Reader's Digest: Groundhog Day, 2023

Last week I caught up on the New York Review of Books.

In January, Colin Thubron wrote about ruins. One of his subjects was a volume by Matthew Green called Shadowlands: A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Cities and Vanished Villages, which tells this macabre tale:

Green’s most poignant medieval site [is] the once wealthy town of Dunwich on the Suffolk coast. Ever since two violent tempests struck it seven centuries ago, the cliffs beneath have been drastically eroding under the winds and tides of the North Sea. By the mid-sixteenth century more than half the town—five complete parishes with their churches—had sunk into the ocean. For years the remains of All Saints, the last surviving church, teetered alone on the cliff edge. Already most of it had tumbled by chunks into the void: first its chancel, then, by degrees, its nave. Finally, in 1922, its bell tower and the graves nearby crashed down the cliff in a shower of human bones.

I don’t know if the horror/sci-fi author H. P. Lovecraft k…