Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951)

This novella is available for free on Project Gutenberg.

I only downloaded this story because I had the misfortune to read a bad graphic novel adaptation of it by Nicolás Lepka called Wendigo. I was curious to see if the problem lay with the source material or the adapter, and it seems to be Lepka.

This version is a mediocre horror story that relies more on atmosphere than in-your-face horror as the presence of the monstrous Wendigo is more felt than seen. Lepka, meanwhile, turns it into a literal monster story with the Wendigo appearing on page after page flitting about.

If you are tempted to try one or the other, I'd go with this one, but keep in mind it is steeped in racism against Black and Indigenous people. That's more unpleasant than any of its intended horrors.… (mehr)

*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."… (mehr)

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.… (mehr)