Sunday, March 17, 2013

Rashmi bookmarks “The Willows”


I had mentioned this by way of passing in a previous blog: anyone can scare you in the dead of the night; but if someone can put eternal fear in the very core of your being on a bright hot day with sunlight pouring in on a gorgeous island … now that’s art! With not a hint of gore, this horror story - one of Algernon Blackwood’s best known short stories - is a work of pure genius, and one of my favourites - not just in the horror / weird genre (I haven’t read enough in that category to make an informed judgement anyway), but across all genres.

The Willows is the story of two friends (interestingly, both anonymous to the end) on a canoe trip down the Danube River, and their weird experiences in a world cloistered in masses of menacing willows forming “an ever-moving plain of bewildering beauty”.

What I really like about Blackwood’s writing is his fascinating combination of two seemingly opposing tones - yes, this is a horror story with fear at its base - but at the same time the narrative is sheer poetry, which elevates the reading experience to a whole new level. “Midway in my delight of the wild beauty, there crept, unbidden and unexplained, a curious feeling of disquietude, almost of alarm … acres and acres of willows, crowding, so thickly growing there, swarming everywhere the eye could reach, pressing upon the river as though to suffocate it, standing in dense array mile after mile beneath the sky, watching, waiting, listening.”

Clothed in as much a nameless sense of awe as a vague feeling of terror, this haunted and primeval world presented everything from a man on a boat shouting and gesticulating at them from a distance, to the inexplicable sounds of the gongs that seemed to emanate from every direction, to the shrinking island, to the possibility that they were at the weakest point between two worlds: a point of contact with a “fourth dimension” being watched by aliens, to that horrific moment of mental breakdown where a sacrifice was suggested as the only way to escape the terror of the world of the willows.

And therein lay the brilliance of this story; in a story where it would be hard to say in concrete terms, “what happens in this story is…” it was fascinating to see how many ideas were presented and how many emotions those gave rise to. Reminiscent of Blackwood’s “The Wendigo”, neither were there any specific events or frantic action scenes, nor was the ambiguity of the story, including the mysterious ending, ever clearly explained. More so, therefore, it is fascinating how such a story could somehow transport you to a whole new world of thought and idea, and finally leave you captivated by that constricting yet nameless fear that reigned constant and supreme.

“Yet what I felt of dread was no ordinary ghostly fear. It was infinitely greater, stranger, and seemed to arise from some dim ancestral sense of terror more profoundly disturbing than anything I had known or dreamed of.”

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