"Crouch End — I think that is an ugly name."

[....]It's like a nightmare you want to forget as soon as you wake up, but it won't fade away like most dreams do; it just stays and stays and stays.'

[....]‘Well, this fellow Lovecraft was always writing about Dimensions,’ Vetter said, producing his box of railway matches. ‘Dimensions close to ours. Full of these immortal monsters that would drive a man mad at one look. Frightful rubbish, of course. Except, whenever one of these people straggles in, I wonder if all of it was rubbish. I think to myself then – when it’s quiet and late at night, like now – that our whole world, everything we think of as nice and normal and sane, might be like a big leather ball filled with air. Only in some places, the leather’s scuffed almost down to nothing. Places where the barriers are thinner. Do you get me?’

[....]And when she looked at them, it was a child's look — simple, exhausted, appealing . . . and at bay, somehow. It was as if whatever had happened had somehow shocked her young....

[....]He seemed unaware. He walked out on the other side — she saw him for just one moment silhouetted, tall and lanky, against the bloody, furious colors of the sunset, and then he was gone.

[....]The stars were out, but they were not her stars, the ones she had wished on as a girl or courted under as a young woman, these were crazed stars in lunatic constellations, and her hands went to her ears and her hands did not shut out the sounds and finally she screamed at them: 'Where's my husband? Where's Lonnie? What have you done to him?'

[....]And in Crouch End, which is really a quiet suburb of London, strange things still happen from time to time, and people have been known to lose their way. Some of them lose it forever.

"Crouch End" (1980) is a fine "opening the door" story.

It was an early canonical King story, and by 1988 had already graduated to a place in Hartwell's The Dark Descent. While it does not have the compressed energy and elan of the superior "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut," it is a model of modest non-pastiche cosmicism in more mainstream US horror fiction.

Jay