1. Algernon Blackwood (1906), The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories
So here I am with a weekend to myself for the first time in ages, but that isn't for good reasons, and it will probably be the first of far too many - if we're all lucky. I could sit here and write about the coronavirus, but for the sake of normality and mental health, here is a post about some ghost stories I read instead.
I started reading this collection a day or two before Christmas 2019, but I didn't finish it until after New Year 2020, so I'll count it as the first book of 2020. I have only knowingly read one Algernon Blackwood story before, which was The Willows, though I read a lot of horror short story compilations in my teens, so may well have read others. Anyway, I love The Willows, and what I love about it is that the scary supernatural entities in it are not ghosts or monsters in anything like the normal sense, but elemental forces or beings, seemingly from another dimension, which the human characters cannot see or understand. That really spoke to me and made for an immensely gripping and powerful story, so having read and enjoyed that one recently in isolation, I decided to make this, Algernon Blackwood's earliest published short story collection, the subject of this year's ghostly Christmas reading.
The table of contents runs thus:
The Empty House
A Haunted Island
A Case Of Eavesdropping
Keeping His Promise
With Intent To Steal
The Wood Of The Dead
Smith: An Episode In A Lodging-House
A Suspicious Gift
The Strange Adventures Of A Private Secretary In New York
Skeleton Lake: An Episode In Camp
Precis of all the stories (and more) may be found here, while the whole collection is online here. Some, such as The Empty House, A Case Of Eavesdropping and Keeping His Promise are standard-to-fairly standard ghost stories, though certainly very well done and typically leaving me feeling pleasantly on edge and unwilling to look behind me by the time I had finished them and was ready to turn out the light. But others reflect the same interest in the unknowable, the occult or the divine as The Willows. One was The Wood Of The Dead, in which a traveller who has stopped at a village inn during a walking holiday has a strange and almost epiphanic encounter with an old man who joins him in the dining room. The effect of the man on our narrator is strange and powerful, and exactly what I had come looking for in light of The Willows. It's worth quoting a substantial extract"I have come for someone who must soon move, even as I have moved."
He looked me through and through with a dreadfully piercing gaze, but I met his eyes with a full straight stare, trembling though I was, and I was aware that something stirred within me that had never stirred before, though for the life of me I could not have put a name to it, or have analysed its nature. Something lifted and rolled away. For one single second I understood clearly that the past and the future exist actually side by side in one immense Present; that it was I who moved to and fro among shifting, protean appearances.
The old man dropped his eyes from my face, and the momentary glimpse of a mightier universe passed utterly away. Reason regained its sway over a dull, limited kingdom.
"Come to-night," I heard the old man say, "come to me to-night into the Wood of the Dead. Come at midnight-"
Involuntarily I clutched the arm of the settle for support, for I then felt that I was speaking with someone who knew more of the real things that are and will be, than I could ever know while in the body, working through the ordinary channels of sense - and this curious half-promise of a partial lifting of the veil had its undeniable effect upon me.
As the story unfolds, this man proves to be both a ghost himself and a psychopomp - not, as it rather sounds from this passage, come to guide our narrator into the next world, but, as it turns out, the unfortunate young woman from the inn who is serving them both that day in the dining room. But as I think that passage makes clear, he is rather more than an ordinary ghost, or even a psychopomp either, but a more element spirit of nature; perhaps even a sort of localised god.
The other story with a similarly Willows-y feel to it is Smith: An Episode In A Lodging-House, in which Mr Smith, the rather mysterious and shady tenant in the room below our narrator, summons up beings which he cannot control. This time they are rather less benign than the old man in The Wood Of The Dead (who is not malign - just guiding over people whose time has come anyway), and indeed probably prototypes for the beings in The Willows itself, which was written only a year later. This is how our narrator experiences them when he sense on returning home one night that Smith is in terrible trouble and enters into his room:My first impression on entering the room had been that it was full of-people, I was going to say; but that hardly expresses my meaning. Beings, they certainly were, but it was borne in upon me beyond the possibility of doubt, that they were not human beings. That I had caught a momentary glimpse of living, intelligent entities I can never doubt, but I am equally convinced, though I cannot prove it, that these entities were from some other scheme of evolution altogether, and had nothing to do with the ordinary human life, either incarnate or discarnate.
They were in constant motion about me. They stood close to my side; moved behind me; brushed past my shoulder; stirred the hair on my forehead; and circled round me without ever actually touching me, yet always pressing closer and closer. Especially in the air just over my head there seemed ceaseless movement, and it was accompanied by a confused noise of whispering and sighing that threatened every moment to become articulate in words. To my intense relief, however, I heard no distinct words, and the noise continued more like the rising and falling of the wind than anything else I can imagine.
But the characteristic of these 'Beings' that impressed me most strongly at the time, and of which I have carried away the most permanent recollection, was that each one of them possessed what seemed to be a vibrating centre which impelled it with tremendous force and caused a rapid whirling motion of the atmosphere as it passed me. The air was full of these little vortices of whirring, rotating force, and whenever one of them pressed me too closely I felt as if the nerves in that particular portion of my body had been literally drawn out, absolutely depleted of vitality, and then immediately replaced-but replaced dead, flabby, useless.
As luck would have it, his very entry into this scene allows Smith to regain control of the situation and banish the beings. Naturally, the narrator gives notice to the landlady the next day.
Blackwood's interest in stories of this kind seems to be grounded in a real-life interest in occultism (fairly unsurprisingly), while other recurring features such as stories set in shared rented accommodation or in places such as Canada and New York likewise reflect his real life and work. Indeed, some suggest (without labouring the point) quite cutting observations about the effects of poverty and social exploitation. No less than four in the collection also feature a character with the same name, Jim Shorthouse, though without any of them ever referring within them to the events of any of the others. That rather leaves unresolved the question of whether they are actually the same person, or merely a set of unrelated characters to whom Blackwood gave the same name for want of thinking up anything else, but this blog post does a good job of thinking about how they could be viewed plausibly as a set across which a single character gradually evolves.
Two stories also place a significant emphasis on the act of story-telling itself, complete with the possibilities of unreliable narration which that instantly raises - Smith: An Episode In A Lodging-House and Skeleton Lake: An Episode In Camp. The Smith story is framed as being related by its narrator (a doctor) to a circle of listeners at a fire-side, in which sounds like a very M.R. Jamesian setting. This one is not so much concerned with unreliable narration, but rather uses occasional breaks from the action of the story to return to the doctor narrating it, and to emphasise through his pale face and nervous body-language just how very real and still traumatic the events were for him. The Skeleton Lake story, by contrast, is almost wholly about unreliable narration. A small camping party are interrupted in the night by the arrival of a man utterly intent on feverishly pouring out the story of how he has become separated from his hiking partner in a way which strikes the listeners as an attempt to write an untruth into reality, and which proves utterly at odds with what two of them find when they go to investigate the scene of the supposed events. That one is more of a crime story than anything supernatural, but a good one and cleverly written. Indeed, one line in it reflected an interesting sense of the power which can come with defining the record of an event, while simultaneously reminding me of Stoker's Dracula and its similar interest in narration, recording and story-telling: "he told his story boldly, forcing his conclusions upon us as if we had been so many wax cylinders of a phonograph that would repeat accurately what had been told us."
Finally, again in line with the last Stoker novel I read and because it very much needs to be acknowledged, there is some full-blown racism in this collection too. In A Haunted Island, our narrator is left alone for a few weeks at an island lodge in the middle of a lake in Canada, where he thinks he will do some studying, but he soon begins to see and hear strange things, which culminate in a vision of seeing himself scalped and dragged away by (as he called them) 'Indians'. In The Strange Adventures Of A Private Secretary In New York, one of the Shorthouse stories, he goes to an isolated Gothic house on Long Island to deal with a matter of private blackmail between his employer and the house's owner, only to find that the latter is certainly extremely weird and probably a werewolf. So far, so fine and dandy, but his butler is Jewish, a point which Shorthouse registers immediately he opens the door, and as far as I can see this particular piece of characterisation is there purely to ramp up the general sinisterness of the house's atmosphere and allow Blackwood to put some extremely anti-semitic remarks into the house-owner's mouth. It's disappointing. As I've noted above, Blackwood is quite capable of noting and portraying the harmful effects of social and income inequality, but he still seems to have viewed The Other as a threat rather than a victim of similar disparities.
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I started reading this collection a day or two before Christmas 2019, but I didn't finish it until after New Year 2020, so I'll count it as the first book of 2020. I have only knowingly read one Algernon Blackwood story before, which was The Willows, though I read a lot of horror short story compilations in my teens, so may well have read others. Anyway, I love The Willows, and what I love about it is that the scary supernatural entities in it are not ghosts or monsters in anything like the normal sense, but elemental forces or beings, seemingly from another dimension, which the human characters cannot see or understand. That really spoke to me and made for an immensely gripping and powerful story, so having read and enjoyed that one recently in isolation, I decided to make this, Algernon Blackwood's earliest published short story collection, the subject of this year's ghostly Christmas reading.
The table of contents runs thus:
The Empty House
A Haunted Island
A Case Of Eavesdropping
Keeping His Promise
With Intent To Steal
The Wood Of The Dead
Smith: An Episode In A Lodging-House
A Suspicious Gift
The Strange Adventures Of A Private Secretary In New York
Skeleton Lake: An Episode In Camp
Precis of all the stories (and more) may be found here, while the whole collection is online here. Some, such as The Empty House, A Case Of Eavesdropping and Keeping His Promise are standard-to-fairly standard ghost stories, though certainly very well done and typically leaving me feeling pleasantly on edge and unwilling to look behind me by the time I had finished them and was ready to turn out the light. But others reflect the same interest in the unknowable, the occult or the divine as The Willows. One was The Wood Of The Dead, in which a traveller who has stopped at a village inn during a walking holiday has a strange and almost epiphanic encounter with an old man who joins him in the dining room. The effect of the man on our narrator is strange and powerful, and exactly what I had come looking for in light of The Willows. It's worth quoting a substantial extract"I have come for someone who must soon move, even as I have moved."
He looked me through and through with a dreadfully piercing gaze, but I met his eyes with a full straight stare, trembling though I was, and I was aware that something stirred within me that had never stirred before, though for the life of me I could not have put a name to it, or have analysed its nature. Something lifted and rolled away. For one single second I understood clearly that the past and the future exist actually side by side in one immense Present; that it was I who moved to and fro among shifting, protean appearances.
The old man dropped his eyes from my face, and the momentary glimpse of a mightier universe passed utterly away. Reason regained its sway over a dull, limited kingdom.
"Come to-night," I heard the old man say, "come to me to-night into the Wood of the Dead. Come at midnight-"
Involuntarily I clutched the arm of the settle for support, for I then felt that I was speaking with someone who knew more of the real things that are and will be, than I could ever know while in the body, working through the ordinary channels of sense - and this curious half-promise of a partial lifting of the veil had its undeniable effect upon me.
As the story unfolds, this man proves to be both a ghost himself and a psychopomp - not, as it rather sounds from this passage, come to guide our narrator into the next world, but, as it turns out, the unfortunate young woman from the inn who is serving them both that day in the dining room. But as I think that passage makes clear, he is rather more than an ordinary ghost, or even a psychopomp either, but a more element spirit of nature; perhaps even a sort of localised god.
The other story with a similarly Willows-y feel to it is Smith: An Episode In A Lodging-House, in which Mr Smith, the rather mysterious and shady tenant in the room below our narrator, summons up beings which he cannot control. This time they are rather less benign than the old man in The Wood Of The Dead (who is not malign - just guiding over people whose time has come anyway), and indeed probably prototypes for the beings in The Willows itself, which was written only a year later. This is how our narrator experiences them when he sense on returning home one night that Smith is in terrible trouble and enters into his room:My first impression on entering the room had been that it was full of-people, I was going to say; but that hardly expresses my meaning. Beings, they certainly were, but it was borne in upon me beyond the possibility of doubt, that they were not human beings. That I had caught a momentary glimpse of living, intelligent entities I can never doubt, but I am equally convinced, though I cannot prove it, that these entities were from some other scheme of evolution altogether, and had nothing to do with the ordinary human life, either incarnate or discarnate.
They were in constant motion about me. They stood close to my side; moved behind me; brushed past my shoulder; stirred the hair on my forehead; and circled round me without ever actually touching me, yet always pressing closer and closer. Especially in the air just over my head there seemed ceaseless movement, and it was accompanied by a confused noise of whispering and sighing that threatened every moment to become articulate in words. To my intense relief, however, I heard no distinct words, and the noise continued more like the rising and falling of the wind than anything else I can imagine.
But the characteristic of these 'Beings' that impressed me most strongly at the time, and of which I have carried away the most permanent recollection, was that each one of them possessed what seemed to be a vibrating centre which impelled it with tremendous force and caused a rapid whirling motion of the atmosphere as it passed me. The air was full of these little vortices of whirring, rotating force, and whenever one of them pressed me too closely I felt as if the nerves in that particular portion of my body had been literally drawn out, absolutely depleted of vitality, and then immediately replaced-but replaced dead, flabby, useless.
As luck would have it, his very entry into this scene allows Smith to regain control of the situation and banish the beings. Naturally, the narrator gives notice to the landlady the next day.
Blackwood's interest in stories of this kind seems to be grounded in a real-life interest in occultism (fairly unsurprisingly), while other recurring features such as stories set in shared rented accommodation or in places such as Canada and New York likewise reflect his real life and work. Indeed, some suggest (without labouring the point) quite cutting observations about the effects of poverty and social exploitation. No less than four in the collection also feature a character with the same name, Jim Shorthouse, though without any of them ever referring within them to the events of any of the others. That rather leaves unresolved the question of whether they are actually the same person, or merely a set of unrelated characters to whom Blackwood gave the same name for want of thinking up anything else, but this blog post does a good job of thinking about how they could be viewed plausibly as a set across which a single character gradually evolves.
Two stories also place a significant emphasis on the act of story-telling itself, complete with the possibilities of unreliable narration which that instantly raises - Smith: An Episode In A Lodging-House and Skeleton Lake: An Episode In Camp. The Smith story is framed as being related by its narrator (a doctor) to a circle of listeners at a fire-side, in which sounds like a very M.R. Jamesian setting. This one is not so much concerned with unreliable narration, but rather uses occasional breaks from the action of the story to return to the doctor narrating it, and to emphasise through his pale face and nervous body-language just how very real and still traumatic the events were for him. The Skeleton Lake story, by contrast, is almost wholly about unreliable narration. A small camping party are interrupted in the night by the arrival of a man utterly intent on feverishly pouring out the story of how he has become separated from his hiking partner in a way which strikes the listeners as an attempt to write an untruth into reality, and which proves utterly at odds with what two of them find when they go to investigate the scene of the supposed events. That one is more of a crime story than anything supernatural, but a good one and cleverly written. Indeed, one line in it reflected an interesting sense of the power which can come with defining the record of an event, while simultaneously reminding me of Stoker's Dracula and its similar interest in narration, recording and story-telling: "he told his story boldly, forcing his conclusions upon us as if we had been so many wax cylinders of a phonograph that would repeat accurately what had been told us."
Finally, again in line with the last Stoker novel I read and because it very much needs to be acknowledged, there is some full-blown racism in this collection too. In A Haunted Island, our narrator is left alone for a few weeks at an island lodge in the middle of a lake in Canada, where he thinks he will do some studying, but he soon begins to see and hear strange things, which culminate in a vision of seeing himself scalped and dragged away by (as he called them) 'Indians'. In The Strange Adventures Of A Private Secretary In New York, one of the Shorthouse stories, he goes to an isolated Gothic house on Long Island to deal with a matter of private blackmail between his employer and the house's owner, only to find that the latter is certainly extremely weird and probably a werewolf. So far, so fine and dandy, but his butler is Jewish, a point which Shorthouse registers immediately he opens the door, and as far as I can see this particular piece of characterisation is there purely to ramp up the general sinisterness of the house's atmosphere and allow Blackwood to put some extremely anti-semitic remarks into the house-owner's mouth. It's disappointing. As I've noted above, Blackwood is quite capable of noting and portraying the harmful effects of social and income inequality, but he still seems to have viewed The Other as a threat rather than a victim of similar disparities.
Dreamwidth version |
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