"The Barrens"

by F. Paul Wilson
originally published Lovecraft's Legacy, Tor, 1990

Kathy McElston, aka "Mac" (at least the narrator isn't nameless for a change) is born and raised in the ultra-rural, ultra-redneck Pine Barrens of NJ, but ends up graduating from Rutgers and starting up her own accounting firm.  She's left that world behind her until one day, her one-time college boyfriend, Jon Creighton calls her out of the blue.

Jon, a drifter, seeker, and all-around flake, wants her help.  It seems he ended up at Miskatonic U., and now he has several grants to write a book tracing the origins of certain Amurrican folk legends, including the Jersey Devil.  He wants Mac to be his guide and liaison to the Pineys.  Divorced and at loose ends, she agrees.

Mac and Jon make their way into the Barrens in a fully-outfitted Wrangler, where they first meet Jasper Mulliner, a distant relative of Mac's, who sends them on to Gus Sooy, a moonshiner who lives in an intensely remote part of the Barrens.

Sooy is helpful at first, but when Jon asks too many questions about the "pine lights" - will-o-wisp-like apparitions known to the locals, Sooy turns hostile.  Things get more complicated when Mac and Jon get lost trying to get back to civilization, and their jeep gets stuck in a sand pit.  That night, a bizarre encounter with the "pine lights" leaves Jon with a badly burned arm.  But its also clear that Jon knows more than he's letting on and has a hidden agenda.

The next morning a band of deformed, inbred pineys helps free the jeep, and shows Jon their ghastly village.  More importantly, they show him "the place where nothing grows", a barren patch of sand in the middle of the woods, with no vegetation and no sign of animal presence.  Jon is enraptured.

Back in civilization, Mac does her best to avoid Jon.  But when a state trooper comes looking for him, and it turns out he's stolen something from the MU "restricted" collection, and that there are no grants, Mac goes looking for him.

She finds him holed up in a motel and looking sick.  She also learns that Mac has been researching "nexus points", places where, at the equinoxes, the veil between our illusory reality and the true reality is thinned, and where seekers may be able to look behind the curtain into the true nature of reality.

And it's just about time for the fall equinox. 

Mac arrives in time to find Jon in the middle of the barren patch, slowly transforming into a tentacled potato-thing.  She has a glimpse of the true reality before he shoves her off into the woods.

Creighton is gone.  Mac returns home, shoots her answering machine, loses all interest in her business and makes plans to visit the nexus point next equinox.

This is overall a superior story, with very effective atmosphere and buildup.  It's a truly Lovecraftian story that doesn't read anything like HPL, yet clearly follows his ideas about structure and orchestration.  And very successfully so.

On the downside, I found Mac's final confrontation with Jon to be distinctly unimaginative and a letdown. Perhaps an author with a more surreal imagination could have come up with something more potent.

A very good story with a superb buildup, but a slightly disappointing climax.