Welcome to Litsy!

I was so excited to read this, I was basically sold just for it being part of Penguin‘s Weird Fiction imprint and Algernon Blackwood‘s (isn‘t that just such an authors name?) Wikipedia page made for interesting reading.

The book itself is essentially a collection of John Silence‘s case notes. Anyway, I wanted to love occult Sherlock Holmes but I lowkey hated it and was mostly bored throughout.

Me : I‘ll just take a small handbag with me, because I want to travel lightly today.

Also me : I think this paperback would fit in my coat pocket..

(Isn‘t Algernon Blackwood just such an author name?)

I thoroughly enjoyed these stories, instilled more with a dark atmosphere of unease than outright horror, which is entirely in my bailiwick 🙂
The final story, The Willows, was an acknowledged inspiration for Lovecraft's brand of cosmic horror, woven from suggestions of an Outside intelligence at once both cruelly oblivious and calculatingly inimical to humankind, and the majesty of Nature, dwarfing to insignificance individual existence 5🖤

"- Hush! Do not mention them more than you can help. Do not refer to them by name. To name is to reveal; it is the inevitable clue, and out only hope lies in ignoring them, in order that they may ignore us.
- Even in thought?
- Especially in thought. Our thoughts make spirals in their world. We must keep them out of our minds at all costs if possible."
- The Willows

"When common objects in this way become charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of appearance that lent them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures. Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us."
- The Willows

The third story, "The Sea Fit", is not, I think, quite as successful as the previous two in horripilation, but is still an enjoyable example of early Cosmic Horror, and a clear influence on Blackwood's admirer, H. P. Lovecraft. ??

The 2nd story in this collection, "The Listener", is creepy AF ? Featuring a MC suffering psychosis, it skirts a prejudicial view of mental health but, I think, manages to avoid outright stigmatising by dint of other characters clearly experiencing some of the disturbing manifestations in the Old Dark House at the end of an unfrequented, cat-infested London alley.
If you like slow, creepy tales of the macabre, Blackwood is a good companion ?

The title story was near perfect for me: setting, atmosphere, themes and style of writing. I've read other Blackwood short stories, but somehow have never got to this one before, despite it being one of his most anthologized.
A nervous man resting over in a quiet French town finds himself intrigued by the curiously feline demeanor of the locals, who show a disquieting interest in his movements. Being enthralled by the innkeeper's daughter, ⬇️

"There are, it would appear, certain wholly unremarkable persons, with none of the characteristics that invite adventure, who yet once or twice in the course of their smooth lives undergo an experience so strange that the world catches its breath - and looks the other way!"

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl