Welcome to Arkham

Witness Arkham like you’re walking its streets and peering into its shadows with Welcome to Arkham: An Illustrated Guide for Visitors from Aconyte Books…

This amazing new, full-color hardcover hits shelves in April, and we wanted to give fans of the Arkham Horror Files a closer look.

Welcome to Arkham – or, to give the book its full title, Welcome to Arkham: An Illustrated Guide for Visitors to the Historic Town of Arkham, Massachusetts, and Environs Including Dunwich, Innsmouth and Kingsport – is a 176-page hardcover bringing together descriptions, illustrations and an incredible variety of other snippets of information that together bring to life the city of Arkham and its surrounding towns, as well as the people who live there and the mysteries that surround them.

Long-time Arkham Horror fans may remember the original “Welcome to Arkham” as a 32-page section in the Arkham Horror 3^rd Edition Deluxe Rulebook, presenting the key locations and neighborhoods found in the game in rich, evocative detail. These original neighborhoods and locations all appear in the new Welcome to Arkham book, and are now expanded to cover the whole of the city of Arkham as well as the towns of Dunwich, Innsmouth and Kingsport.

Familiar neighborhoods are expanded with new locations – including well-known destinations like Downtown’s Excelsior Hotel and First Bank of Arkham, and others never seen before, such as the Palace Movie Theater and Thomas Ward Bridge. Alongside these, the famed French Hill neighborhood, home to the Silver Twilight Lodge, appears for the first time, while Miskatonic University rightly receives its own, greatly expanded chapter.  

Away from the city of Arkham itself, the book takes us to Dunwich, Innsmouth and Kingsport, exploring locales like the Blasted Heath and the Innsmouth Shore, and locations as fabled and feared as the Whateley Farm Ruins, Innsmouth’s Devil Reef and the Kingsport Caverns.

But Welcome to Arkham is more than just the words on the page. The book itself is presented as a living artifact, its pages crammed with newspaper cuttings, typewritten documents, photographs and other curios, as well as handwritten notes scribbled in the margins. Together these hint at the sinister mysteries for which Arkham and the Miskatonic Valley are renowned. Read between the lines and you can also begin to piece together the story of the book’s owner and their apparent fate… 

These intersecting narratives and descriptions – and the rich, varied ephemera strewn across the book’s pages – turn this humble guidebook into a deep mystery, built on layer upon layer of horror and intrigue.

Perhaps most notable among the haphazardly assembled collection of documents stuffed into Welcome to Arkham’s pages are a series of excerpts from the folklorist Kōhaku Narukami’s “Book of Living Myths,” an artifact first mentioned in the recent Feast of Hemlock Vale expansion for Arkham Horror: The Card Game. For now, though, precisely what connects Kōhaku to the one-time owner of this particular copy of Welcome to Arkham remains a mystery…

Welcome to Arkham is on sale in the US and worldwide in mid-April*, in both print and digital editions. The book is available to pre-order now from the webstore and your local bookstores.

*The book may be on sale a little earlier in some territories.