The Terror of Nature and the Nature of Terror
“Of the quality of Mr. Blackwood’s genius there can be no dispute; for no one has ever met the skill, seriousness, and minute fidelity with which he records the overtones of strangeness in ordinary things and experiences, or the preternatural insight with which he builds detail by detail the complete sensations perceptions leading from reality into supernatural life or vision.”
During the month of October, I make it a point to read horror literature. This year I read Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood. Deuce Richardson wrote a good piece about him for this blog a while back. As the quote above shows, H. P. Lovecraft thought highly of his work. In fact Lovecraft considered him one of the four masters of the weird tale with M. R. James, Arthur Machen, and Lord Dunsany.
His two best known stories are “The Willows” and “The Wendigo.” I had read “The Willows” before but I did not remember much about it. Why it did not leave much of an impression on me the first time I don’t know, because it certainly did the second. Both stories are considered classics of horror. In both stories, the horror is routed in the natural world.
“The Willows” takes place in Germany. The two main characters are tourists travelling down the Danube on a canoe. They camp out on an island in a swamp among the willows of the title. Soon it becomes clear that the area they are in is haunted by some sort of supernatural presence. What the presence might be is never explained but both the characters have different theories. What Blackwood seems to imply, however, is that the presence is something truly beyond the understanding of man.
“The Wendigo” takes place in the wilderness of Canada. A group of hunters travels deep within this forest until they decide to split up. Two of the hunters, a divinity student named Simpson and a French-Canadian guide named Defago, head even deeper into uncharted territory. Slowly, over the course of the story, they realize they are not alone. They encounter a horrible scent and mysterious footprints. Eventually Defago disappears. Simpson makes it back to the rest of his companions. Then something claiming to be Defago appears. In reality it is the creature of Algonquin legend: The Wendigo.
In both stories Blackwood shows a great attention to detail. The pace might be considered too slow by some modern readers, but I consider it necessary to the stories. A faster paced story would lack the atmosphere and the verisimilitude. One could probably write a story where the monster appears on the first page and make it interesting, but it would have to be interesting in a different way than these stories.
Both stories are also somewhat autobiographical. Blackwood was an avid outdoorsman. In his introductions to Best Ghost Stories, he mentions that he really did canoe down the Danube and he also lived in Canada.
The stories are also similar in that the terror of story is the terror of being lost in the wilderness. The characters in both are far away from human society. They are outside the safety of civilization. They have no one but their companions and themselves to rely on in an emergency. In the wild strange things lurk.
What is interesting is that many of the other stories in the volume take place in cities. They include “The Listener” and “The Empty House.” These are more typical ghost stories compared to the cosmic horror of “The Willows.” They are of very good examples of the traditional ghost story, but they lack something of the power of “The Willows” or “The Wendigo." Also in the volume, there is the story “The Glamour of Snow” which is set a ski lodge. It also deals with the fear of nature. This story seems to rest in a spot between the urban ghost stories and the terror tales of the wild. Though a good story, it is not on the same level as either “The Willows” or “The Wendigo.” I think this is because a ski resort is still too civilized.
It is not that a great horror story taking place in the city cannot be written. Fritz Leiber did just that with “Smoke Ghost” and Our Lady of Darkness. It is however a very different type of fear that is being conveyed.
There is something unique to the fear of being out alone in the wild. This fear is elemental to humanity. It is in fact essential to human survival. If we are without fear we act foolishly. Even today when there is a lot less wilderness people disappear on camping trips never to be seen again.
It is this elemental fear that, along with Blackwood’s craftsmanship, gives the stories their power. What differentiates this kind of cosmic horror from, say, that of H. P. Lovecraft, is that the horror is combined with genuine awe. Blackwood had a strong mystic side that rational materialist Lovecraft lacked. In this he was probably closer to Machen than Lovecraft. It is a kind of a dark transcendentalism. It is not the cosmic indifference of Lovecraft. The fear comes with awe of being part of something greater than ourselves. “The Wendigo” gives us the downside of pantheism: the loss of individual identity. This makes it in some ways the scarier story of the two even if “The Willows” is probably the better written. “The Willows” seems to express the mixture of awe and terror better.
Either way, they are both classics. I highly recommend seeking them out. Depending on how you view it, they would make very good or very bad reading on a camping trip. Just remember to be careful. You do not know what is out there.