{"id":3583,"date":"2008-10-10T01:31:02","date_gmt":"2008-10-10T01:31:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2008\/10\/10\/the-willows-by-algernon-blackwood\/"},"modified":"2010-12-29T19:03:34","modified_gmt":"2010-12-29T19:03:34","slug":"the-willows-by-algernon-blackwood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2008\/10\/10\/the-willows-by-algernon-blackwood\/","title":{"rendered":"The Willows by Algernon Blackwood"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"willows.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Light play on the river Thame by net_efekt<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

…the major products of Mr. Blackwood attain a genuinely classic level, and evoke as does nothing else in literature an awed convinced sense of the imminence of strange spiritual spheres of entities.<\/p>\n

The well-nigh endless array of Mr. Blackwood’s fiction includes both novels and shorter tales, the latter sometimes independent and sometimes arrayed in series. Foremost of all must be reckoned The Willows<\/em>, in which the nameless presences on a desolate Danube island are horribly felt and recognised by a pair of idle voyagers. Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a single strained passage or a single false note.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thus HP Lovecraft in 1927 from his lengthy overview of horror fiction, Supernatural Horror in Literature<\/em><\/a>. Lovecraft was enthusiastic about many of Blackwood’s weird tales, rating him as one of the contemporary masters along with Arthur Machen. A year before his essay he prefaced The Call of Cthulhu<\/em><\/a> with a Blackwood quote and regularly referred to The Willows<\/em> as one of his favourite stories. Blackwood’s tale continues to find enthusiasts today, among them the Ghost Box music collective whose Belbury Poly CD<\/a> titled after the story manages to reference in the space of 44 minutes Blackwood, Machen, CS Lewis and The Morning of the Magicians<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"belbury.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

If your curiosity is sufficiently piqued by this point, you can read the story online at Wikisource<\/a> or Project Gutenberg<\/a>. Or you can listen to a reading in a new posting at LibriVox<\/a>. The perfect thing for autumn and the month of Halloween.<\/p>\n

Previously on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 Horror in the shadows<\/a>
\n\u2022 Wanna see something really scary?<\/a>
\n\u2022 Ghost Box<\/a>
\n\u2022 The Absolute Elsewhere<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Light play on the river Thame by net_efekt. …the major products of Mr. Blackwood attain a genuinely classic level, and evoke as does nothing else in literature an awed convinced sense of the imminence of strange spiritual spheres of entities. The well-nigh endless array of Mr. Blackwood’s fiction includes both novels and shorter tales, the … Continue reading “The Willows by Algernon Blackwood”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[42,29,22,26,3],"tags":[182,197,3319,2412,104,172,1687,2396],"class_list":["post-3583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-electronica","category-horror","category-lovecraft","category-music","tag-algernon-blackwood","tag-arthur-machen","tag-belbury-poly","tag-cs-lewis","tag-cthulhu","tag-ghost-box","tag-hp-lovecraft","tag-weird-tales"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-VN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3583\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}