that town; it's the chief of police of Camside who investigates what seems to be the resulting double murder.
Other mentions of Camside in Campbell's fiction include:
*in "The Horror from the Bridge", Camside is the hometown of James Phipps, until he was expelled in 1800 for practicing weird science, resettling in Clotton.
*When a meteorite falls in the woods near Goatswood in the 1600s, searchers come from both Camside and Brichester to look for it without success, in "The Insects from Shaggai".
*In "The Mine on Yuggoth", Edward Taylor is committed to the Camside Home for the Mentally Disturbed in 1924, after his ascent of the Devil's Steps.
*The undertaker who handles the funeral of Brichester resident Robert Shorrock in "The Return of the Witch" came from Camside; afterwards he "suddenly left his profession and took to drink." (Brichester is certainly large enough to have its own funeral parlours; it's possible that undertakers closer to hand knew enough to refuse the Shorrocks' business.)
Category:Locations Originating From Expanded Mythos Works
Category:Structures