"A Case of Eavesdropping" (1900)

Here's another good ghost story by Algernon Blackwood, an early one. I'm starting to think I like his ghost stories even more than the ineffable weird stuff like "The Willows," which is the usual story designated to represent him in anthologies. With the ghost story so much is already given yet there are so many variations and Blackwood was canny about working them. This is more like a haunted house tale, set in an empty rooming-house in exotic New York City. Note that traveling Englishman Blackwood is good at many things but a New York dialect does not seem to be among them. Or maybe that's really how flinty Yankee landladies talked at the turn of the 20th century. It's bizarre. The rooming-house is empty because it's haunted but our man, Jim Shorthouse, doesn't know that when he takes the room. He's an itinerant ne'er-do-well working the nightshift as a reporter. Think Weegee even if Weegee is a later era. Shorthouse, by the way, would be seen contending with another haunted house in another Blackwood story six years later, "The Empty House." What's particularly good in this one are the special effects, even though even then they were likely well-known: heavy footsteps on the stairs, pounding on the door, voices heard from another room in tense exchange. All this is in the middle of the night, of course, which is approximately when you should be reading it. Simple things like footsteps stopping outside the door just completely give me the willies here. Blackwood holds it there for several beats before the knocking starts. Scary! It's not actually our man's door, as it turns out, but the door of an adjoining room with a flimsy partition between. This is what enables Shorthouse to overhear the strange, confusing, and terrible exchange between a father and son. Another nice effect, later, toward the end, is when Shorthouse feels himself sickening in his bed and weakening, unable to move, as he hears the voices next door speaking quite clearly. The landlady knows the place is haunted and she's used to it. She just wishes these tenants passing through would get used to it too and stay. Somehow she makes it all worse—maybe it's the alien dialect too but she is a wonderful element. Staying is not in the cards for Shorthouse, however. He is bound to bug out, if he can, shortly after the impressive crescendo scene. Great ghost story—it works on me every time.

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"The Listener" (1907)

I tend to think of Algernon Blackwood more as savant of the ineffably extra-dimensional beyond our ken (see "The Willows," see "The Winnebago Wendigo," etc.), but this story and many others demonstrate how good he could be even at the ghost story, that root basic unit of horror. "The Listener" takes on the form of diary entries, a classic not to say overplayed device, and then in many ways proceeds as vividly as Hanns Heinz Ewers's "The Spider." Blackwood's anonymous urban creature is more of a Londoner, as opposed to Ewers's Parisian. He's a freelance writer who finds rooms that are dirt-cheap and close to the newspaper offices where he pitches stories. You can guess the reason those rooms are cheap, though Blackwood's typical light touch slips it by. He's remarkably good at working variations on the conventions. It's always a ghost that's bothering our freelancer, though the one clumsy element of the story is a visit our man pays to a lecture about death that basically explains fine points of the story's conceit, a good old ghost bit that runs from Sheridan Le Fanu's "The Familiar" to the Paranormal Activity movie franchise, with a ghost attaching itself to an individual. The way the plot point is inserted via the public lecture is what's clumsy, not the concept or the language: Suicides, he learns, "cannot shirk their responsibilities so easily. They must return to take up life exactly where they laid it so violently down, but with the added pain and punishment of their weakness. Many of them wander the earth in unspeakable misery till they can reclothe themselves in the body of someone else—generally a lunatic, or weak-minded person, who cannot resist the hideous obsession. This is their only means of escape."

A freelance writer is clearly an example of a lunatic or weak-minded person, so we quickly grasp the sense of his danger. He also mentions in his diary that he has had problems with sleepwalking in the past—not good! He is obviously ripe for a reclothing exercise on the part of some suicide still residing in the Phantom Zone of his rooms. Blackwood inserts passing examples of our man's mind being preyed on even as he is writing out his diary entries in real-time, such as one where he is talking about his exasperation with the housemaid who cleans his rooms and misplaces his things: "Sometimes I feel inclined to throw the inkstand at her, just to bring an expression into her watery eyes and a squeak from those colorless lips. Dear me! What violent expressions I am making use of! How very foolish of me!" One obvious point in such stream of (double) consciousness foreshadowing is how much H.P. Lovecraft was influenced by Blackwood, whose best is better than anything Lovecraft touched for all his considerable influence himself. Even the misplaced things is done insidiously well here—it could be the help, it could be the addled freelancer, or it could be the ghost, which systematically works on him on different sensual levels: sounds and smells long before sight of anything, and at one point he feels the arm of another person in a dark room. "Like small doses of morphine often repeated," he writes, "she has finally a cumulative effect." But we know it's not the housemaid.

When the ghost is finally named, as "the Listener," it brings sharp focus to the strange events and perceptions swirling around our man and/or merely in his mind. He is plainly haunted now, by something that feels more and more predatory: "Last night I was again troubled by most oppressive dreams. Someone seemed to be moving in the night up and down my room, sometimes passing into the front room, and then returning to stand beside the bed and stare intently down upon me. I was being watched by this person all night long. I never actually awoke, though I was often very near it." The lines between annoyance and dread and danger are passed successively in order but almost imperceptibly. Blackwood always works well at his peak operatic moments. Part of his skill is the way he raises the temperature so high even as we barely notice. Suddenly things are dire and how did we get here? The final payoff and explanations are a bit pat and a lot antiquated and insensitive, but certainly grotesque so (on one level) why not? The least you can say about Blackwood is that he's a certifiable master of horror.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos

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"The Willows" (1907)

Algernon Blackwood's beloved classic is a long story that feels a bit like a cross between Jack London and H.P. Lovecraft. In fact, Lovecraft was deeply influenced by it, citing it as his single favorite story. "The Willows" is set in a section of the Danube River that is less like a ballroom waltz and more like a Louisiana bayou, ambling through sandy marshes and swampy shallows. The first-person narrator and his companion, identified as "the Swede," are traveling by canoe, on some intrepid type of camping vacation apparently. They are trawling down the river in a high waters time, which means small sandy islands can wash away and boats lose track of the over-flooding channel and even become trapped in backwaters. Blackwood is good at wilderness and physical description though perhaps not as good as some others, such as London. Blackwood is often equally focused on his genre considerations, distracted from the natural by the supernatural threads in his stories which can be conventional.

Still it's the brooding things of wilderness that ultimately carry this one. Those willows, most obviously, swaying and bending in the high winds, an image returned to again and again. Filmmaker David Lynch has used a similar effect many times, notably in his Twin Peaks episodes, with the camera simply sitting and looking at trees in the wind. The high winds themselves are unsettling—windstorms, especially at night, are the most disturbing storms of all. Ultimately, of course, what we have here is a serious case of Ineffable Evil. But what's great about this story is not its interest in the evil but rather how perfectly strange that evil is. My grasp of it, though the story was written well before commercial radio, is as the sense of something peering back from behind the static between stations. It does not surprise me in a way that Lovecraft honored this piece above all others, as it is both an impressive enough feat of world-building and also such a solid slab of id-sourced weird. The point is that we can't understand it, whatever it is, though we know to our core it's awful. From Blackwood's description, this isolated section of the Danube is a place where two parallel dimensions are scraping against one another and the membrane has grown thin, heralded by the high winds and an ominous sound that recurs only inside the mind. The two men are in great danger. It is like an encounter of a bobcat and a squirrel and they are the squirrel. The hunting style of these superior beings appears to be like the feline style of playing with prey. The landscape is blurred between the physical and the mental. Much of the peril is an implicit threat of madness, literally losing their minds.

"The Willows" is considered Blackwood's best by a good margin though many also note how prolific he was at high levels. There's indeed something open and inviting about his work—I've enjoyed the handful or so stories I've read and intend to read more, but I'd put him closer to my idea of an adventure story writer rather than horror. Probably my own favorite Blackwood so far is the only very short story I've read by him yet, "Ancient Lights," about a man who can't find his way through a small patch of woods. "The Wendigo" appears to be Blackwood's consensus #2 best, but its North American setting wasn't at all convincing to me and I kept thinking of James Fenimore Cooper, not a favorite. "Glamour in the Snow" had an unconvincing supernatural story but was very good on snow and frigid conditions. I can see how "The Willows" is a notch above. The setting is inspired and the turn to an unknowable weird almost aggressive. It's not conventional supernatural, that's for sure.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
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