H P Lovecraft, page 9 of 15

Algernon Blackwood, photo by Douglas

Of all those early-20th century weird writers (Arthur Machen, M R James, Lord Dunsany, H P Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith), Algernon Blackwood seems the most difficult to really know. Reading Lovecraft — the very type of the weird writer — you can’t help being aware that HPL has a definite idea of what a weird tale should be, and that he’s doing his best to capture it in form, content, style and idea, honing his approach tale by tale, in theory and in practice. Blackwood doesn’t seem to have an aesthetic ideal; his fiction is an outpouring of all sorts of stories and styles, ghostly, adventurous, romantic, comedic. (Lovecraft himself calls Blackwood’s work “voluminous and uneven”, though says it contains “some of the finest spectral literature of this or any age”.) He does though, like Lovecraft, have a central belief that acts as the DNA that shapes and unites all his fiction — “an interest in the Extension of Human Faculty”, as he puts it — but it seems to me that, in contrast to Lovecraft’s fiction, where the best tales are usually those that most embody Lovecraft’s stated ideals, those where Blackwood most explicitly captures his views on “extended or expanded consciousness” are usually the least successful as fiction. Fortunately, Blackwood has another force driving the production of his stories, and it’s where this is most evident that he’s at his best.

In his introduction to The Insanity of Jones and other tales — a selection of his fiction written between 1906 and 1910 —  Blackwood says:

“I recall, anyhow, that these tales poured from me spontaneously, as though a tap were turned on, and I have often since leaned to the suggestion that many of them derived from buried, unresolved shocks… These ‘shocks’ had come to an exceptionally ignorant youth of twenty who had drifted into the life of a newspaper reporter in New York after a disastrous cattle-farm and a hotel in Canada, and the drifting had included the stress of extreme poverty and starvation… the New York experiences in a world of crime and vice had bruised and bludgeoned a sensitive nature that swallowed the horrors without being able to digest them, and… the seeds thus sown, dormant and unresolved in the subconscious, possibly emerged later — and, since the subconscious always dramatises, emerged in story form.”

The best of the tales in this book are those most obviously rooted in real experience and vividly-created, authentic-feeling settings. The weird desolation of the wilds of the Danube in “The Willows”, and the truly vast and primal wilderness of Canada in “The Wendigo” are two obvious ones, but Blackwood isn’t only a wilderness man. The New York of “Max Hensig”, with its evocation of the alcohol-sodden, sleep-deprived world of city reporters is just as convincing — and gripping — an environment. Elsewhere, although Blackwood can be poetic (as in, say, “The Dance of Death”, or “The Old Man of Dreams”, which mostly work because they’re short), the difference begins to tell in those stories written purely as stories rather than outpourings of genuine experience (“Miss Slumbubble”, in which an overly-anxious woman finds herself trapped in a haunted train carriage, or “The Insanity of Jones”, where a young clerk is given the chance to enact a karma-free revenge on a man who tortured him to death in a previous life) are the least substantial, and least convincing.

The key (with all weird writers, I suspect, particularly those who have a philosophy to expound) is mystery. Whatever a writer’s beliefs, while they’re conjuring the mystery — the awe, the fear, the terror, the wonder — they include us all, but as soon as the explanation arrives, the portcullis clangs down. The perfect example is Blackwood’s “May Day Eye”, which starts as a vivid evocation of the borderline panic of being lost in a mile or two of English countryside as dark descends — then, suddenly it’s all technical talk of “elementals”, and it’s not convincing. The point at which this tale changes is where the narrator meets with an expert on folklore who has all the necessary explanations. Such a mouthpiece character doesn’t always appear in Blackwood’s fiction, but when he does, he usually spoils it, for me. The most obvious example is the “psychic detective” John Silence (if only he would be silent), one of whose tales, “The Camp of the Dog” is in this book. John Silence is absent for much of the tale, and before he comes we get — again — a great evocation of an environment, in this case a vast collection of tiny islands north of Stockholm, and a growing tension between the small group of campers holidaying there, a tension taking a dangerously lycanthropic turn. Then John Silence arrives and talks all about “vital forces”, “the Subtle Body” and all things “fluidic”, and puts a dampener on what was building up to be a rather hothouse tale of teenage lust at odds with civilised values.

But when Blackwood’s good, he can be very good, and he’s good when his tales are backed up by a solid grounding in real places and situations. In “Max Hensig”, the New York reporter, Williams, gets to interview a psychopathic doctor on trial for the poisoning of his second wife. Williams is convinced Hensig is dangerous, and writes so in the papers, but Hensig — who is clearly a psychopath, and is openly contemptuous of so unimaginative a way of killing someone as poison — is released, and then Williams knows Hensig is after him. The interviews, with Williams one side of the prison bars and Hensig the other, feel like Hannibal Lecter territory, and when we know Hensig is on the loose once more, hard-drinking Williams’ descent into near-nervous collapse is as thick and sticky as an alcoholic sweat.

But the best tale in the book, for me, is “The Wendigo”. (“The Willows” is here, too, but I think that, despite Lovecraft’s endorsement, it has to take third place after “The Wendigo” and “Max Hensig”.) For a start, the environment is wonderfully realised:

“In front… lay the stretch of Fifty Island Water, a crescent-shaped lake some fifteen miles across from tip to tip, and perhaps five miles across where they were camped. A sky of rose and saffron, more clear than any atmosphere Simpson had ever known, still dropped its pale streaming fires across the waves, where the islands — a hundred, surely, rather than fifty — floated like the fairy barques of some enchanted fleet. Fringed with pines, whose crests fingered most delicately the sky, they almost seemed to move upwards as the light faded — about to weigh anchor and navigate the pathways of the heavens instead of the currents of their native and desolate lake.”

Then there’s the supernatural element itself. Simpson’s hunter-guide Défago is snatched from the very mouth of his tent by the Wendigo — snatched and carried off to race through the woods, then up into the skies, where his cries about his “burning feet of fire” echo down to the terrified Simpson. But this isn’t all. Out of sheer boldness, Blackwood has Défago return after several days’ absence for an hour or two — or is it Défago? The thing looks like him, but that likeness could be “a mask that was on the verge of dropping off, and… underneath they would discover something black and diabolical revealed in utter nakedness.” Défago’s comrade Hank shouts that this isn’t Défago, and the thing disappears as mysteriously as it came… Then, later, we find Défago again, only this time, we’re told, it’s the real man, one utterly frostbitten, exhausted, and empty-minded. And so, is the Wendigo an actual creature? Is it a supernatural entity? Or is it a metaphor for “that other aspect of the wilderness: the indifference to human life, the merciless spirit of desolation which took no note of man”? Blackwood — as caught up in the rush of his tale as Défago is in the Wendigo’s grip — doesn’t answer, but lets the mystery remain:

“Out there, in the heart of unreclaimed wilderness, they had surely witnessed something crudely and essentially primitive. Something that had survived somehow the advance of humanity had emerged terrifically, betraying a scale of life monstrous and immature. He envisaged it rather as a glimpse into prehistoric ages, when superstitions, gigantic and uncouth, still oppressed the hearts of men; when the forces of nature were still untamed, the Powers that may have haunted a primeval universe not yet withdrawn.”

A glimpse — this is what a great weird tale should be, not an explanation. And it’s when Blackwood keeps his tales to that glimpse that he most succeeds.

IT was one of the major reading events of my teens. As well as being the first Stephen King book I read as it came out (in paperback, anyway) right when I was in the grip of my first enthusiasm for horror, sheer page count meant IT couldn’t help being an event rather than a mere read. Plus, there was something about the basic idea that seemed so right: a bunch of loser kids face horror in small-town USA, then have to come back and face it again as adults. Nostalgia for the small-town life of 1950s USA seemed to pervade the 1980s, mostly thanks to George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg (Lucas’s American Graffiti sparked it off in 1973, 1978’s film of Grease made it more widespread, but the whole thing found its apotheosis in 1985’s Spielberg-produced Back to the Future), and as I was neither born in the 1950s nor in the USA, it formed for me a sort of fairy-tale fantasyland where stories of innocence and coming of age could be told, no more nor less real than the Germanic never-never land of the Grimms, or Clark Ashton Smith’s far-future Zothique. To read a horror story set in that fabled land of innocence and bobby-sox polka-dot lollypop rock’n’roll seemed just what I wanted — no, needed — as I hit the second half of my teens.

It’s become an occasional (though unplanned) theme in this blog to revisit things I was frightened of as a kid (the most recent one being another King effort, the TV mini-series of Salem’s Lot), and one of the things that made me put off re-reading IT was how certain scary scenes had lingered in my memory — particularly the one where Beverley Marsh hears the voices of dead kids coming up through the plug-hole of the bathroom sink. Back when I first read IT, that made me very nervous of our rather claustrophobic, spider-prone bathroom, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to reawaken the fear. (Pardon the pun, but fear of the bathroom is such an inconvenient fear.) The other thing that put me off re-reading IT was how disappointing I’d found the ending the first time around (combined with how disappointed I’d been by the endings of the last two King novels I read: Duma Key and — a while back — Bag of Bones). But then I read James Smythe’s article on IT, part of his comprehensive re-read of all Stephen King’s novels and story collections, and when he said IT was “a summer novel”, and I realised it was starting to be summer, I decided to dive in.

In the end, a sort of reversal occurred. I was no way near as scared of the horror scenes as when I’d first read the book — in fact, I was rather disappointed by them — but I found the ending a little less disappointing (only a little, mind, and perhaps because I was prepared for it). Nevertheless I still enjoyed IT immensely. So, why?

The horror scenes, first. One I’d been particularly chilled by the first time I read IT was where grown-up Beverley returns to her former home, finds it occupied by what appears to be a sweet old foreign lady, and is invited in for tea. Once inside, the sweet old lady transforms into something undead and disgusting. (Her line, “My madder was my fadder”, was one of the novel’s many catchphrases that stuck in my mind as surreally horrific. Although, I discovered on this re-read, it’s not as much of a catchphrase as I recalled, only being repeated once, unlike “We all float down here”, or “Beep-beep, Richie.”) This time reading that scene, as the transformation began, I was at first a little creeped, but as King ladled on grisly detail after grisly detail, I started to find the whole thing overdone, and then too OTT to be scary. It was as though King was so over-sugaring his horror with whatever the horror equivalent of sugar is, that he’d numbed my readerly taste-buds. And I think every horror scene — or, I should say, every supernatural horror scene — in IT suffers the same way. What struck me as sensational and grisly when I first read the book, on this re-read seemed merely sensational.

It could be argued that this is the point. King himself spells it out:

It was like some comic-book villain. Because they saw it that way? Thought of it that way? Yes, perhaps so. It was kid’s stuff, but it seemed that was what this thing thrived on — kid’s stuff.

The creature in IT assumes the form of whatever frightens its victims the most, and kids being frightened by gloopy, gory, grisly details, that’s the approach it uses. The trouble is, this is also the fault I found with Bag of Bones and Duma Key — that the supernatural horror scenes were so un-disciplined, so full of detail after detail straining after effect at the expense of meaning, that the overall result was to detract from rather than strengthen the horror and the story. Because the creature in IT has no limits but King’s prodigious vocabulary of gloop, it loses its effectiveness as horror. Pennywise the Clown has the power to assume any form, to read its victim’s innermost thoughts, and to make its victims see whatever it wants them to see, and to even feel it as dangerously real — so why doesn’t Pennywise win hands down? Why hasn’t it wiped out the world? Why doesn’t it assail the kids with so much horror they go insane? Why doesn’t it simply jump out of the nearest drain and tear them to pieces? The truly frightening scenes, for me as an adult reader, were where Pennywise uses human beings to do its work. And although these humans are much less powerful than Pennywise, they’re more scary because I know they can’t be warded off with a childhood talisman (a book about birds, an asthma inhaler), and that they can do actual physical damage. Their lack of over-the-top-ness makes them more real, and so more scary.

IT has every potential of being a Lovecraftian horror — a horror story of ideas as much as grisly details — but it’s here where, for me as an adult reader, King really falls short. Pennywise is at once set up as a force of pure evil, pre-existing the universe itself, to the extent that we can only assume it to be King’s version of Satan (with the useless Turtle as demiurge, and the “Final Other” a sort of removed, indifferent, Gnostic True God); but at the same time, Pennywise is so limited — geographically, if nothing else (in all of the universe, it is bound to Derry, Maine) — and rather useless. It can only frighten kids. It’s as likely to kill the “bad” kids, that serve its purposes, as the good. It runs away from bird books and asthma inhalers. Unlike Lovecraft’s monsters, the meaning of the evil Pennywise represents is nowhere looked into any deeper than that it is evil. But what would a universe where such a creature as this exists, with the powers it has (telepathy, creation of solid hallucinations, a hunger for fear) mean for human beings? That is what Lovecraft’s fiction is all about — the meaning behind the horror, the implications for mankind if they’re taken as a universal laws. Of course, IT is far more about human than cosmic things — it’s basically a summation of the purest of childhood terrors (King called IT his “final exam on horror”) — and with that God-like “Final Other” providing an ultimate escape clause in any attempt to understand what stops the balance between good and evil from tipping over, there doesn’t seem to be any meaning to Pennywise’s horror, other than to represent pure, irrational horror itself. IT is a nightmare — as scary as that is, and as ultimately insubstantial.

This comes to a head in the ending. The thing about the ending of IT is that because Pennywise has no “rules” — no established weaknesses or limits — I had no idea how it could be defeated. The Ritual of Chüd — a folklorish tongue-wrestling match the kids read about in a library book — sounds like it might work, and might also be genuinely risky to attempt, but the actual ending doesn’t use it (though makes a fudging attempt at pretending it has), making me wonder why King bothered setting it up in the first place. The actual ending involves a lot of kids holding hands, shouting “You killed my brother!” and somehow driving back the creature through sheer force of — what? will? feeling? belief? solidarity? Then physically tearing it apart. In which case, the question is, why didn’t any of Pennywise’s other victims defeat it if it’s so easy to defeat? If the creature in IT had been set up with just one weakness, just one stated limitation, its demise, I can’t help feeling, would suddenly become much more meaningful, and the challenge to the kids much more interesting and real.

And then, with regards to the ending… there’s what Beverley does. I don’t want to break into a spoiler here, but if you’ve read IT, surely you know what I mean when I say I’m talking about what Beverley does after Pennywise is defeated for the first time, and the kids find themselves lost in the sewers. How she “brings them all back together”. I mean… why? It seems just weird. Weird in a wrong way. Demeaning and without meaning. Nothing in the novel prepares for it, and nothing in the novel calls for it. On this re-read, it seemed even more out of place than on my first read.

Adam Faraizl as Eddie Kaspbrak from the 1990 mini-series of IT

But despite all this, IT is such a readable book. And IT is readable because King is such a strong storyteller. He kept me going through this very long novel (and as I’ve said before, I don’t like overlong novels) through sheer storytelling power. King inhabits his story like no other writer, and you can just feel him, at times, hunkering down into the scene and simply wallowing in it (for some reason, the image that comes to mind is of a hog in mud, but this isn’t meant as a criticism!). For me, the essence of IT‘s good points all come out in chapter 16, “Eddie’s Bad Break”, which could almost be a short story on its own. Eddie, an over-cosseted kid whose mother controls him through fears about his health, learns first of all that the asthma medicine he relies on is a placebo, then experiences real life-threatening danger for the first time when bully Henry Bowers breaks his arm. King’s supernatural horrors are spooky, mostly superficial, and are all about the effect of grisly details — usually layered on so thickly they start to seem ridiculous rather than horrific — but his moments of character horror, of everyday horror, are subtle and much more effective. The scene where the druggist, Mr Keene, takes Eddie into the back room and explains what “placebo” means is far more tense than any of King’s supernatural horror scenes, because it is so intimately tied up with Eddie’s character, his personal fears, his relationship with his mother, his own identity. It threatens Eddie’s world in a way that the existence of a super-powered mega-clown from outer space somehow doesn’t. The scene where Eddie is cornered by Henry Bowers and his gang, and not helped by a previously-reliable adult is far more chilling, and far more meaningful, than any of the scenes where Pennywise the Clown appears. Pennywise’s most effective appearance in the entire novel is in this chapter, when, in a dream/semi-dream, Eddie imagines the clown’s face imposed on his own mother’s when she’s at her most protective/controlling. The idea that all adults have a little bit of IT in them would be a great idea for a novel… But it’s not in this novel.

I can’t help wondering, considering my reaction to this re-read of IT, whether King’s prodigious storytelling ability almost works against him. Because he can weave such a strong spell with writerly skill alone, he perhaps lets himself get lax in terms of the basic bones of his story. Thinking about it, and despite the fact that I much prefer fantastical elements in the stories I read, the more satisfying King stories and novels I’ve read have all been non-supernatural ones — “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption”, “Apt Pupil”, Misery — where King has been forced to take on more disciplined bounds to his boundless skill in storytelling. I want to read more King, but am put off by the suspicion that while the reading experience itself will be enjoyable, the ultimate aftertaste that comes from the end of the story will be that of a little too much of something a little too (horrifically) sweet.

But, having said this, King is of course immensely successful, so what do I know?

MorganScorpion has put her reading of Alice at R’lyeh up on her YouTube channel. I’ve embedded the reading here, but her channel’s well worth a visit for her readings of Lovecraft, William Hope Hodgson, Oscar Wilde, M R James, and other weird writers’ stories & poems.