pick"The Occupant of the Room" is one of the shorter stories in this collection, so Blackwood doesn't mince words on poetic descriptions of the Swiss Alps or the quaint mountain village hotel, he just gets on with making the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, and with sending shivers down the spine ?
Featuring an otherworldly wardrobe, but, "Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Narnia anymore!"
CWs in comment.
"Fear, once in, is difficult to dislodge."
- The Occupant of the Room
When will people in ghost stories realise that they should avoid the fortuitous turn of events that must surely end in terror?!
I'm at the start of the story, but I'd definitely advise Minturn, a tourist in the Swiss Alps, not to accept the hotel room of the woman who went missing in the mountains a couple of days previously, whose return is surely inevitable, alive or dead! ?
"Through the confusion upon his faculties, rose a certain hint of insecurity that betrayed itself by a slight hesitancy or miscalculation in one or two unimportant actions. There was a touch of melancholy, too, a sense of something lost. It lay, perhaps, in that tinge of sadness which accompanies twilight on an autumn day, when a gentler, mournful beauty veils a greater beauty that is past."
- The Tryst
pickIt took me a while to get through "The Man Whom the Trees Loved". It's a slow paced novella that I found rewarded my patience with it. There's an initial section focusing on the eponymous man, a retired forester whose cottage on the edge of the New Forest allows him access to the trees he loves, and which come to love him in turn with an inhuman jealousy that threatens to possess and subsume him into themselves.
⬇️
"The forest held her with its giant fascination. In this secluded breathing-spot that the centuries had left untouched, she had stepped close against the hidden pulse of the whole collective mass of them. They were aware of her and had turned to gaze with their myriad sight upon the intruder... And their steady stare shocked her as though in some sense she knew that she was naked. They saw so much of her: she saw of them - so little."
“She feared long words she did not understand. Beelzebub lay hid among too many syllables.”
- Algernon Blackwood, "The Man Whom the Trees Loved"
Sophie Bittacy learned her religion at her minister father's knee, accepted this heritage wholesale, without reflection or consideration, and her reaction to non-Biblical ideas put me in mind of Asimov's words on anti-intellectualism.
pick"Running Wolf" is a vivid story of an encounter between a lone huntsman in the Canadian backwoods and a timber wolf with strangely human behaviours.
Blackwood builds the tension from the outset, with vague warnings from local hunters about the areas around Medicine Lake that Hyde should avoid, through to the unsettlingly gradual approach of the preternatural wolf and its silently urgent appeal.
pick"Ancient Sorceries" is one of my favourite stories. It is redolent of cats, and feline imagery is woven throughout it, but how many actually appear? ?
Meek suburbanite, Arthur Vezin feels overwhelmed by the raucous behaviour of fellow English tourists aboard a train travelling through Northern France, and takes the uncharacteristically spontaneous step of debarking at a medieval village, becoming enmeshed in an autumnal twilight world, where ⬇️
Onto the next story, “Ancient Sorceries“, a classic that includes cats🐈⬛, a psychic detective (Dr. John Silence), cats🐈⬛, an eldritch French village, cats🐈⬛, witches, and cats🐈⬛. Did I mention cats?🐈⬛
I love the facing illustration and decorated title for this story.
"Here was a place unpolluted by men, kept clean by the winds from coarsening human influences, a place where spiritual agencies were within reach and aggressive. Never, before or since, have I been so attacked by indescribable suggestions of a "beyond region," of another scheme of life, another evolution not parallel to the human. And in the end our minds would succumb under the weight of the awful spell, and we would be drawn across the ⬇️
#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl
"After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Buda-Pesth, the Danube enters a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low willow-bushes."
"The Willows" by Algernon Blackwood, illustration by Sidney Stanley
The tales are "queer" as in "peculiar", and with that wonderful name and that characterful face, what other kind of tale was Algernon going to write?
I've read the title story and "Ancient Sorceries" in a modern edition, the edition I'm reading now being the 1925 one shown in the image, though sadly my copy no longer has that excellent dust jacket. It is illustrated, though, and I'll post some of them as I go along ?
The Willows and Other Queer Tales | 
