koilungfish | Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural by Algernon Blackwood

Title - Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural
Author - Algernon Blackwood
ISBN - Not Given

"Yet, for all the untamed riot, there was a lift of beauty pulsing underneath. Even when the wildest abandon approached the heat of orgy, when the recklessness appeared excess - there hid that marvellous touch of loveliness which makes the natural sacred. There was coherence, purpose, the fulfilling of an exquisite law: and - there was worship. The form it took, haply, was strange as well as riotous, yet in its strangeness dreamed innocence and purity, and in its very riot flamed that spirit which is divine."

Contents:

The Doll
Running Wolf
The Little Beggar
The Occupant of the Room
The Man Whom The Trees Loved
The Valley of the Beasts
The South Wind
The Man Who Was Milligan
The Trod
The Terror of the Twins
The Deferred Appointment
Accessory Before The Fact
The Glamour of the Snow
The House of the Past
The Decoy
The Tradition
The Touch of Pan
Entrance and Exit
The Pikestaffe Case
The Empty Sleeve
Violence
The Lost Valley

Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural is a book that has taken me somewhere in the vicinity of eight months to read. This is in no part due to its length. The Lord of the Rings is almost twice as long and I generally complete that in around ten days. Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural has been a long, slow act of perseverance because of Mr Blackwood's unique style.

Mr Blackwood has an exceptional, perhaps unique, gift for capturing the ephemeral quality of human emotion and passion, the formless yet intense feelings that overrule logic and drive people to do things that will uproot their lives. He can describe sudden love, spiritual uplift, peace and unreasoning anxiety like nobody else. Mr Blackwood's gift is that he describes not only with uncommon depth but with uncommon perceptiveness. He makes the effort to fathom the cloud of emotional drift that most writers - indeed, most people - are barely aware of - the superstitious overlay with which we regard the world, perceiving as animate and filled with intent such things as the movement of trees, or the way in which the passing of a cloud across the sun can change our perception of things from cheerful to threatening. We do not, as a rule, observe these facets of ourselves, and Mr Blackwood's ability to not only observe them but also accurately describe them make this a must-read book - indeed, make him a must-read author - for just about everyone with an IQ higher than than of a pig. As a matter of fact, the pigs should probably read Mr Blackwood too.

Mr Blackwood also has a strong bond with the wilderness. Most if not all of his stories here - I think only The Empty Sleeve is the exception - are sited in or strongly connected to wild places, and the spirit of wildness, of untamed, untrodden land. Mr Blackwood's heart belongs to forests and mountains, and his love for such places shines gently out of the pages. He makes one feel quite fusty for being indoors at all.

That said, Mr Blackwood's short stories have a certain tendency towards similarities. Twins recur - meaningfully, as in The Lost Valley, and pointlessly, as in The Empty Sleeve - and most every tale involves a man having an odd experience in some lonely wild place. This experience may be considered supernatural, or religious, or just plain odd. Occasionally there is a woman involved, but Mr Blackwood's women are mostly ciphers, figures of femininity without much in the way of character to them. Miss Elspeth from The Touch of Pan is probably the best, being a wild creature with a will of her own, where as Katya from The Lost Valley is one of the worst female characters I've read in a long time. She exists solely to be beautiful and exotic and cause emotional ruction. The protagonist loves her passionately at a glance, without saying a single word to her, nor knowing anything of her personality or even her wants in the whole turbulent business. Katya is one of those unfortunate things one finds in old books, like Mr Blackwood's faint undercurrent of anti-Semitism ... such is the age of these stories.

Mr Blackwood's style also takes a long time to get places. It is not that he is aimless, but that his way of describing the vague, illogical, unthinking emotions that run human existence takes a lot of space. This is entirely justifiable; such emotions are rarely described well, let alone as superbly as Mr Blackwood does. However, when Mr Blackwood presents twenty-odd stories, some of which run to considerable length - The Man Whom The Trees Loved is a seventy-page monster, and The Lost Valley is a fifty-page brute of text - to try and read from one end of the book to the other ... well, some books can be read at a break-neck page, but this one must be read at a broken-necked pace. Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural was not meant to be sat down with for hours on end. It is, in a way, the ultimate collection - twenty or so stories collected simply because it would make no sense to put them in separate books, but to be read separately, at different times, so that the similarities between them, their slow development and the gradual evolution of their contents can be appreciated. Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural is much like a rack of good wines - one would not drink a cup from each bottle, one after the other, but would stop to appreciate the flavour, not to mention avoid getting drunk.

However, I cannot give comment on the individual merits of all the stories here because, over eight months, I have forgotten most of the early ones. Suffice it to say that I do not recall any of them being dull, or bad reading, or indeed bad writing. The Glamour of the Snow in particular struck me as good, and The Pikestaff Case is the gentle distant cousin of one or two of Lovecraft's scoundrels.

All in all, Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural is a staggeringly large amount of good reading, and the best way to read it is very slowly. I recommend that anyone who happens to find themselves with a copy of this, or Mr Blackwood's other monster tomes, that they read one story per month, no more. Perhaps less.

It has been said that there are only six masterpieces of supernatural fiction. Mr Blackwood wrote two - The Willows and The Wendigo. That should tell you all you need to know about how good this book is.

This book is:
* - excellent reading
* - contained of exceptional descriptive and emotive writing
* - to be read over the course of three or four years

This book is not:
* - contained of as many ideas as it is stories
* - light or casual reading
* - in print