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Post by valdemar on Dec 18, 2013 1:44:26 GMT
The first Algernon Blackwood story I ever read was 'The Nemesis Of Fire', which to a [long ago] teenager has everything - a remote dwelling harbouring odd inhabitants; Egyptology; unexplained fires; a bowl of hot blood; the dread-filled chase of an unseen entity, the panic-stricken tone of which made my flesh creep, and an unpleasant crawl through a claustrophobic crumbling tunnel. What's not to like? Why has nobody filmed this? [Mark Gatiss, I'm looking at you...]. I then read 'Ancient Sorceries', which is a great story that gets darker and more menacing as it progresses. Now here's an odd thing: every time I read it, I start thinking about the TV show 'The Avengers', to be more accurate, the Emma Peel era shows. I have pondered this, and although there is no logical reason for this, I think that the seemingly indifferent people and weirdly empty streets that Mr Arthur Vezin encounters, are linked in my mind to the oddly depopulated England [including London!] of The Avengers. Or I'm losing it big-time. Years ago, I went to Wales on a camping holiday with some friends. I took some books with me, as I always do, and one was a collection of stories including 'The Willows', which I read one wet and windy night, in my tent. Very possibly the very stupidest place to read this tale, because not only was the weather foul, but we had camped near a river, and very near some Willow trees. Thankfully, they didn't get any nearer, but the story stuck in my mind, and kept me from sleeping properly for several nights. Damn you, Mr Blackwood!
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jstern
New Face In Hell
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Post by jstern on Nov 12, 2015 2:12:20 GMT
"The Trod" is an interesting tale. The allusion to the role of the silver crucifix is part of what makes this different from a lot of other literature in the genre. I also think the end paragraph is a very effective unveiling of everything that came before it.
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Post by helrunar on Aug 12, 2019 19:32:02 GMT
I was at a loose end last Friday and took up Blackwood's novel The Centaur again, roughly where I had left off reading it a year or two ago. It is by far the oddest thing by him I have ever come across. If it were by almost any other writer, I would describe it as an exercise in psychedelic nature-mysticism with some sort of heavily veiled, heavily coded homoerotic undertow. But with Blackwood, all bets are off. And for me, all facile modern attempts at categorization fail. I do not think it is at all the kind of thing the typical Vault reader would want to tackle. It's only horrifying to someone like Arthur Machen, or Lovecraft, for whom revelations of non-human forms of consciousness, and the possibility that the most austere Pagan metaphysicians might have understood more of the true nature of reality than the mumblings of Christian theologians or positivistic scientists--the accepted "normal" outlook of educated people circa 1910--were apparently the ultimate in horror. Anyhow I was looking at articles about Blackwood. This seems like a good one. www.theguardian.com/books/2007/oct/27/featuresreviews.guardianreview32H.
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Post by Knygathin on Aug 13, 2019 9:26:12 GMT
I really don't think Lovecraft found The Centaur horrible. In Supernatural Horror In Literature he described it as very dreamlike. It is a pagan spiritual work. I read it completely immersed, perhaps ten years ago, and thought it was one of the very best books I had ever read. Because it was a Revelation. I have not looked into it again, but back then I considered it my Bible.
Lovecraft was also interested in Greek Mythology and the energies it described in Nature, and considered himself a pagan. He found both beauty and horror within the supernatural.
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Post by Dr Strange on Aug 13, 2019 10:58:19 GMT
Lovecraft... considered himself a pagan. He found both beauty and horror within the supernatural. Nonsense. Lovecraft consistently described himself as an atheist and a materialist. Here's a couple of quotes - “All I say is that I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world, or an eternal survival of personality exist. They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe, and I am not enough of a hair-splitter to pretend that I don't regard them as arrant and negligible moonshine. In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of radical evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist” - Letter to Robert E. Howard, 1932. “I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism—religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality” - Letter to Clark Ashton Smith, 1925.
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Post by helrunar on Aug 13, 2019 13:05:06 GMT
Here's an interesting description of Blackwood by journalist Justine Glass (I think this was a pseudonym, but I've never tried to find out more information about her). In the 1965 book Witchcraft, the Sixth Sense, discussing distinguished members of the Golden Dawn, Glass mentioned Blackwood and how much she admired "The Man Whom the Trees Loved." She continued:
"He was himself a fascinating person; very tall, with (when I met him) a very lined face. He had enormous almost aquamarine-coloured eyes which looked not only at but through you and beyond--to the farthermost horizons, it seemed." (p. 63)
H.
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Post by Knygathin on Aug 13, 2019 15:33:02 GMT
Lovecraft consistently described himself as an atheist and a materialist. Yes, in letters to colleagues and others, when he was concerned about presenting himself as a rational, intelligent, sensible man. But from an artistic aesthetic point of view he was a dreamer and pagan, very spiritual, sensitive, definitely not materialist. When he was younger he even built an altar to the Greek Gods in his room. This partly helped shape his literary expression, perhaps most clearly notable in his early "Dunsanian" phase. A man may have many sides.
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Post by Michael Connolly on Mar 27, 2022 21:03:21 GMT
Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood House of Stratus 2002 (Print On Demand Reprint of 1938 Edition) Contents: Introduction to the 1938 Edition The Willows - From 'The Listener' Secret Worship - From 'Secret Worship' Ancient Sorceries - From 'Secret Worship' The Glamour Of The Snow - From 'Pan's Garden' The Wendigo - From 'The Lost Valley' The Other Wing - From 'Day And Night Stories' The Transfer - From 'Pan's Garden' Ancient Lights - From 'Ten Minute Stories' The Listener - From 'The Listener' The Empty House - From 'The Empty House' Accessory Before The Fact - From 'Ten Minute Stories' Keeping His Promise - From 'The Empty House' Max Hensig - From 'The Listener' This was unexpected.
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Post by Michael Connolly on Jul 2, 2022 18:40:16 GMT
I'd certainly read it and liked it (in the Dorothy Sayers anthology series) when I was at primary school, and later in the Dover book. I'm going to admit this. "Secret Worship" is the only story by Algernon (Boring) Blackwood that I've ever liked. I've had to download a copy to re-read it. I might even buy a book that includes it.
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Post by helrunar on Sept 15, 2022 1:29:41 GMT
Visiting this Blackwood thread to canvas opinions. I finished reading "The Wendigo" this afternoon on my lunch break--I'm afraid I found the story very overwritten and disappointing, since it had been praised so highly. It seems more interesting from an historical vantage than for its qualities as a story. At least that was the experience of this reader.
There have been a number of his stories that would have been stronger if he had simply cut them down by a third, or more. On the other hand, some of his work has really moved and gripped me. I was so fascinated by The Centaur, a novel I read in an electronic edition, that I had to get an early Penguin paperback printing for one of my shelves. It was quite long and had numerous tangents and divagations that I think would have bored most 21st century readers to the point of no return quite early on.
I'm appreciating mentions of some specific tales I have yet to read--obviously, his output was enormous. He's such a significant figure that I feel obliged to read more even though my experience of Blackwood has been mixed, to understate severely.
On the bus ride home this evening I read something by him called "The Woman's Ghost Story" and it was dreadful--a dish-up of Theosophical sentimentality at its most labored. The one good thing about it was how short it was.
I might get evicted from the Vault for good if I go into just how underwhelmed I was by an Aickman tale I read last week, "The School Friend." It was building up to a thrilling climax with a horrifying revelation and... splat. NOTHING. I've been wondering if he wrote the story as an elaborate practical joke.
H.
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Post by ramseycampbell on Sept 15, 2022 12:17:33 GMT
The Willows - Two men travelling down the Danube by canoe spend a couple of nights on a sandbank surrounded by willows and have...an odd experience or two. This was great - and Lady P thought so too as she sat on the couch last night and had the entire thing read to her (she's not blind or anything btw, she just likes the...er...JLP voice). In fact I'm not sure which is better - this or The Wendigo, and I imagine that people with more time on their hands have debated the matter endlessly. Well, for some curious reason I never saw this at the time, but yes, Robert Aickman and I did that.
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Post by andydecker on Sept 16, 2022 8:24:31 GMT
Visiting this Blackwood thread to canvas opinions. I finished reading "The Wendigo" this afternoon on my lunch break--I'm afraid I found the story very overwritten and disappointing, since it had been praised so highly. It seems more interesting from an historical vantage than for its qualities as a story. At least that was the experience of this reader. . I know what you mean. I also think it too long in places and the ending rather disappointing. Blackwood's stories are often too long for their plot. But he often sounds authentic, especially his descriptions of nature. Which makes The Willows so effective.
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drauch
Crab On The Rampage
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Post by drauch on Oct 14, 2022 17:30:38 GMT
Ah, interesting to see Blackwood's work fairly divisive here, but I can kind of understand why. I find both The Willows and The Wendigo excellent, excelling in the moody, brooding build-up, primarily of their surrounding environmental descriptions. Evil is somewhere, ever encroaching, still unknown.
Conversely, I found Ancient Sorceries to be a bit of a slog, lacking in the effective atmosphere of the aforementioned stories. The main fault I had was with the descriptions of the cats, or things being 'cat-like', as that's simply how they're always being described, ad nauseum. Certain paragraphs will just describe everything of "sounding like a cat" or "like a cat", instead of his usual clever descriptiveness. This starts early on, so when the inevitable happens the reader is left without any surprise. This all culminates to an interesting conclusion with the narrator's tale, but as mentioned by another, the story abruptly ends with little satisfaction, shoehorning in an ambiguous question that presents itself rather clumsily. Not a bad tale! But one that I believe would have improved with a shorter length.
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Post by weirdmonger on Dec 14, 2022 7:38:02 GMT
Possible spoilers
THE LISTENER: ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
“The chance was a mere chance, and unworthy of record.”
This story of a striving writer who takes on a property cheap, without knowing why it is cheap in an erstwhile London. And finds it full of things like…
“The floor of my sitting-room has valleys and low hills on it, and the top of the door slants away from the ceiling with a glorious disregard of what is usual. They must have quarreled – fifty years ago – and have been going apart ever since.” and “…the same uncouth figure of a man crept back to my bedside, and bending over me with his immense head close to my ear whispered repeatedly in my dreams, “I want your body; I want its covering. I’m waiting for it, and listening always.”
Cats stalking him from outside, rats inside, winds full of tricks and larks, dreams of dreams and the Listener who terrifies him as the narrator eventually follows him to the room upstairs, and thoughts fighting thoughts within the narrator’s brain he can’t control (“unusual thoughts, thoughts I have never had before, about medicines and drugs and the treatment of strange illnesses”), and mention of de Quincey alongside suicides cursed with ‘reclothing’ themselves upon earth, the sense of a closeness of a loathsome disease, a bad egg, and a landlady with a tablecloth that makes his clothes feel crooked and she also has a “son who is ‘somethink on a homnibus.’” A repeated refrain throughout of this son on an omnibus. But what is that to do with the suspensively awaited Chapter to rescue the narrator? But rescue him from what… a ghost of a leper as a mere chance decoy from a terrifying truth, so worth recording, after all?
“I am looking forward very much to Chapter’s arrival. […] I wish Chapter would come. My facts are all ready marshalled,…” The narrator’s thoughts versus Chapter’s thoughts like two sets of bombs. And my italics here… “He talked and I listened. But, so full was I of the horrid thing I had to tell that I made a poor listener. I was forever watching my opportunity to leap in and explode it all under his nose.” Some think ‘hominibus’ (Latin), cf “somethink on a homnibus.”
Hic liber a duobus hominibus scriptus est
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Post by Knygathin on Sept 9, 2023 11:19:50 GMT
Does anybody have any experience with Aegypan press? I wonder about their printing of The Lost Valley and Other Stories. I understand it is a print-on-demand, but is the quality good, and is the text solid?
By the way, if you have not read The Centaur, I recommend it. It is sublime.
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