Even though Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’ is one of my favourite weird tales, possibly even my most favourite, I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve read little of his less-known work and hardly any of his non-fiction writings. This is doubly shameful as not only is there a huge amount of work beyond stories like ‘The Willows’ and ‘The Wendigo’ but also much of it is concerned with a love which I share with the writer: a deep love not only of enjoying nature (or Nature, as editor Henry Bartholomew reminds us of Blackwood’s love of capitalisation) but of becoming lost within it. I’ve never been to the Canada that Blackwood described as ‘the nearest approach to a dream come true I had yet known’, but I have explored the jungles of Borneo, trekked across Andean passes and skirted Himalayan foothills. As Blackwood would’ve known, these are all places where reality itself seems to become thin and one’s soul expands outwards to fill the void left behind. They are, in short, weird places.
It’s timely, then, that Algernon Blackwood, The Unknown appears from Handheld Press to fill that void in my own knowledge of Blackwood’s weird places, both real and imagined, with Bartholomew’s skillful blending of non-fiction essays and fiction narratives that sketch Blackwood’s wider concerns and loves.
Each of this collection’s four sections – starkly titled Canada, Mountain, Reincarnation and Imagination – opens with one of Blackwood’s essays and then two tales, all of which cover the section’s themes from different angles. This is a clever way to organise the work, as it shows, quite succinctly, how these themes occupied Blackwood’s thoughts as part of his own, personal worldview and not simply as sources of narrative inspiration. The first paragraph of ‘’Mid the Haunts of the Moose’, the piece which opens this collection, is simple, plain writing which speaks of Blackwood’s ability to bring his own experiences into the mind’s eye of his readers. When he talks, later, of ‘cranes, huge fish-hawks, divers, laughing loons, eagles, tracks of otter, mink, bear, deer, and occasionally of wolves along the shore’, the smooth, confident flow of this litany populates the woods Blackwood has already planted in our minds. It’s beautiful, evocative writing, and, even though I find the moose-hunting that it describes cruel and unpleasant, I became instantly swept up in Blackwood’s effortless story-telling ability.
As good as this opening salvo is, however, it’s the pivot from reportage to the shadow-tale of ‘utter loneliness’ in ‘Skeleton Lake’ that opens up those weird gulfs beneath our feet; Blackwood, in Bartholomew’s editorial hands, takes a short breath after describing a humorous interlude at the end of ‘’Mid the Haunts of the Moose’, and, with the finesse of a campfire tale-teller, he leads us into the darkness that lies under the broad canopy of Canadian woods, under the glimmering surface of its ice-cold lakes. ‘Skeleton Lake’ is a simple tale and one, like ‘The Willows’, in which the awful inertia of its revelation is almost more important than the revelation itself. Blackwood, by implying as much as he states outright, drags the reader into the characters’ confusion and, by doing so, allows the horror to become tinged with our own worst fears. Blackwood’s fascination with the inexorable is as potent here as it is in ‘The Wolves of God’, where we’re moved from Canada’s vastness to the isolated islands of Orkney, but the implacable glare of Nature is still as fearsome and unrelenting.
Yet as harrowing and wrathful as Blackwood’s vision of Nature can be, it is also beguiling and intoxicating. His awe-struck description of the Alps – ‘clothed so simply in their robes of jet and ermine’ – is almost reverential; the hushed whispering of a devotee crouching in a cathedral of granite and snow, contemptuous of the human bustle that threatens to spoil his adorations. The two stories that follow – ‘The Glamour of the Snow’ and ‘The Sacrifice’ – both deal with this need to encounter something both utterly other and utterly indifferent to oneself, then to dissolve in their strangeness. The eerie, Alpine spirit – a frost-clad sibling of the Grecian oreads, whom Hibbert encounters in ‘The Glamour of the Snow’ – embodies the obsession of climbing one more slope, cresting one more ridge until the original aim is lost in the very doing of it. Hibbert isn’t simply climbing a mountain but approaching a god ‘terrifically enthroned and close to Heaven’. The collection’s cover artwork, a detail of Emil Cardinaux’s tourism poster of the Matterhorn, transforms from mountain into a looming, cosmic monstrosity.
Blackwood’s greatest asset in these tales is, perhaps strangely for a horror writer, his enthusiasm. It’s an enthusiasm not only for the telling of tales, at which he is a master, but also for the world the tales depict. Whether that is the real world or an imaginary one is largely an academic distinction for Blackwood; if the human mind can travel there, then it is real enough to represent in its fullest form. Ironically, however, this means that some of his writing, especially that which deals with more metaphysical concepts, contorts this enthusiasm into the slightly pompous oratory of the evangelist. Both tales in the Reincarnation section – ‘The Insanity of Jones’ and ‘The Sacrifice’ – have a cloying, drawn out repetition of theme that betrays Blackwood’s inexperience with human interaction. And ‘By Water’ is interesting more for how it explains Blackwood’s creative process than it is for the tale in itself. Here, too, some of Blackwood’s stylistic foibles start to grate when not supported by the velocity of his best ideas; his tendency to over-write when reinforcing a philosophical point is cumbersome at times, and the way he cliff-hangs certain sentences with hyphenated words often comes across as – awkward.
I feel, though, that these are personal preferences and about my own ability to identify more with a love of the out-of-doors than with a sometimes credulous and patchwork mysticism. Blackwood’s genuine and persistent enthusiasm for the world, all its dangers as much as its joys, is also far more preferable to me than the hermitic turning-away from experience of the weird genre’s many Lovecrafts. Even the sections I didn’t enjoy so much as a reader, I appreciated as a writer and, more importantly, as a human being.
In short, Algernon Blackwood, The Unknown: Weird Writings, 1900-1937 is another excellent collection from Handheld, boldly edited by Bartholomew, and one which, like Blackwood himself, gleefully steps off the well-worn path and pushes into darker woods, colder climes.
Review by: Daniel Pietersen, who is the editor of I Am Stone: The Gothic Weird Tales Of R Murray Gilchrist, part of the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series, and also a regular guest lecturer for the Romancing The Gothic project. He covers gothic and weird horror, both fiction and non-fiction, for publications like Dead Reckonings, Revenant and Horrified. Daniel lives in Edinburgh with his wife, dog and a surprising amount of skulls. Daniel has also reviewed The Villa and the Vortex: Supernatural Stories (1916-1924), Elinor Mordaunt, edited by Melissa Edmundson (Handheld Press, 2021), From the Abyss: Weird Fiction by D. K. Broster, and Gothic: An Illustrated History, by Roger Luckhurst, for Horror Homeroom.
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