HYDERABAD: Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows was rated as the best tale of the supernatural, by the renowned American horror writer HP Lovecraft. And that’s how I came to learn about the work of this remarkable writer. Algernon Blackwood had an extraordinary life. An Englishman, in his young adulthood, he had travelled to Canada and then the US in search of work.
He had been a farmer, a hotel manager, a newspaper reporter, a model and a violin teacher. In his late 30s, he decided to move back to his native England, and embarked on a writing career. This was in the early part of the 20th Century. Soon, he had established himself as one of the finest writers of both psychological horror and weird fiction.
Two of his most famous pieces are The Wendigo – a long short story of chilling horror about a moose-hunting trip along Northern Ontario; and The Willows the novella – the topic of this piece. The protagonist and his friend, only referred to as ‘the Swede’, are adventurers, canoeing down the river Danube right from its origin at the Black Forest, to the Black sea where it drains into. For the more curious one’s in you, this is more than 3,000 km.
While canoeing downstream somewhere between Vienna and Budapest, they encounter ‘a region of singular loneliness and desolation’, an area of dense willow-bushes. They are reluctant to break their journey there, but the weather conditions and the behavior of the waters force them to take shelter on a small island. They decide to set their tent in that island, and to resume their journey in the next couple of days, once the storm has subsided and the river has become gentler.
What follows is a study of nature, the natural and the supernatural, and how it consumes the minds and perhaps the flesh of the two hardy, practical adventurers. The Danube has a life of its own, forcing the adventurers to halt their journey. The wind has a life of its own, howling its otherworldly scream as it blows through the willows. And then there are the Willows.
This is a difficult piece to write about, not because I am fearful that I will leave out spoilers and that will disrupt your experience, but because Algernon Blackwood is an absolute master at creating an eerie, surreptitious kind of supernatural. I had finished reading this story perhaps a couple of weeks back, but the chill that ran through my spine while thinking about it, was real.
The goosebumps I am having right now are real. And here’s the thing — there is no blood. There is no gore. Heck, there is hardly any dialogue. There is just this all-encompassing envelop of atmospheric, impending terror. And this story was written perhaps a hundred years back. It is about humans and nature, as all Algernon Blackwood stories are. It will never get old. And that’s perhaps not a comforting thought.
Shom Biswas on Twitter@spinstripe