Arkham

Arkham is the old witch-haunted city on the Miskatonic River, the heart of Lovecraft's invented Massachusetts and the home of Miskatonic University with its locked library and its forbidden book. Modelled on the decaying mill towns of the Merrimack valley, it is a place of gambrel roofs, narrow streets and long memories, where the past has never quite let go and the respectable surface hides older business.

Half the Mythos passes through Arkham at some point, its scholars, its asylum, its graveyards, its quiet families with too much history. It is less a single story than a stage on which the others play out. The whole of The Arkham Tapes is set in its streets and the country just beyond them.