Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre by Algernon Blackwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Tales of the Sublime and Transcendent Most of the early 20th-century stories by Algernon Blackwood collected in Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre (1967) don’t suit the title of the collection or the lurid red and black and blue demonic face on the cover. Two of the twenty-three stories, “The Damned” and “The Transfer,” do build intense macabre suspense, but they don’t traffic in crude horror, and the other stories explore the supernatural or divine that lies just behind surface reality ready to burst through to challenge our preconceived notions of the universe and human experience. A better title for the collection would be Tales of the Sublime and Transcendent. Or Tales of Life and the Epiphanic. The collection gives a varied sample of Blackwood’s many kinds of psychological, supernatural, metaphysical, and sublime stories. They occur in England, Canada, Europe, Arizona, Switzerland, and Egypt; in sublime mountains, harsh deserts, dense forests, pastoral countrysides, and crowded cities; in an old chateau, a country estate, a Cairene hotel, a sea-side bungalow, and an alpine inn; in the present and the past; in situations of romance, male-bonding, haunting, dreaming, and dying. And so on. The stories feature either sensitive and imaginative or obtuse and practical people who experience some awesome supernatural phenomena, for “Science does not exhaust the Universe.” By the way, both Blackwood and H. P. Lovecraft wrote more-to-the-world-than-we-usually-see stories, but the former imagined a universal sublime life force behind the scenes, the latter a horrifying set of powerful and malevolent demonic aliens. Here is an annotated list of the stories. 1. Chinese Magic (1930): The conflict between Beauty and Reality, involving a bachelor psychologist, love at first sight, the allure of the orient, and the Perfume of the Garden of Happiness. 2. First Hate (1920): Just as animals instinctively and instantly know their dire enemies, so too do we humans. An unpleasant hunters’ story. 3. The Olive (1921): Italian olives, a mysterious girl, an erotic evening featuring fauns, nymphs, and Pan, and a desire to be altogether in life. 4. The Sacrifice (1914): Life is a Cecemony in the great temple of the world—if you can go mountain climbing during a time of crisis. 5. The Damned (1914): An increasingly suspenseful novella that demonstrates how the places lived in by strong-willed enough past people (especially the religiously intolerant) can influence (if not dominate) the present. 6. Wayfarers (1914): Time slips and eternally reincarnating lovers: “Have you so soon forgotten . . . when we knew together the perfume of the hanging Babylonian Gardens, or when the Hesperides were so soft, to us in the dawn of the world?” 7. The Sea Fit (1910): The Great Powers of Nature are still very much alive, and their appearance before us should not be a matter of terror but of triumphant singing. 8. The Attic (1912): A short, moving tale of a family (and cat) still grieving for the death of a beloved child, and of their haunted attic where a usurer hanged himself. 9. The Heath Fire (1912): An artist in Surrey, unlike most Englishmen, wants to embrace mystery, seeking in a burnt heath the “Soul of the Universe.” 10. The Return (1911): “The hierophantic, sacerdotal Power that had echoed down the world since Time began and dropped strange magic phrases into every poet’s heart” may touch even the most practical of middleclass businessmen. 11. The Transfer (1911): A governess recounts what happened when a successful vampiric uncle encountered a hungry patch of barren garden earth. 12. Clairvoyance (1912): A man who can hear but not see ghosts spends the night in a haunted room full of the ghosts of children in the house of a mismatched couple: the young wife is too sensitive and fertile, her old husband too obtuse and narrow. 13. The Golden Fly (1912): A devastated businessman observes the “lordly indifference of Nature,” so as to realize his “world of agony lay neatly buttoned up within the tiny space of his own brain. Outside it had no existence at all.” 14. Special Delivery (1912): When traveling in the mountains and staying in an inn, heed any warnings Nature might send your way. 15. The Destruction of Smith (1912): As a dying person may communicate with us in the moment of their death, so too may an entire town. An unlikeable “western” yarn. 16. The Tryst (1917): A complex psychological study of what happens to a person who works for fifteen years to become able to marry a sweetheart, with a horripilating climax. 17. The Wings of Horus (1914): The dangers of not having an outlet for one’s creative imagination, especially if one is a genius in Egypt under the influence of Horus. 18. Initiation (1917): The Beauty of nature transcends business, banks, and cities if you open yourself to it: “Fear slipped away, and elation took its place.” 19. A Desert Episode (1917): The desert outside Cairo is the perfect place to learn that through love, Life and Death are “unchanging partners” providing immortality. 20. Transition (1913): An ordinary man is bringing his ordinary family ordinary Christmas presents while remembering a play called Magic when a traffic accident provides him a moment of “hearty, genuine life at last.” 21. The Other Wing (1915): A brave, imaginative little boy has a real dream adventure in the closed wing of his family's mansion, and then decades later has cause to recall it. 22. By Water (1914): Vividly demonstrating what it's like to be lost in the Sahara and to drown there without knowing that one is drowning. 23. A Victim of Higher Space (1914): What happens when you become able to enter the 4th dimension without being able to control your coming or going? Better visit the Psychic Doctor John Silence for some advice and empathy. An unusually funny story. The Spring Books edition is well made (binding, pages, and print), but marred by jarring typos, at least one per story, whether the wrong words spelled correctly (e.g., the/that, tall/tell, if/it, etc.) or the right words spelled incorrectly (e.g., bpon/upon, dakrness/darkness, lefet/left, hitory/history, etc.). From the standpoint of contemporary mores, some of Blackwood’s stories have embarrassing elements of gender (e.g., twenty-five year old “girls” with “little” feet and hearts) and race (e.g., “Redskins, whatever they may feel, show little”), and he wasn’t at his best channeling Western pulps (e.g., “Ain’t it jest possible”), but given his era he open-mindedly viewed cultural, religious, scientific, and romantic matters, and his stories champion tolerance of different ways of understanding the divine or supernatural. And the stories here are mostly beautiful, thoughtful, powerful, and well-written fantastic literature. View all my reviews
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