When it comes to horror, give me stories that go boldly beyond the limits of everyday life. Weird tales that explore places and spaces and times through radically altered states of mind.
Algernon Blackwood was a British master of a very peculiar, extremely self-aware mode of horror. His work as a ghost-storyteller for BBC radio and TV from the 1930s through the early 1950s earned him a late-life moniker: "the Ghost Man.” Yet, he should be remembered for more.
Blackwood was a lifelong occultist who wrote about ghosts, phantoms, and legends with a signature twist. His narrators, though often astounded by what they saw, weren’t always trying to prove whether the supernatural was real or fake. Their bigger questions always seemed to be, “Do I have the strength to really see what life’s strangest things will show me? How long can I keep my eyes open before I look away?”
A new collection of Blackwood’s work, The Unknown, Weird Writings, 1900–1937, suggests the author never blinked. Issued in March by Handheld Press, the book pairs his lesser-known short stories about astounding experiences in Canada, the Alps, and elsewhere with nonfiction essays about his views on writing. All the chosen stories exhibit Blackwood’s abiding obsession with the inexplicable moments of human experience.
My favorite is “The Glamour of the Snow” (1911), a spellbinding adventure story about a writer drawn away from ski lodge in the Alps by an irresistible womanly being. The story begins by observing the hero’s state of mind:
The three worlds that met and mingled here seemed to his imaginative temperament very obvious, though it is doubtful if any another mind less intuitively equipped would have seem them so well-defined. There was the world of tourist England, civilised, quasi-educated, to which he belonged by birth, at any rate; there was the world of peasants to which he felt himself drawn by sympathy — for he loved and admired their toiling, simple life; and there was this other — which he could only call the world of Nature. To this last, however, in virtue of a vehement poetic imagination, and a tumultuous pagan instinct fed by his very blood, he felt that most of him belonged.
One of Blackwood’s signature interests is the irrepressibility of an ever-divided self. In “Glamour,” the hero pursues the mystery woman because she seems connected to a pagan realm he desperately wants to experience. It’s not humanly logical to follow a phantom up into the high, cold mountains — but there is spiritual value in the chase, so YOLO, amirite?
Henry Bartholomew, editor of The Unknown, provides a good historical explanation for why Blackwood’s narrators always desperately sought to escape the ordinary. In the introduction, Bartholomew writes, “While Blackwood was adept at writing traditional tales of terror, the guiding principle of his fiction concerns the re-enchantment of a world that global war and the rush for modernity had effaced.”
This “re-enchantment” has a very loose relationship with the time-space-mind continuum. Blackwood’s narrators often experienced life in many worlds — the outer world surrounding the narrator, the inner world of the mind driving the narrator, and the liminal world, like “Nature,” that strangely bound the two — at the same time.
Indeed, in “Glamour,” time and space and thought get all mixed up the hero’s head like an inner multiverse, where what is realistically impossible is also poetically crystalline. To me, this is the very definition of re-enchantment, when a narrator is irresistibly drawn to unknown realms of experience.
Blackwood wasn’t shy about this impulse in his other writings, either. Take this excerpt from his nonfiction essay, “The Winter Alps” (1910), which precedes “Glamour” in The Unknown. In it, Blackwood describes the extraordinary feeling of being in an ordinary mountain village as night falls:
At dawn, or towards sunset, the magic is bewildering — saisissant.1 The wizardry of dreams lies over the world. Even the village street becomes transfigured. The winter mountains then breathe forth for a brief moment something of the glory the world knew of old in her youth before the coming of men. The ancient gods come close. One feels the awful potentialities of this wonderful white and silent landscape. Into the terms of modern life, however, it is with difficulty, if at all, translatable. Before the task were half completed, someone would come along with weights and scales in either hand and mention casually the exact mass and size of composition of it all — and rob the wondrous scene of half its awe and all its wonder.
Not only did Blackwood write in earnest to re-enchant himself with his surrounding world that modernity and war were destroying, but he generally looked down on his age’s growing scientific need to simply quantify everything and move blindly forward.
Today, staring into a darkening A.I. future where everything will be blandly illuminated, I feel a growing kinship with Blackwood. I can’t read enough of his stories. I want more strange. I can’t recommend more the enchanting sensation you’ll feel when trying hard to see what Blackwood sees, feel what he feels — and always coming up short.
In Blackwood’s stories, we remember there is more to life than figuring shit out. We learn that “Nature” needs to remain forever un-algorithmic. What will preserve our humanity will be our urge to forever ponder what might be out there — and inside ourselves — and never fully get it.
“Glamour” represent the pinnacle of what weird stories can explore. It takes us to the edge of what we know and dares us to just behold in awe.
Thankfully, the BBC is doing some work to keep the “Ghost Man” alive. Set aside 15 minutes to listen to this abridged version. If you’re lucky, a few minutes in, you’ll be likewise re-enchanted. What remains for you to discover in “this wonderful white and silent landscape” Blackwood described so eloquently more than a century ago? Your own chills of wonder.
“French, striking, startling or arresting,” so says the endnote, and the many splendid others, prepared by Kate Macdonald.