Christmas Ghosts: Algernon Blackwood Style

Last time I spoke to the English ghost story as a Christmas treat. M. R. James brought that traditional tale to the peak of its creepiness, but he was a holiday visitor for all that. Algernon Blackwood, by comparison, was a full time tradesman in this field. As “The Ghost Man”, he appeared on BBC radio and television to read his tales. Blackwood’s ghostly works have been published in twenty-one volumes (up to his death, a dozen more after). M. R. James produced only four original anthologies along with his Collected Ghost Stories. Blackwood wrote novels and plays as well. It is clear to see the difference between the hobbyist and the professional. (This addresses quantity, not quality.)

Lovecraft, Critic

Blackwood will be best remembered for two stories: “The Willows” and “The Wendigo”. H. P. Lovecraft said of him in Supernatural Horror in Literature:

Less intense than Mr. Machen in delineating the extremes of stark fear, yet infinitely more closely wedded to the idea of an unreal world constantly pressing upon ours, is the inspired and prolific Algernon Blackwood, amidst whose voluminous and uneven work may be found some of the finest spectral literature of this or any age. Of the quality of Mr. Blackwood’s genius there can be no dispute; for no one has even approached the skill, seriousness, and minute fidelity with which he records the overtones of strangeness in ordinary things and experiences, or the preternatural insight with which he builds up detail by detail the complete sensations and perceptions leading from reality into supernormal life or vision. Without notable command of the poetic witchery of mere words, he is the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere; and can evoke what amounts almost to a story from a simple fragment of humourless psychological description. Above all others he understands how fully some sensitive minds dwell forever on the borderland of dream, and how relatively slight is the distinction betwixt those images formed from actual objects and those excited by the play of the imagination.

Getting the Job Done

Lovecraft points out Blackwood’s faults: “…ethical didacticism, occasional insipid whimsicality, the flatness of benignant supernaturalism, and a too free use of the trade jargon of modern “occultism”. Beginning attacked for style is certainly not unknown to HPL, but as the Providence master also points out, as long as the author can generate a frisson of terror in the reader’s mind, all other faults can be forgiven. Unlike mainstream verbal rambles, horror fiction, including the ghost story, has but one purpose…to creep you out. The exception to this might be the occult detective, a sub-genre Blackwood added to with his John Silence tales.

All that reading can be hard on the eyes, so let’s allow some other people to do it, while we listen to some classic tales by a master writer….

Lovecraft, Critic

Getting the Job Done

The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories

The Listener and Other Stories

Other Treats

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