Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951)

*Spoilers ahead*

I'm sure it's due to some obscure perverseness that I can't consciously pinpoint, but I've never quite warmed up to "The Willows." Despite its esteemed reputation, despite the fact that I've reread it many times during the past thirty-five years in hopes that I would appreciate some nuance which previously had eluded me, I'm left essentially unmoved by the story. With just two characters in a single setting, and action that remains almost entirely ambiguous to the end, it's too spare to justify its length (a little over fifty pages). Not much happens: two outdoorsmen, one of them the story's narrator, are paddling a canoe up the Danube; they make camp on one of the river's numerous small islands, where the willow bushes seem to take on a threatening aspect. Are the willows really occupied/manipulated by some intelligent lifeform from another plane of existence, or are the men so overwhelmed by the loneliness and remoteness of the island that they (one of them, in particular) suffer a psychotic break? It's never made clear. The missing oar, the damage to the canoe and the loss of provisions arguably can be blamed on the narrator's eccentric traveling companion. Even the ghastly corpse that turns up at the end may have been a victim of the Swede.

Here emerges an inescapable parallel with the age-old critical debate over Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw" (which Blackwood greatly admired): is it really a ghost story, or isn't it? But "The Willows" is even less plainly a tale of the supernatural. Read it carefully and you'll realize how consistent the psychological interpretation is. With a single exception (a visual phenomenon which the narrator witnesses alone, and is easily attributable to imagination), all the strange events of the story could have been wrought by human hands. What "The Willows" is actually about, in my view, is the narrator's dawning realization that his traveling companion is not the stable, unimaginative, trustworthy type he had appeared to be.

I understand the effect that Blackwood was aiming for, but the execution is labored. Again and again, the narrator describes the uncanny atmosphere of the island, the rustling of the willows, the anxiety that overtakes him as escape begins to look impossible...and the more he describes it, the less I'm able to feel it. Blackwood is too insistent, and because the story is so long yet so lacking in substance, he has no choice but to go on insisting. All that the narrator can do is sit around and wait for something bad to happen. It just doesn't work for me. I'm not sure how "The Willows" came to be regarded as the greatest horror story in the English language; I'll take Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan" (which is, unambiguously and unapologetically, a horror story) any day of the week. And this, I assure you, is coming from someone who admires much of Algernon Blackwood's work. He conveyed an atmosphere of supernatural wonder far more effectively in "Ancient Sorceries," and of creeping dread and horror in "The Occupant of the Room."… (altro)

This is a collection of the most famous of Algernon Blackwood's spooky stories, plus a concluding one, 'Max Hensig' which is non-supernatural and deals with a reporter's brush with the psychopathic killer of the title, quite interesting in its own right.

The book opens with 'The Willows', a long story which some have stated is the best ghost story in the English language. I wouldn't agree; for a start, it isn't about ghosts but about the encounter of two men, travelling to the source of the Danube, with forces from another dimension. The setting is a remote marshy area covered in stunted willow bushes, and in the course of the story, the willows take on something of the nature of the inimical force which threatens the two men. I found it a bit slow, and its chief interest lay in my conviction that it must have influenced H P Lovecraft, a well-read man, because it is surely the earliest example (the 1907 credit is of its first collection in another anthology, so it is earlier than that) of a story about the intrusion into our dimension of hostile forces alien to humankind - a theme which became Lovecraft's entire oeuvre.

Other stories, such as 'Ancient Sorceries' and 'Secret Worship' concern those who worship traditional sources of evil, such as the devil Asmodeus. A hapless protagonist is drawn into a situation where he feels an irrestible attraction to a place or person, sometimes both - in 'Ancient Sorceries' and 'Glamour of the Snow' the person in question is a femme fatale who exercises an almost literally fatal attraction. The portrayal of witchcraft is always traditionally satanic in nature; far from the nature worship of the modern Wiccan religion which antedated Blackwood's stories.

Other tales are more varied - 'The Listener' concerns an impoverished magazine article writer who takes rooms because they are cheap and finds out why, and 'He Kept His Promise' is about a student who is cramming for his exams when an old friend arrives, sadly transformed. In 'Ancient Lights' a staid officeworker is pixie-lead in an old wood, and an equally unadventurous character on a walking holiday is brought face to face with a moral dilemma in 'Accessory Before the Fact'. 'The Empty House' is the most traditional ghost story in the collection, in which the protagonist is asked to accompany his plucky but elderly aunt who wants support when she spends the night in a local haunted house.

'The Transfer' is unusual in that it is the only story with a female protagonist: a governess who witnesses the visit of her employer's brother, a psychic vampire who leaches vitality from all around him, but who finally meets his match in a rather mystical fashion. And 'The Other Wing' is from the viewpoint of a young boy, although it is rather confusing at first, implying that the boy is an invalid - he isn't - and then that he is much younger than eight or nine; but it does capture well the attempt by a child to make sense of strange phenomena by inventing his own story about it to tell himself.

Some of the stories fall a bit flat with non-conclusive endings: 'Ancient Sorceries', already mentioned, is one of a series Blackwood apparently wrote where someone tells their tale to a "psychic doctor" called John Silence, and trails off rather flatly. However, even where they strike a modern reader as a bit slow or predictable, or lacking an impactful ending, they nevertheless are usually good at evoking an atmosphere of creepy awareness of the supernatural.

Not the final story in the book, but the one I most enjoyed was the first Blackwood story I ever read, 'The Wendigo'. Despite last reading this as a child, I still remembered certain striking details. The story holds a strange power and tellingly, is set in the great outdoors of remote Canada. Blackwood was a great explorer of wildernesses which still existed in the early Twentieth Century, Canada being one, and in 'The Wendigo' he evokes the remote loneliness and power of the forests and the strangeness of its denizens. Loosely based on a Native American mythological character, this story still creates shivers, though it is necessary to overlook the stereotypes of the era, including the somewhat condescending portrayal of the Native American cook and general dogsbody.

Given the mixture of stories and their varying success for me, my overall rating for the collection is 3 stars.… (altro)

Algernon Blackwood had a largely forgotten long career, first as a short story writer and later as a novelist, then broadcaster on radio and early BBC TV. At one time, he was far better known for his radio/TV appearances. I came to his work many years ago by reading one of his supernatural short stories, 'The Wendigo', in a collection of ghost stories. Most of his work is not, in fact, traditional ghost story material but falls more into the arena of strange presences in the great outdoors, since he was always a great traveller in what, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were the largely unexplored wild places of Canada and Eastern Europe.

This collection brings together the more obscure writings and broadcasts of his career, stemming from an early short story which did take a traditional haunted house as setting, through to extracts from four novels, and some stories from broadcasts, the criteria being that these are all stories not collected prior to the 1989 publication of this anthology. I won't say much about individual stories, simply because, having made the mistake of passing on my copy elsewhere before writing my review, most of it has left little impression. The only things I have retained is the gist of a propaganda story Blackwood wrote during WWII, which struck me as more suiting WWI because the soldier protagonist is suffering from shell shock, in which the convalescing soldier is visited by a special visitor with a national character Britannia, and two of the novel extracts, one where a young boy lives in an alternative world in which he is being taught by his teacher to fly, while he is actually unconscious after a serious accident, and another where the protagonist has a weird unworldly out of body experience while lying on the lawn sunbathing with the children of his hosts - that would have all kinds of dodgy connotations to a modern audience - where they visit the abode of the winds.

The stories have an older style of narrative which comes across as a bit long drawn out, though on occasions beautifully described, and the climaxes occasionally fall flat, so have rated it only 2 star.… (altro)

I read The Regeneration of Lord Ernie. It certainly wasn't *bad* but for me personally I just found the descriptions too long winded - you could reasonably cut half of it and I wouldn't feel like I'd missed much. I think part of the problem is I just really can't get a good mental image from all the descriptions - I find them quite repetitive even when he's describing things changing. The Willows suffers from this problem a bit but I felt the uniqueness of some of the images really lingered with me. This one not so much.… (altro)