Nature Horror in Blackwood’s “The Willows” (1907)

Frequently found in anthologies of classic ghost or horror stories is Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” (1907).  Remarkably, the principal cause of the horror in the story is none other than the titular willows.   That small and widespread tree – Blackwood calls them “bushes” (The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell, Tor, 1987, p. 909) – of wet and neglected ground, considered a weed by some, is an unlikely cause of such cosmic horror as Blackwood is able to evoke, yet its effectiveness is undeniable.

  Blackwood sets the stage for horror by describing in knowledgeable detail the surrounding, which is a unique one: the Danube and the sümpfe or marshes of its flood plain between Vienna and Budapest.  The location is not further specified by Blackwood but has been linked with the Dunajské Luhy protected landscape area in Slovakia.  This setting is the first masterstroke, neither fully water nor land, a liminal space difficult to traverse and ever ready to claim the lives of the uncautious.  The narrator and his friend, known only as “the Swede”, are canoeing down the river and, in rising winds and heavy rain, camp for the night on a river island which is in danger of being submerged or washed away.  The island, as with the other river islands nearby, the banks and the flood plain, is covered with innumerable willows.  

  Characterisation in the story is minimal.  Blackwood never names his narrator, and gives no information on his background except to note that he and the Swede have travelled together many times before.   He has, essentially, no past, no psychological depths , no trauma plot. A character that can hardly be conceived in our culture: not reacting to the complications of his previous relationships, just existing in a set of circumstances that need to be dealt with. All we know of the narrator, like a person we meet for the first time in an emergency, is how he is reacting to those circumstances – with considerable alarm and fear, but in a reasonable and human manner.  Neither is there much in the way of plot: if you know the protagonists are caught in a Danube island on a stormy night, you know pretty much all there is to know.

  Without characterisation and plot, atmosphere is all in this story.  The river, weather conditions and isolated location combine to create an intense and realistic sense of peril.  If that were all, “The Willows” would be an adventure story.  But it isn’t.  From the beginning, the atmosphere is heightened.  There is something different about this place which the narrator struggles to define:

We had made many similar journeys together, but the Danube, more than any other river I knew, impressed us from the very beginning with its aliveness… [I]t had seemed to us like following the growth of some living creature.  Sleepy at first, but later developing violent desires as it became conscious of its deep soul, it rolled, like some huge fluid being, through all the countries we had passed, holding our little craft on its mighty shoulders, playing roughly with us sometimes, yet always friendly and well-meaning, till at length we had come inevitably to regard it as a Great Personage. (911)

Though the association of the place with horror has yet to be established, there is a curious insistence on it as a living entity that will resonate throughout the story.  And, despite its “friendly and well-meaning” nature, there is a hint of darkness in its “violent desires”.

  When they escape the rising river to dock on the island, the suggestion of aliveness is renewed:

The ground seemed to shake with the shock and rush, while the furious movement of the willow bushes as the wind poured over them increased the curious illusion that the island itself actually moved. (913)

The movement of willows with wind and its creation of the notion of a living landscape is a keynote of the story.  Almost immediately, Blackwood introduces an extraordinary simile to suggest life in the willows:

the willows… closed about [the river] like a herd of monstrous antediluvian creatures crowding down to drink.  They made me think of gigantic sponge-like growths that sucked the river up into themselves.  They caused it to vanish from sight.  They herded there together in such overpowering numbers.  (913)

these acres and acres of willows, crowding, so thickly growing there, swarming everywhere the eye could reach, pressing upon the river as though to suffocate it, standing in dense array mile after mile beneath the sky, watching, waiting, listening.  And, apart quite from the elements, the willows connected themselves subtly with my malaise, attacking the mind insidiously somehow by reason of their vast numbers, and contriving in some way or other to represent to the imagination a new and mighty power, a power, moreover, not altogether friendly to us.   (914)

Rarely have willows been presented to the imagination in such a formidable guise, recalling antediluvian monsters while intangibly evoking something yet greater and more terrible.  This is true cosmic horror, most often associated with H.P. Lovecraft, yet present in this work long before Lovecraft put pen to paper.  Lovecraft was fully aware of the influence and said of “The Willows”: 

Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a single strained passage or a single false note. (“Supernatural Horror in Literature”, At the Mountains of Madness, Modern Library, 2005, p. 164)

  When horror is as cosmic as this, not only terror is produced but also awe.  The word “awe” appears 9 times in the story and “terror” 14 times.  What produces such terror and awe can only be a deity of sorts, a creature or creatures beyond both nature and the imagination of man; creatures, as such, that can only be hinted at but not described. 

We had “strayed,” as the Swede put it, into some region or some set of conditions where the risks were great, yet unintelligible to us; where the frontiers of some unknown world lay close about us. It was a spot held by the dwellers in some outer space, a sort of peephole whence they could spy upon the earth, themselves unseen, a point where the veil between had worn a little thin. (933)

The awe and terror lie in some unknown and hitherto unsuspected mode of being.  The littleness and contingency of humanity comes crashing in upon the narrator and – of course in lesser degree – upon the reader.  Life is not what we small petty humans experience, or not only that.  As with Le Fanu’s “Green Tea”, “The Willows” is a post-Darwinian and post-Kelvin’s second law of thermodynamics brooding on the nature of life.  In a constantly expanding and dying universe, cold and infinite, one can only think with flashes of wonder but mostly terror of what lies beyond, of a cold, indifferent infinity prefigured in “fifty miles of willows, willows, willows” (938) across an unpeopled and chaotic mosaic of land and water in the middle of Europe.

¨Eloi Eloi Lama Sabachthani¨ (1919): The Masterpiece of William Hope Hodgson, Bard of the Swine-Mother of Monstrosity

William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) has a place in the history of horror fiction, often cited as one of the primary influences on H.P. Lovecraft, and one of the forerunners of the genre of Cosmic Horror, wherein the source of horror is not a mere ghost or monstrous entity, but rather the all-encompassing fact that the entire universe is under the dominion of mad or evil gods, whose terrible ways become apparent to the more sensitive from time to time, with catastrophic results. Hodgson is now perhaps best known for the novels, The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land (1912), and these two novels came in for extravagant praise from the aforementioned Lovecraft in his influential and comprehensive study Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927). Of The Night Land, Lovecraft writes:

Allowing for all its faults, it is yet one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written. The picture of a night-black, dead planet, with the remains of the human race concentrated in a stupendously vast metal pyramid and besieged by monstrous, hybrid, and altogether unknown forces of the darkness, is something that no reader can ever forget.

¨Allowing for all its faults” is a key element in this judgement, however. Lovecraft does find the book to be ¨seriously marred by painful verboseness, repetitiousness [and] artificial and nauseously sticky romantic sentimentality¨. It is a long and extremely difficult book, and is not infrequently risible.

The House on the Borderland is also flawed. It is a classic and founding text of cosmic horror:

The mountains were full of strange things—Beast-gods, and Horrors so atrocious and bestial that possibility and decency deny any further attempt to describe them. And I—I was filled with a terrible sense of overwhelming horror and fear and repugnance; yet, spite of these, I wondered exceedingly.

[…]

Later, a question repeated itself. What were they, those Beast-gods, and the others? […] There was something about them, an indescribable sort of silent vitality that suggested, to my broadening consciousness, a state of life-in-death—a something that was by no means life, as we understand it; but rather an inhuman form of existence, that well might be likened to a deathless trance—a condition in which it was possible to imagine their continuing, eternally.

This is the essence of Hodgsonian horror. Monsters are not merely monsters: they are gods, lurking at the back of all existence, their own existence a mockery of all human endeavour, progress and hope. Beasts are gods and gods are beasts. There is no response but the descent into madness.

Yet The House on the Borderland is a strange book, something of a structural mess which reads like two short works melded together and vaguely intertwined: one concerns the recluse´s (the narrator is not given a name in the novel) visionary journeys through time to the death of the sun; the other concerning his battles with swine-people who attack his isolated home in the west of Ireland. The former section is extremely indebted to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895); the latter echoes Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau (1896).

These novels were rescued from obscurity by Lovecraft, and in Hodgson´s own lifetime he was better known for his shorter stories, especially those found in The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost Finder (1913). Lovecraft is dismissive of this collection in Supernatural Horror in Literature. However, given Hodgson´s relative success with short stories, we might deviate from Lovecraft and consider that his best, or at least most accessible work, is in this format.

In Carnacki, a further two stories are set in the west of Ireland (¨The House among the Laurels¨ and ¨The Whistling Room¨), showing it was an important locus of horror for Hodgson, who had spent a part of his childhood in County Galway (1887-1890). In his west of Ireland work, a sense of the unease of the English visitor, a colonialist interloper in a revolutionary land, is echoed. Even before the monsters arrive in The House on the Borderland, the Irish are a source of disquiet:

[T]he man turned to a comrade and said something rapidly in a language that I did not understand; and, at once, the whole crowd of them fell to jabbering in what, after a few moments, I guessed to be pure Irish. At the same time they cast many glances in my direction. […] By the expression of his face I guessed that he, in turn, was questioning me; but now I had to shake my head, and indicate that I did not comprehend what it was they wanted to know; and so we stood looking at one another […]. [A]ll in the little crowd smiled and nodded in return, though their faces still betrayed their puzzlement.

It was evident, I reflected as I went toward the tent, that the inhabitants of these few huts in the wilderness did not know a word of English

[…]

“I wish we had got the driver to interpret for us before he left,” I remarked, as we sat down to our meal. “It seems so strange for the people of this place not even to know what we’ve come for.”

This uneasy relationship of the English visitor with the native Irish is also a key element in ¨The Whistling Room¨. In the Carnacki stories, the figure of the swine from The House on the Borderland also returns. ¨The Hog¨ is ¨the most gruesome and disturbing¨ story in the collection, according to David Stuart Davies in his introduction to the stories (The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost Finder, Wordsworth, 2006, 13). In this story, Carnacki meets with a Mr Bains, ¨a little sensitive man¨ haunted by swine:

I hear the sound coming up out of that enormous depth, and it is always the noise of pigs – pigs grunting, you know. It’s just simply dreadful. The dream is always the same. Sometimes I’ve had it every single night for a week, until I fight not to go to sleep; but, of course, I have to sleep sometimes. I think that’s how a person might go mad, don’t you?

[…]

All the grunts, squeals and howls blend into one brutal chaos of sound – only it isn’t a chaos. It all blends in a queer horrible way. I’ve heard it. A sort of swinish clamouring melody that grunts and roars and shrieks in chunks of grunting sounds, all tied together with squealings and shot through with pig howls. I’ve sometimes thought there was a definite beat in it; for every now and again there comes a gargantuan GRUNT, breaking through the million pig-voiced roaring – a stupendous GRUNT that comes in with a beat. Can you understand me? It seems to shake everything…. It’s like a spiritual earthquake. The howling, squealing, grunting, rolling clamour of swinish noise coming up out of that place, and then the monstrous GRUNT rising up through it all, an ever-recurring beat out of the depth – the voice of the swine-mother of monstrosity beating up from below through that chorus of mad swine-hunger.

The importance of the swine points to an element that is central to Hodgsonian horror: disgust. The pig is an animal considered, at least in figurative language, to embody some of the most traits found most repulsive in humans: filth, greed, laziness, and so. Hodgson´s protagonists are haunted not by swine alone, but by a truly horrifying sense of human kinship with these same swine:

I grunt too. I know it’s horrible. When I lie there in bed and hear those sounds after I’ve come up, I just grunt back as if in reply. I can’t stop myself. I just do it. Something makes me. I never told Doctor Witton that. I couldn’t. I’m sure now you think me mad[.]

A pig alone is simply an alien thing, but true horror is borne of the realization of the swinishness within oneself. Hodgson´s work if full of this sense of repulsion before humanity and its alliance to beastliness. For Hodgson, it is almost always a male figure that is the focus of the horror. The narrators, too, are all male, so the books present situations of men regarding men with horror and yet fascination. In a study of The House on the Borderland, Amanda Boulter finds an element of strong ¨sexual failure and fear¨ in Hodgson´s writings, as well as the idea that the monster is the¨desiring man¨, and that seems equally applicable to this story. (Boulter, ¨The House on the Borderland: The Sexual Politics of Fear¨, in Clive Bloom, Creepers: British Horror and Fantasy in the Twentieth Century, Pluto, 1993)

Less visceral than ¨The Hog¨, but certainly one of Hodgson´s best works is the searingly powerful short story, ¨Eloi Eloi Lama Sabachthani¨. The title translates as¨My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?¨ and it quotes the words of Jesus on the cross, according to the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. The story is also known as ¨The Baumoff Explosive¨. Hodgson died in World War I, and this was one of the last works he produced, not published until after his death, and it constitutes a chilling last word on Hodgsonian horror. It concerns an ¨Experimental Chemist” named Baumoff but, like most Hodgson stories, the story is told through a frame device. The narrator hears it from a friend in a gentlemen´s club, but witnesses none of it himself. The friend, named Stafford, recounts that Baumoff – ¨the most enthusiastic intelligent believer in Christ that it will ever be possible to produce¨ (italics in original) – came up with a theory according to which the Darkness of the Cross, between the sixth and ninth hours of Christ´s crucifixion, was merely an extreme form of a notable phenomenon whereby great emotional stress could produce a darkening in the surrounding atmosphere. This was related to a ¨disturbance of the Aether in the immediate vicinity of the person suffering.¨ [Aether/ether was also a central element of Arthur Conan Doyle´s contemporaneous The Poison Belt (1913).] Baumoff has discovered or concocted a certain substance which can produce a similar temporary darkening. His idea, then, is to introduce this substance into his own body and to produce effects similar to those the crucifixion had on Christ.

This is where the importance of Baumoff being an enthusiastic and intelligent believer in Christ comes in, implicitly: Baumoff is an almost Christ-like figure, capable of such fine suffering that he is the fittest subject for testing his own invention. Baumoff, then, will undergo the agony of the cross using his ¨explosive¨ and other pain-inducing mechanisms. Needless to say, it does not go well. As a committed Christian, Baumoff is opening himself to God, but in a Hodgsonian cosmos, this is really not a good idea – even aside from the suffering his experiment will entail.

What follows in ¨Eloi Eloi Lama Sabachthani¨ is perhaps the ultimate statement of Hodgson´s brand of cosmic horror, contained in a short and perfectly formed work without the longueurs, repetitions and misjudgements of The House on the Borderland and, especially, The Night Land. It may be doing Hodgson a disservice to claim his best work is in the novels as his short stories are far more accessible and crafted and one of them, at least, is a masterpiece.

Revival, by Stephen King

As a teenager of the 90s, I grew up reading a lot of Stephen King.  My impressions of his writing are mixed up with memories of staying up into the small hours eagerly consuming  The Stand, It, et al.  It seems that adolescence is the optimum time to read King. This might explain why so many critics have had pops at King (like Dwight Allen at Salon): they first encountered him as adults, and were not responsive to his merits.  (It may explain also my response to J.K. Rowling:  maybe I was just a few years too old when I first came to it.)  My really intensive reading of his books was in my early teen years in the mid-90s.  Later, I cooled on him, partly because my tastes changed and partly because once I had worked through his back catalogue I found that what he was then producing was not as good as the early stuff. The mid-90s saw a few clunkers (Insomnia, Rose Madder) and while Bag of Bones and Hearts in Atlantis showed King developing in interesting ways, they were followed by an unparalleled outpouring of dross (Dreamcatcher, Black House, From a Buick 8, Cell, etc.)  2006’s Cell was where the very last vestiges of my King fixation died, and I stopped reading his new works.

Still now, as he approaches 70, King is putting out about 2 books a year.  Novels mostly, of wildly varying lengths, punctuated with collections of short stories.  Occasionally I check in, but with no great returns. Revival (2014) is my first King in quite a while.  It’s a slim-ish volume, 372 pages of fairly large print.  One thing that interested me was how allusive the book seemed.  The dedication page lists 11 of “the people who built my house”; that is, the writers who have inspired him.  It’s the usual suspects for King: Shelley, Stoker, Jackson, Lovecraft, Machen.  The blurb from Sydney Morning Herald posits Frankenstein as the key influence on the novel; the Guardian review suggests Lovecraft.  I would say it’s Machen.  In King’s opening paragraphs, as the narrator introduces the key character, he writes:

I can’t bear to believe his presence in my life had anything to do with fate. It would mean that all these terrible things – these horrors – were meant to happen.  If that is so, then there is no such thing as light, and our belief in it is a foolish illusion.  If that is so, we live in darkness like animals in a burrow, or ants deep in their hill.

This recalls a passage from Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894), a story which King refers to specifically in the aforementioned dedication.  In Pan, Machen’s protagonist exclaims:

It is too incredible, too monstrous; such things can never be in this quiet world, where men and women live and die, and struggle, and conquer, or maybe fail, and fall down under sorrow, and grieve and suffer strange fortunes for many a year; but not this, Phillips, not such things as this.  There must be some explanation, some way out of the terror. Why, man, if such a case were possible, our earth would be a nightmare.

Both passages start with an expression of incredulity (“I can’t bear to believe”, “It is too incredible”), though Machen’s character is more unconditional, King’s more ambiguous.  This incredulity is founded, not on rationality, but on what is bearable.  Machen’s register is classically of the horror genre: “monstrous […] terror […] nightmare”.  These are all the things that are at stake in accepting the evidence. King, too, lays on the big abstractions of the genre (“the horrors“).

Even King’s syntax and word choice changes in this passage. “If that is so” is archaic, and rather inconsistent with the tone of King’s aging rock musician narrator.  “[W]e live in Darkness” evokes the biblical “we see through a glass, darkly” and, by extension, Sheridan LeFanu’s famous collection In a Glass Darkly.  Machen, like most pre-20th century Anglophone writers was steeped in biblical language (his father was a clergyman), and it gives his prose a resonance and stark power, at times.  With King, though, it’s imported, and sits unassimilated in the middle of his much more homely and colloquial prose.  Machen couldn’t have written like King, and King can’t write like Machen, not for more than a paragraph or so, anyway.

But those two paragraphs both set the works in the genre of cosmic horror.  The genre is predominantly associated with Lovecraft, but the real establishing text is The Great God Pan, which Lovecraft, like King, made no secret of his admiration for.  So similar are the philosophies underlying Machen and Lovecraft’s stories that influence by the former is sometimes imputed to the latter, simply because he’s more widely known and read.  The essence of cosmic horror is not that there is a monster who must be faced and, perhaps, defeated; it is that life is monstrous, the universe is monstrous.  And the universe cannot be defeated.  The visible monsters are only representatives of a greater evil at the heart of life itself.  That is why life is a “nightmare” and faith a “foolish illusion”.

King plays with these ideas in Revival, but for most of the novel they’re background.  Like most of King’s work, there’s a great deal of focus on characterization, of community life, and so on.  King is an incorrigibly humanist writer.  Machen wasn’t really a humanist; Lovecraft even less so.  Maybe that’s where the difficulty lies: King is too warm, too invested in his fellow humans to be really invested in cosmic horror.  It’s when you don’t think much of humanity in general that horror can come to seem cosmic.  For all King’s humanity, though, when it comes to the pay-off, the big finale, we know from the hints and the build-up that it’s all going to have to centre on the idea of the great horrors.  The anti-climax in Revival is, sadly, risible.  How can you really construct a finale that will provide pay off when dealing with ideas of such magnitude?  Machen didn’t do great in bringing Pan to a climax, either.  For Lovecraft, there tended to be an overreliance on “indescribable” and its synonyms when the monsters made their appearance.  King barely tries, his ending is run-of-the-mill, but I will avoid spoilers.

In short King is King, and this is a superior read in the King vein.  There’s some pretty atmospheric americana scene-setting, some of King’s typically laboured humour (this has always been his weak point, for me: King is not funny, but he never stops trying), and a lot of nods towards the greats of cosmic horror.  Cosmic horror is just the dressing, though, it’s not really what King is about.  He’s got his own thing going.  It’s a shame he couldn’t integrate this particular subgenre better into his own writing, but, on this front, Revival doesn’t quite come off, though it retains interest I think both as a good read all round and King’s most considered fictional statement on religion, rendering it a notably more thematic work than most of his others, while still retaining a good narrative thrust.