H.P. Lovecraft - "The Nameless City"

That is not dead which can eternal lie
And with strange aeons even death may die (p. 30).

For the Lovecraft enthusiast, the most obvious lures of “The Nameless City” are bibliographic, the way that it introduces Abdul Alhazred and his couplet (quoted above) and prefigures At the Mountains of Madness with the idea of artwork giving a window into a lost civilization’s history. But it is also a powerful tale in its own right. As the narrator descends beneath the sands of Araby, Lovecraft displays his gifts at toying with history and building atmosphere, but he also works with wonder in a way which I had not often considered in my prior readings of his work.

[Be warned before continuing that I am assuming some familiarity with Lovecraft as a whole and so will not be going into great detail on the more obvious topics, such as the specifics of his dark revelations (in a word, scale; in a few, the realization that the universe is infinitely vaster than we are and that we do not matter) or how many adjectives he can cram into a single sentence. There will, also, be some spoilers for the story discussed. Finally, note that all page numbers come from the Penguin Classics edition of The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories, edited by S.T. Joshi.]

In popular culture and brief references, Lovecraft is often reduced to one emotion: fear. Occasionally, at moments of great specificity, that might be clarified to fear of the unknown. I don’t mean this in a purely derogatory way. Fear of the unknown is a huge part of Lovecraft’s work, and he evokes it masterfully. But “The Nameless City” exhibits the other driving force behind much of Lovecraft’s work: wonder, and our need for it.

The narrator here is not forced into his predicament. He came to the Nameless City of his own volition, well aware of its reputation. He endured many hardships to see it, even excepting those he encountered after his arrival that he could never have expected. Early on, he talks of “curiosity stronger than fear” (p. 32). Shortly afterwards, he writes of “that instinct for the strange and unknown which has made me a wanderer upon earth and a haunter of far, ancient, and forbidden places” (p. 34). Curiosity, the drive to seek the wondrous, then, is a matter integral to the narrator’s character. And it is admirable. We are not dealing with a dallier, here, but rather with a man that has managed to trace forgotten legends to their source, one whose search for knowledge has left him fluent in Lord Dunsany’s short stories, Thomas Moore’s poetry, and Greek mythology.

This need for wonder is not a fleeting thing. It might be the driving force for the erudition just discussed, but it goes farther than that. Just before descending into the Nameless City, the narrator says that he was “more afraid than I could explain, but not enough to dull my thirst for wonder” (p. 33). Fear, then, goes beyond what can be put into words, past what is rational. But so does wonder, for the narrator’s wonder trumps his fear. Remember, after all, that he has not yet entered the city when he feels that way. He could have simply turned around and seen no more. Right up until the final revelation, the narrator insists that “wonder drove out fear” (p. 39).

Let us step back for a moment and remember that this is the Lovecraft that, in a 1930 letter to August Derleth, wrote that: Time, space, and natural law hold for me suggestions of intolerable bondage, and I can form no picture of emotional satisfaction which does not involve their defeat – especially the defeat of time, so that one may merge oneself with the whole historic stream and be wholly emancipated from the transient and the ephemeral. An escape from strict, material reality like the kind that Lovecraft there described certainly sounds like a matter for wonder to me.

In fact, it leaves me wondering if wonder might not be the other pole of the cosmic dread that makes up so much of Lovecraft’s worldview, if his protagonists, aware of the unsatisfactory nature of the mundane, find that their only chance at joy is to strive for something greater than what is commonly perceived. That question is starting to go beyond “The Nameless City,” admittedly. While the narrator certainly does show a drive for wonder, we do not get to see any of his ordinary life, nor his state before the expedition. But the distinction between wonder and terror is one I certainly do plan to keep in mind when I next return to Lovecraft’s work.

What “The Nameless City” does provide in ample detail is how a search for wonder, for something greater than the limited perception that we all have ends if it ever really succeeds. Needless to say, it ends poorly. By the time he has escaped the Nameless City, the narrator can bleakly boast that “no other man shivers so horribly when the night-wind rattles the windows” (p. 30). The knowledge he has gained burns away any shred of joyous wonder.

In his imparting of that overawing knowledge, Lovecraft operates by taking successive steps away from the narrator’s comfort zone, enlarging the frame each time but doing so by subtle enough degrees that we follow him until the final shocks. From Araby* to the uncharted desert to the ruins to the strange temple and on, each step seems tied to the last. Many of the piece’s more evocative details serve to bridge and strengthen the gaps between conceptual shifts. The seemingly source-less wind that leads the narrator to the passageway down, for instance, is an admirably physical hook that keeps things from feeling too easy or too bodilessly concerned with alien art.

(* In any other author, the fact that “Araby” seems utterly unpopulated save for the narrator and a few briefly mentioned sheiks would seem like whitewashing. In Lovecraft’s work, it just left me glad that we were spared any execrable descriptions of cultic natives dancing about a fire.)

The most interesting thing about the different stages might be how easy it is to cross from one to the next. It does not, of course, look that way at first. “There is no legend so old as to give it a name, or to recall that it was ever alive” (p. 30) Lovecraft tells us of the Nameless City before, after a semicolon, continuing with: “but it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered about by grandmas in the tents of sheiks, so that all the tribes shun it without wholly knowing why” (ibid).

Of course, if there are no legends about it and no one has ever heard of it, it is difficult to see how so many people are whispering about it. One could be forgiven, therefore, for thinking that Lovecraft let his grandiosity get away with him. But I think the seeming contradiction shows something deeper. There are barriers to seeing the cosmic truths behind the mundane, but those barriers are perspectival and not material. It is not that all knowledge of this past is truly gone. Rather, we fervently wish that all knowledge of it was, and so we loudly declare that even as we whisper the truth to those closest to us.

Then there is the crucial fact that Lovecraft does not reach the end of these stages. He never says that he is done, that all truth has been revealed, and that the reader can rest contented. Rather, at the end, he gives us a glimpse of more vistas yet to come, even if we could never manage to tread upon them. The artwork grants the narrator great knowledge, but it is incomplete. It does not take him to the present day. Instead, he is left knowing that: “Of what could have happened in the deological aeons since the paintings ceased and the death-hating race resentfully succumbed to decay, no man might say” (p. 39). The final revelation, then, is that, even with the veil torn back, there is still an incomprehensible vastness beyond it, still infinitely more to be known that can never be known, other and innumerable gaps of cosmic time that even this monolithic revelation cannot come close to filling.

I would like to end, though, on a slightly smaller scale: with an allusion to mythology. As the narrator journeys to the Nameless City, he sees the sun, and we hear that he “fancied that from some remote depth there came a crash of musical metal to hail the fiery disc as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile” (p. 31). To those that either know the myth or alternatively turned to S.T. Joshi’s handy footnote (I will admit that I fell into the later category), the description of the natural world seems poetic, tinged with greater stories and imaginings. Lovecraft brings the allusion back at the tale’s end, and those same words are then utterly overshadowed by the vaster horrors below. Similarly, wonder functions in the story throughout, growing putrid and awful as it is attained but no less present for it.

William Hope Hodgson - Carnacki the Ghost Finder

Following only a few years after Algernon Blackwood's John Silence, William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki is one of the earliest occult investigators. The first collection of Carnacki stories hit in 1913; by the 1948 Arkham House edition, which added three tales unpublished in Hodgson's lifetime, the set as we know it today was complete. Hodgson's command of atmosphere is immense, here, but that atmosphere rarely survives to the story's end.

The collection's first triumph comes from how each of the stories build on one another. Carnacki's character, admittedly, is rather stock; we see little of his personality or life outside of his investigations. His circle of friends and manner of telling, however, does bring a human element to the stories. Each begins with his four closest friends coming to his home, eating a meal with him, and then sitting down expectantly to hear of his most recent case. Before long, the reader feels like they, too, are sitting in an armchair before Carnacki as the fellow smokes and begins his yarn. This feel is enhanced by Carnacki's frequent mentions of and questions to his listeners, such as his asking them: Can you picture it all? (p. 185)

The successive cases aid the supernatural as well. Carnacki never develops a complete mythos, but multiple elements carry over from tale to tale and begin to sketch his world. References to the Sigsand Manuscript, the Saaamaaa ritual, and hints as to the means and nature of the impossibilities Carnacki imagines come together to form a cohesive mystery that is more pernicious than disconnected hints could be. Backing up the idea of a growing understanding of the void, Carnacki frequently recalls prior cases as he speaks and draws comparisons, and he sometimes references his listeners to imagined lectures and books for more information on a particular occult topic.

When it comes to the occult, Carnacki is not some overconfident fool. He knows that: We are but speculating on the coasts of a strange country of mystery (p. 270). Always, his inquiries into the unknown are rational and methodical. He has much of the private investigator in him, but he is also a man of science. He neither unthinkingly accepts all he hears nor dogmatically dismisses it. As he says, he never allows himself to be blinded by a little cheap laughter. (p. 168). He is an unprejudiced sceptic (p. 138), and he continues to ask questions, and keep [his] eyes open (p. 168). In some, Carnacki finds the genuinely supernatural; in others, he does not. For all the problems this raises (which I'll get to shortly), it does give credit to Carnacki's position.

Hodgson's evocation of the occult is superb and is effective precisely because of its obliqueness. Little direct, physical action is taken by supernatural forces, let alone violent action. When such things are done, they come as rich climaxes, abrupt releases of the atmosphere's tension. Hodgson creates his moods through the subtle manipulation of the senses and through Carnacki's meticulous work at assembling every unearthly clue.

Often, Hodgson's tool is sound. After pitching his scenes into utter darkness, Hodgson leaves his investigator with nothing to go on but his ears, and then he fills the room with noises, each of which is not only a creepy bang in the night but is rife with significance to the man willing to think it through. In "The House Among the Laurels," Carnacki realizes that the sounds he hears are the breakings of the seals he placed on the mansion's doors; without a single visual, Hodgson impresses upon us the slow ghosting open of each of the doors and the implications thereof. "The Horse of the Invisible," meanwhile, has the horse's oncoming gallop be the knell of onrushing disaster. In "The Whistling Room," Hodgson goes farther still, and the room's infernal noises actually reach a climactic pitch, a succession of sounds with a certain, horrible personal note in it; as if there in the darkness you could picture the room rocking and creaking in a mad, vile glee to its own filthy piping and whistling and honing; and yet all the time aware of you in particular (p. 196).

When working with sight, Hodgson still does not rely simply on lurid imagery but rather bends and toys with light and vision itself. In "The Haunted Jarvee" it is unnatural shadows that first spell doom, but it is "The Searcher of the End House" that truly excels in this regard. It is here that light shifts before us, changing the very fundamentals of our perception into something unearthly. I give you (part of) the first paragraph in which Carnacki and those he's with glimpse the apparition:

In the very instant that I made this movement [towards my lantern], the night which filled the passage seemed to become suddenly of a dull violet colour; not, mind you, as if a light had been shown; but as if the natural blackness of the night had changed colour, as I might say from the inside. Do you understand what I am trying to tell you? And then, coming through this violet night, through this violet-coloured gloom, came a little naked child, running. In an extraordinary way, the child seemed not to be distinct from the surrounding gloom; but almost as if it were a concentration of that extraordinary atmosphere; almost – can you understand? – as if that gloomy colour which had changed the night,, came from the child (pp. 215-6).

Against even the excellence of all the stories listed, "The Hog" still likely stands out. Of all the stories here, it is by far the most cosmic in its Horror and its implications. The infernal, dream-haunting Swine-things within it hearken clearly back to those in Hodgson's The House on the Borderland, and this tale seems to give some of the grand backdrop against which that epic plays out – and, in the process, actually might have increased my appreciation for each work. In the short, Carnacki's investigation into a man plagued by awful dreams brings him into contact with that which in ye earlier life upon the world […] [had] power, and shall again in ye end (p. 300). "The Hog" is the longest of the Carnacki stories by a good bit, but I tore through it like a man possessed and rushing to reach the closing doors of sanity. The approach of the frightful Hog is excellently done, with one particularly powerful bit of imagery coming as the Hog rises up through Carnacki's defenses:

I saw through the slow whirl of the cloud curtains that the violet circle had begun to leave the floor. It was being taken up on the spread of the vast snout. […] Straining my eyes to see through the swaying funnel of clouds I saw that the violet circle had melted and was running down the pale sides of the snout in streams of violet-coloured fire (pp. 304-5).

Still, as in The House on the Borderland, Hodgson does not accompany his broadening in metaphysical scale with a broadening in morality. Those stories in Carnacki the Ghost-Finder that veer into cosmic forces do so in a fashion that is still black and white, or at least gray and white. For, you see, in addition to the Monstrous Ones (p. 300) that reside in the Outer Circle (p. 313), Hodgson also has an even more powerful Protective Force (p. 301) in his universe. The grand beasties exist in a rather amoral but horrific predatory fashion. As Hodgson describes it: They have desires regarding us which are incredibly more dreadful to our minds when comprehended than an intelligent sheep would consider our desires towards its own carcass (p. 315). The Protective Force, however, has no stated naturalistic reason for its aid. So, for all that it expands our conception of the universe, Hodgson's fiction once again keeps the idea of a benevolent and (so far as can be discerned) all powerful watcher over us.

Therefore, while his effects are very similar to Lovecraft in many ways, his thematic intentions are anything but, which is my chief problem with views like those espoused in this article by Lee Weinstein. As Weinstein, observes, Hodgson succeeds admirably in attaching the emotion of fear to the vastness of the cosmos. But Lovecraft's fear did not simply come from the size of the cosmos but also from their composition; his yawning vistas were not frightening solely (or even primarily) for the creatures that occupied them but rather for their size, for the way they cast humanity into insignificance, and for their emptiness of purpose and benevolence. Of course, Hodgson cannot be called inferior to Lovecraft simply for having different thematic interests. This paragraph and the one preceding it are more pointed at those, in my view, misconstruing Hodgson's work than they are at Hodgson himself.

What does directly damage the stories here, however, are their endings. Just about all of them close with Carnacki dishing out the hitherto utterly unguessable facts. That, in and of itself, is fine. Many of them, however, then rationalize away their supernatural elements as mere hoaxes, a move so infuriatingly, atmosphere-destroyingly similar to a century-older Scooby Do that one can hear the culprit of the hour screaming "I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling paranormal investigators!"

 In this article, Ellery Queen (yes, THAT Ellery Queen) defends the endings, stating that:  These natural elucidations, frowned on by devotees of the weird, must be applauded by devotees of the detective story; they transform Carnacki from a mere dabbler into the unknown to a legitimate and authentic detective. I can't help but noting that Queen never gives a single literary reason for why these explanations are good besides that they make Carnacki more of a detective. As to that, fair enough, but I don't think many would say a story is always bettered by including a detective, no matter what. In these cases, that inclusion (going by Queen's definitions) harms the stories quite a bit.

My problem is not simply that the endings are not supernatural – I am more than capable, needless to say, of enjoying realistic mysteries and other kinds of literature – but that they fatally undermine the story before them. Revealing that blood descending from a ceiling is actually colored water is simply silly (the genius detective did not verify that the blood mist was made of, you know, blood?), and that is, to be honest, one of the better reveals. Many of the absurd revelations contained herein are frankly less plausible than the idea that a ghost did it.

Their absurdity cheapens the atmosphere. When the reader knows that the otherworldly terror they felt came from a man controlling an absurd number of doorways with a hook, or one somehow running down a crowded hallway and escaping gunfire while wearing a mask and pretending to be a ghost, the reader's main reaction is not only that the preceding story was not worth their dread but that the next one will almost certainly not be either, and that they had better not invest themselves too closely emotionally, lest they simply be cheated again. This, needless to say, damages every piece in the collection, not only the supposedly realistic ones.

The worst examples come when Hodgson includes both a hoax and a real haunting, having one more unexplainable, clearly supernatural incident follow the apprehending of the – now terrified – prankster. But, by that point, it's too late, and I'm not about to fall under the sway of another illusion, even if this one happens to be genuine. The result of trying to come back from a Rube Goldberg-style haunting with the genuine article is simply to reinforce the reader's disbelief with yet another impossibility.

Very few, though that is not to say none, of these stories ended without leaving me in a state of some annoyance, feeling like a truly great reading experience had been snatched away from me at the last moment. But to entirely dismiss thirteen pages of superb atmosphere and writing for the final three, as in the case of the unfortunately ended "The House Among the Laurels," feels simply churlish. Having finished my second work of Hodgson's, I find myself in a similar position as when I finished The House on the Borderlands: frustrated and more than a bit awed. Hodgson is a writer too powerful for those interested in the Weird to pass by, even if I have yet to find the work of his that I can read or recommend without severe reservations.

[Notes:

1. All page numbers from The House on the Borderland and Other Mysterious Places, the second volume of the Night Shade Books Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson
2. I would like to thank Sam Gafford for his work at http://williamhopehodgson.wordpress.com/, which is where I discovered both articles on Hodgson discussed in this review and also many fascinating others.]

Algernon Blackwood - Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories

Algernon Blackwood wrote in the earlier years of the 20^th century and has since joined the hallowed ranks of Weird Fiction's classic authors. In his study of the field, Supernatural Horror in Literature, H.P. Lovecraft called Blackwood one of the Modern Masters and wrote that Blackwood was the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere (p. 1091, H.P. Lovecraft: The Fiction). Here in Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories, premier Weird scholar S.T. Joshi has collected nine of Blackwood's worthiest tales. Needless to say, they do rather more than stand the test of time.

The first thing that one realizes upon reading Blackwood is that, in his writings and perhaps beyond them, the world we know is only a thin veneer over the vast truths beneath. As Blackwood writes in "Sand": One world lay upon another, but this modern layer was a shallow crust that, like the phenomenon of the "desert-film," a mere angle of falling light could instantly obliterate (p. 321). This shallow layer of desert-film, of our modern and natural world, is kept in place by what Blackwood frequently refers to as either a veil or a curtain. That veil is made from our ignorance. But, in "The Man Who Found Out," the protagonist, after suffering a terrible revelation, says that the falsity of our world is so obvious that I can hardly understand why it is not patent to every mind in the world (p. 144); the veil, therefore, is not only our ignorance but our willful ignorance.

In his work, Blackwood continually lash out at not only the falsity of our world but also the scientific close-mindedness that underpins it and denies all else. Though written a century ago, these criticisms of materialism are still biting and, dare I say, not wholly inaccurate by any means. They are most often expressed in "Sand," so we shall return to that story once again to allow Blackwood to state his case: The mind to-day wears blinkers, studies only the details seen directly before it. Had none of us experienced love, we should think the first lover mad. […] If the world were deaf it would stand with mockery before a hearing group swayed by an orchestra, pitying both listeners and performers (pp. 301-2).

Without exception, each of Blackwood's protagonists is subjected to revelation, and its first result is a distrust or even a hatred of what the narrator of "The Insanity of Jones" comes to call the more or less interesting set of sham appearances (p. 63) that make up our world. "The Glamour of the Snow" and "Sand" society comes to look ridiculous besides the vaster world all around it; in the latter, the narrator concludes after a particularly lambasting passage, that against the background of the noble Desert their [the English socialite's] titles seemed the cap and bells of clowns (p. 283). But the veil does not only cover the actions and interactions of men; the very bedrock of the world is is shifted by its pulling aside. As Jones comes to realize, time is nothing but arbitrary nonsense (p. 63).

It is vital to remember that, with a single exception that we will come to shortly, Blackwood is not telling us what precisely lies beyond the veil. He is absolutely convinced that what we see is not all there is, but that leads him to a position of what he calls resignation filled to the brim with wonder (p. 280) rather than a new set of dogmatic beliefs. The core of his views can be most succinctly summed up as the protagonist of "Sand" says it here:  Anything may be true, since knowledge has never yet found final answers to any of the biggest questions (p. 298).

Still, we can see some of what may lie beyond the veil. The first fact of the supernatural in Blackwood's work is reincarnation. In his annotations, S.T. Joshi writes that AB believed that he himself was the reincarnation of an American Indian medicine man (p. 356). Throughout the collection, reincarnation is the main positive claim that Blackwood makes. It is the foundation for the plot of "The Insanity of Jones," but, though that's the only tale to wholly rely on it, it is present as part of the world's framework in many others, such as "Ancient Sorceries" where it is the means by which Dr. Silence explains the strange happenings or in "Sand" where the narrator speaks of the ancient soul in him (p. 327). I should be clear, however, that reincarnation is not in any way regarded as frightening or even particularly weird by Blackwood; it is simply an unacknowledged part of existence, and his protagonists experience no dread at the thought of it.

The same cannot be said for what else lies in the world of causes (p. 63) beyond the veil. It is where dwell the savage and formidable Potencies lurking behind the souls of men (p. 189). These Potencies are far vaster, more powerful, and more alien than we can imagine. These greater powers are not all behemoths that are blind to us, as in Lovecraft's Weird Fiction, nor do they all possess the malevolence exhibited by Thomas Ligotti's. The powers he writes of are intricately tied to nature and its grandeur. Yet, while they are not evil perhaps in themselves, we must remember that they are yet instinctively hostile to humanity as it exists (p. 189). If these generally indifferent powers take note of us, as they so often do in these tales, we would have no hope at all. They can kill a herd of elephants in a second as easily as you or I could squash a fly (p. 51).

The threat these powers pose us is not purely physical. Blackwood's belief in reincarnation actually serves to open another avenue for horror, for now it is our very souls that can be at risk. As we learn in "The Willows": Death, according to one's belief, mean's either annihilation or release from the limitations of the senses, but it involves no change of character. You don’t suddenly alter just because the body's gone. But this means a radical alteration, a complete change, a horrible loss of oneself by substation – far worse than death, and not even annihilation (p. 52). Throughout the collection, the true danger these powers pose is not petty destruction but rather the melting away of what we are, of what makes us human and us.

For an author with such grand themes and skills, Blackwood is not well served by having "Smith: An Episode in a Lodging House" open the collection. Still, for reasons beyond me, not only Joshi but Lovecraft himself consider the tale noteworthy. Lovecraft says that, in it, we behold frightful presences summoned out of black space by a sorcerer (p. 1092, HP Lovecraft: The Fiction). This is all true, but it's not so much an argument for the tale's importance as a bit of tidy plot summary. There is a sorcerer, but our protagonist only encounters him once or twice and not in a particularly significant way either time. Really, it's a competent but slight story that is rather forgettable and nothing at all compared to the greatness to come.

The same can not be said for "The Willows," which is by far the author's most famous piece and which Lovecraft called in a letter to Lieber the greatest weird tale ever written. Our two protagonists are canoeing down the Danube when they stop at an island surrounded by innumerable willows. Even in the tale's early parts, Blackwood's description is stunningly evocative and, at once, veritably coursing with the ethereal: The eeriness of this lonely island, set among a million willows, swept by a hurricane, and surrounded by hurrying deep waters, touched us both, I fancy. Untrodden by man, almost unknown to man, it lay there beneath the moon, remote from human influence, on the frontier of another world, an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows. And we, in our rashness, had dared to invade it, even to make use of it! (p. 28)

The narrator's feelings are, needless to say, not in error. They are indeed interlopers, trespassers in that place; they have indeed touched the frontier of a region where our presence was resented (p. 29). To keep his weird majesty from devolving into some weak fright alone, Blackwood leaves danger wholly to interpretation, instead focusing on awe. The tale is made of passages of impossible splendor, nature writing, and the protagonist's increasingly overawed mental state. Though the reader and characters have no doubt of the impossible danger that they are in, the precise avenue of that danger is not clear; instead, we get a glimpse of the vastness of this region beyond our own and so don't have the image of some clawed monster reaching out for us but rather of another world, greater and more powerful than ours, that is simply brushing us off its back.

In the course of the story, the narrator remarks that when common objects in this way become charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance (p. 44). By the tale's end, those common things have indeed been truly and inexplicably mauled. All of this building atmosphere and tension is put to excellent use by its ending, which allows the protagonists to shy away from the seemingly inevitable and cataclysmic revelation awaiting them while still giving us a clue with which to reinterpret earlier parts of the tale and, thereby, giving us a glimpse beyond the veil.

Before we move on, we should also turn to the story's characters. Though Blackwood is not a writer primarily focused on character, he is adept at an understated understanding of what makes his protagonists tick, and "The Willows" is a prime example of using the personalities of its characters to both ground us in the story and to suggest greater things. From the beginning, the excitable narrator is contrasted with his partner's unimaginativeness. For a time, this gives the atmosphere the slight boost of affecting even the less gullible, but it's true purpose comes later, when the supposedly unimaginative character says that he has always been strangely vividly conscious of another region – not far removed from our own world in one sense, yet wholly different in kind – where great things go on unceasingly (p. 52).

I will admit that, many years ago, I thought the passage a flaw, concluding that Blackwood had simply mixed his two characters up. Looking at it now, a far more meaningful and (for an author of Blackwood's skill) far more likely possibility appears. First off, it indicates that the awareness of this other region is not solely limited to those outwardly imaginative. Furthermore, it makes the narrator's companion into an embodiment of the means of coping that he espouses: The best thing you can do is to keep quiet and try to hold your mind as firm as possible. This feeble attempt at self-deception only makes the truth harder when you're forced to meet it (p. 43). The character's lack of acknowledgment of that other region, despite being aware of it, then becomes a means of survival; the way he keeps the two together and alive through the tale's early parts proof that his method can work; and the way that his firmness collapses at the end indicative of its potential failings.

As one might expect from the vintage Weird, "The Insanity of Jones" deals with the titular Jones' knowledge of the beyond. But unlike a story like "The Willows," that beyond is not a specific or localized event; Jones does not come into contact with the beyond due to some strange ritual, specific threat, or a visit to a distant place. Sensitive souls like him are, instead, aware at all times of a realm that wholly overlaps our own, of a greater world [that] lies ever at their elbow, and that any moment a chance combination of moods and forces may invite them to cross the shifting frontier (p. 63). This awareness means that, though he is capable of functioning in the modern world, Jones' passions lie ever beyond it, and he is aware as few are of the clumsy shell of space and time (p. 74). Furthermore, looking at the mundane life he is living and all the mundane lives he has lived, he realizes that he has been at this weary game for ages (p. 65).

More than any other story in the collection, "The Insanity of Jones" focuses on reincarnation. Jones is aware of his past lives, but, not only that, he is aware that he was horribly tortured in one of them, and he knows who he was tortured by. Centuries ago, his current day boss committed atrocities upon his flesh, and now Jones believes he can finally right that wrong. He learns through supernatural means that he may either use the sword of justice, or rise to the level of a great forgiveness (p. 76). Choosing the former course, Jones purchases a handgun and shoots his employer six times, horrifically wounding and torturing him before finally firing a shell into each of his eyes.

In his annotations for the story, S.T. Joshi points out that Blackwood, who believed in reincarnation, no doubt meant to subvert the insanity mentioned in the story's title. Jones, Joshi argued, is, to Blackwood, an exhibitor of a higher kind of sanity (p. 357). It's here that I have to break from Joshi's interpretation. In Blackwood's eyes, Jones is no doubt indeed showing a higher level of awareness, but, due to the incredible brutality of Jones' killing, I have a hard time believing that Blackwood supports that outcome. By showing the horrific consequences of the murder – specifying how the boss' wrist was shattered, splashing the wall behind with blood (p. 85) and other such vividly sickening details – Blackwood may be, while he acknowledges the wrong done to Jones and its need for redress, nonetheless condemning Jones' method, arguing that forgiveness was truly the only correct track.

The collection's title piece, "Ancient Sorceries," is the only one to feature Blackwood's famous psychic detective Dr. John Silence. Silence is, however, a peripheral character whose main role is listening to the story told by our protagonist, the timid and once thoroughly ordinary Vezin. After stepping off the train in a small French town, Vezin finds himself submerged in the townspeople's almost impossibly smooth and pleasant life. But, of course, all is not as it seems, and Vezin comes to realize that the townspeople's true lives lay somewhere out of sight behind the scenes […]the main stream of their existence lay somewhere beyond my ken, underground in secret places (p. 96).

To be perfectly honest, I have no idea how to describe or even account for the power of this tale's first half. Though rich with portent and implication, it is nonetheless quiet in every way, and yet it inexorably relaxes the reader to an extent past the natural or comfortable, as if the narrative itself were casting a spell. Describing the story, Lovecraft wrote that it is almost hypnotically vivid (p. 1092, HP Lovecraft: The Fiction). Describing the town, Vezin says that it is like part of a softly-coloured dream which he did not even realize to be a dream (p. 93), and that description works more than passably well for the experience of reading the story.

To this bewitching brew, Blackwood adds an innkeepers daughter to the mystery's very center, and she pulls the main character towards her as he falls deeply and inescapably in love with her. In his introduction to the collection, Joshi writes that "It appears difficult to deny that Blackwood, like Poe and Lovecraft, was largely asexual, sublimating such tendencies into his work and his Nature-mysticism" (xiv). I have no reason at all to doubt the truth of that, but Blackwood, nonetheless, here shows a felicity with romance that is infinitely beyond that which can be observed in most Weird writing. The daughter, of course, turns out to be the seductive heart of the town's darkness, but that does little to alter the tender feeling with which Vezin speaks of her, the way that the mere knowledge that she was living and sleeping in the same house filled me with an extraordinary sense of delight (pp. 107-8).

Alas, the tale's end does not live up to the rest of it. Its climax, in which the town's subtle atmosphere is revealed to be an homage to Satan, is acceptable if not the equal of the excellence that came before, but its true black mark comes when Silence reenters the story once the telling's done. Silence concludes that the entire affair took place subjectively in the man's own consciousness (p. 128) and justifies that conclusion by mumbling about reincarnation and the lived memories of past lives. To explain away the events of a Weird Tale such as this would be a shame, but to do so and replace them not with reality but with another, equally confused and equally nonsensical but not at all powerful, mess of fantasy is inexcusable. Still, the last few pages can't really damage the greatness of the story as a whole.

 "The Man Who Found Out" is a stunningly pessimistic tale of revelation. It focuses on Professor Ebor, a man of science and a mystic (p. 131), Ebor's colleague, and the awful truth that Ebor finally discovers after so much searching. There isn't a huge amount of action here, and Blackwood wisely keeps the details of the ultimate revelation secret, which leaves this as one of the less striking stories of its own merits. Still, it's a powerful piece on the weight and danger of pessimism and on the threat of failure or worse in the quest for truth. In stark contrast to the inquisitive if risky position of a piece like "Sand," "The Man Who Found Out" ultimately ends with the bliss of ignorance, an escape from the merciless clairvoyance (p. 144) that leaves even a man as driven as Dr. Ebor with nothing: The central fires had gone out. Nothing was worth doing, thinking, working for. There was nothing to work for any longer! (p. 138) The story may, perhaps, be seen as the feared and possible outcome of Blackwood's resignation filled to the brim with wonder (p. 280).

Like "The Willows," the "Wendigo" takes place deep in nature. As our hunter protagonists venture deeper, Blackwood continually ramps up the majesty of the forest, a majesty that is at first simply beautiful and then, as night falls, grows frightening as it becomes clear just how much greater it is than the insignificant humans crawling through between its trunks: Outside the world of crowding trees pressed close about them, marshalling their million shadows, and smothering the little tent that stood there like a wee white shell facing the ocean of tremendous forest (p. 162). Unlike in "The Willows," though, the menace here is a far more specific one, a beast known by the natives as the Wendigo. The Wendigo comes as the night's somber atmosphere reaches its peak, and, just out of the protagonist's sight, his guide is taken by the beast.

The protagonist follows, desperate to reclaim his friend, and so begins one of the greatest triumphs of implication in all of the Weird. We never do catch up to the Wendigo, and the chase yields no clear sight of it. All we have are its footprints, its and those of its captive marching alongside it. And, as we follow that double trail, the footprints begin to change, morphing away from the human, changing to the impossible. Without a single glimpse of the foe, using nothing but shapes in the snow and the reasoning that follows their shift for his fuel, Blackwood is able to kindle an incredible atmosphere of unearthly dread amidst the freezing forest's unsearchable size.

The tale does not end there; no, before it truly closes, we get a final scene in which the shell shocked protagonist not only meets with the rest of the now shrunken hunting party but gets to see the guide one last time. That climactic scene could have been the story's undoing, but it's anything but. Using our prior knowledge and fear, Blackwood imbues ordinary conversation with the incalculable aura of wrongness until a single concrete glimpse of the perversion beneath the world sets our suspicions alight.

It is a mark of the tale's masterful impact and vividness that it can afford to diagnose itself before its completion without ruining its strength. In an attempt to explain away what he's seen, one of the hunters says that The Wendigo is simply the Call of the Wild personified (p. 181). The claim is at once true and hopelessly inadequate. The Wendigo is, of course, an expression of Nature, but both nature and the unexplainable are both so much vaster than the speaker can comprehend that his description only serves to enhance the impossible's power.

"The Glamour of the Snow" is a competent tale served badly by being packed alongside so much greatness. Its protagonist is torn between civilization and the wilderness, and many of its descriptions are effective, but almost all of its elements are utilized stronger elsewhere in the collection. The female personification of the wild is far better in "Ancient Sorceries," the social satire in "Sand," and the natural world's call better described in "The Man Whom the Trees Loved." Ultimately, "The Glamour of the Snow" is only really memorable for two excellent bits of prose, the first of nature (Snow covered all. It smothered sound and distance. It smothered houses, streets, and human beings. It smothered – life. (p. 201)) and the latter of man and his narrow thoughts (the dead conventions that imprison literal minds (p. 205)).

The Weird's essence, its status as both vaster than man but not the kind of cheap evil seen so often in Horror, is exemplified in "The Man Whom the Trees Loved." The consciousness of the forest comes to love a man who takes care of the trees. We see this primarily from the perspective of his highly religious wife, who at first finds any belief in the forest's life absurd and then comes to dread the trees. Before long, however, she comes to realize that in the forest there is no positive evil at work, but only something that usually stands away from humankind, something alien and not commonly recognized (p. 265). That recognition, however, does not bring with it a lessening of danger, for, though not evil as we understand it, the trees are nonetheless hugely powerful, and they take her husband into them and destroy her that stands in their way.

Though the story is about the trees, its heart is the relationship between husband and wife. Initially, this is rather worrying. Mrs. Bittacy seems almost impossibly foolish, and passages such as like many women, she never really thought at all, but merely reflected the images of others' thinking which she had learned to see (pp. 217-8) are, to put it as kindly as I possibly can, not exactly indicative of a man about to write a convincing female protagonist. Thankfully, as the story progresses beyond the woman's foolishness and its long and slow opening (through which, I'll admit, I did not think much of the piece at all), Blackwood evidently forgets his low opinion of womankind and writes a woman that feels real and a love that feels powerful.

This is certainly more a tale of wonder than of terror, but I can't agree with Joshi when he writes that, in it, "fear has no place" (p. 366), for there is fear here and, more importantly still, there is tragedy. In her love, Mrs. Bittacy tries to stand aside for her husband and the trees, but such easy resignation is not possible. She is forced to watch him drawn inexorably away from her, and she is destroyed by the experience and by the forest's malice. By the end, she is utterly alone with this terror of the trees… mid the ruins of her broken and disordered mind (p. 272). She is destroyed in the very manner that so many of Blackwood's protagonists fear, for her very being is undone. As she sees herself passing away, she consoles herself with the thought that the spiritual love that linked her to her husband was safe from all attack (p. 271). But it is not so. When her husband tends to her as she fails, we learn that he just aped the services of love (p. 272). "The Man Whom the Trees Loved" took a very long time to win me over but had me completely when it did.

The collection closes with the monolithic "Sand," a story set in far off Egypt that introduces Blackwood's fascinating idea of a group soul, a fascinating idea of the interplay between the divine and the believer: A wave of spiritual awakening – a descent of spiritual life upon a nation […] forms itself a church, and the body of true believers are its sphere of action. They are literally its bodily expression. Each individual believer is a corpuscle in that Body (p. 308). Here we do not have the God and the believers existing independently, nor the believers having wrought the god; instead, the god, through the believer's faith and belief that his actions are correct, uses them as his concrete expression. Awesome stuff.

Besides that, "Sand" exhibits Blackwood's nature writing abilities to their fullest extent, is the source of much of the criticism of science that I quoted in the introduction, and features the summoning of a Power amidst the desert's sands, one whose splendor could never lodge in minds that conceive Deity perched upon a cloud within telephoning distance of fashionable churches (p. 339). Like "The Man Whom the Trees Loved," "Sand" is a slow building tale, and it is fully capable of having an entire chapter given over to philosophical and symbolic discussions and debates. But the spell of its atmosphere is present from the beginning and, by its climax, its every word is filled with incredible depths and dreads.

By this point, it is no doubt needless for me to say that Algernon Blackwood lives up to his reputation. Nonetheless, I will say it; he does. But it's more than that. Blackwood's work is a brilliant envisioning of the Weird and the incomprehensible, an evoking of what the author calls with immeasurable understatement the peculiar beyond ordinary (p. 164). These stories not only defy time and the reality that gave our conception of it birth but, themselves, are timeless.

The Weird Fiction of Daniel Defoe

It shouldn't come as a surprise to any readers of this blog that I'm rather interested in Weird Fiction, that so-fascinating niche of horror that was popularized and defined by H.P. Lovecraft in his seminal essay Supernatural Horror in Literature:

The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain--a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space. (p. 1043, HP Lovecraft: The Fiction)

And so we have its foundations. The Weird Tale is a widening of perspective, a confrontation with the vastness of reality, a style of story that takes our limited and mortal perspective and enlarges it until we cannot help but scream at our own insignificance, cannot help but never again trust the fragile world of man about us. Lovecraft, of course, was not only a historian of the Weird but also its foremost practitioner. One of his most famous passages, one that brings forth and rams home almost every aspect of the Weird and of Lovecraft's own horrors, comes at the opening of The Call of Cthulhu:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (p. 335, HP Lovecraft: The Fiction)

Of course, many authors have followed Lovecraft, not the least of them Thomas Ligotti. But the invocation of the Weird is certainly not something limited to those few that have heard of it. The question of man's place in the cosmos is, needless to say, one that's been pondered often, and sometimes in unexpected places.

So we come to this post's sharp departure from what is traditionally thought of as horror fiction, or Weird Fiction, or anything of that sort. We're venturing all the way afield until we reach a certain, seemingly-deserted island, one where Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe's been forced to make his home. I will admit, I am not a fan of Robinson Crusoe, not of the man and not of the book. Nonetheless, the following quote did rather strike me:

This furnish'd my Thoughts with many very profitable Reflections, and particularly this one, How infinitely Good that Providence is, which has provided in its Government of Mankind, such narrow bounds to his Sight and Knowledge of things, and though he walks in the midst of so many thousand Dangers, the Sight of which, if discover'd to him, would distract his Mind, and sink his Spirits; he is kept serene, and calm, by having the Events of Things hid from his Eyes, and knowing nothing of the Dangers which surround him. (p.165-6, Robinson Crusoe)

Admittedly, the diction's more archaic than even Lovecraft chose to go, but the same ideas are there. The nigh-infinite nature of our existence, the unknowable and uncountable dangers about us, and our utter ignorance of our true position, even if here that ignorance is due to the mercy of a supreme being that is most certainly absent in the cold materialism of Lovecraft's mythos. Though the presence of that supreme being does make the whole thing a bit questionable, at least to me. It's all well and good that God has shielded us from these, as Lovecraft would have it, black seas of infinity, but it does rather raise the question of why that God, supreme creator of all and all that, chose to make those terrifying vistas of reality and those thousand dangers in the first place...