‘Don’t go camping’ is one of horror’s most enduring lessons. If you go camping you might deal with witches, or rouge serial killers, or eldritch being time loops. In ‘The Willows’, you might find yourself butting up against a tear in the interdimensional fabric if you stray too far off the beaten path. Blackwood’s story shows us that as far back as 1907, horror writers have been going ‘what if we don’t go camping?’
I am, of course, being flippant. There is so much more going on here than my beloved anti-camping horror. Two men are on a canoe trip down the Danube, our unnamed narrator and his friend, who we know only as the Swede. I want to talk a minute about the lack of names in weird fiction. It’s such a standard of the genre at this point that I think we gloss over it, but it really does create a destabilization in the narration from the get go. Without a name, the characters themselves are mutable and inherently a little unknowable.
Anyways, our two stalwart adventurers are attempting to canoe the Danube from its source to the Black Sea. Those of us with Boat Fear already know this is a bad idea. They are told by a couple people at the Hungarian boarder this is a pretty bad idea, for practical reasons: it’s easy to get lost on this stretch of the river and you absolutely can starve to death out there, and the supernatural: the locals believe “no one ever landed here because it belonged to some sort of beings outside of man’s world (32).”
The locals are right, of course. They usually are. What makes Blackwood’s story more ‘weird’ than straightforward folk horror, creature feature, or ghost story, is what these beings are. Because our dear narrator and his buddy (who I admit, I have been imagining as the Edwardian equivalent of the frat boy: subtype: lets backpack through Europe) go through several explanations. At first, our narrator calls them ‘elemental forces.’ The Swede believes they are the old gods, at first.
And if one of these ended up being true, I would easily call this folk horror. And there are elements of that here. But the beings that torment our canoeing bros, via mysterious humming sounds, canoe sabotage, and digging weird pits in the sand, among other things, are far stranger than that. ‘You think…it is the spirit of the elementals, and I thought perhaps it was the old gods. But I tell you now it is–neither. These would be comprehensible entities, for they have relationships with men, depending on them for worship or sacrifice, whereas these being who are around us now have absolutely nothing to do with mankind, and it is mere chance that their space happens upon our own (47).” The Swede tells us.
And it is their very unknowability that makes them scary. They steal food, sabotage the canoe, keep the men awake with visions and strange sounds not because they are aware of the effect, but because the beings simply cannot figure out what the humans are any more than the humans can figure out what they are. Our narrator and the Swede are convinced the beings want them dead, and the ending bears this out a little, but its just as likely they are going about their business unaware of their effect.
The closest we get to knowing what these things Are is quote from the same scene: ‘All my life…I have been strangely, vividly conscious of another region– not far removed from our own world in one sense, yet wholly different in kind–where great things go on unceasingly, where immense and terrible personalities hurry by, intent on vast purposes compared to which earthly affairs, the rise and fall of nations, the destinies of empires, the fate of armies and continents, are all dust in the balance; vast purposes, I mean, that deal directly with the soul…(47)”. The beings in the willows are like gods but they are not gods either old nor new. Rather they are something else entirely. Beings with such lofty purposes they could not even begin to understand or care about us, nor us, them. There are shades of Lovecraft’s gods here, though the intro to this story tells us Blackwood did not care for Lovecraft at all, though Lovecraft admired him greatly. I admit I do find Blackwood’s prose much more engaging than Lovecraft’s but I am also allowing that this may be because there is little I love more than ‘bad things happen when you go camping’ stories.
It is interesting that this follows ‘The Screaming Skull,’ as this narrator, like our poor dead sea captain, is almost killed due to his skepticism. It is only the Swede, more superstitious and also, the voice of reason, and the dead peasant, of course, who is able to make sure it doesn’t. The Swede says, about skepticism: “That’s just the way all victims talk (43).” Which is a line that’s going to stick with me a while. Because, while it is obvious in a supernatural horror story, there is truth in this statement more domestic kinds of victimhood, as well. We explain things away, make up stories, justifications, to explain why a terrible thing could not have, could not be, could never, happen to us. Maybe we should more often take the Swedes advice and really look at what is happening to us.
To close out, of the three stories I have read in this collection so far, I think this is my favorite. Blackwood is very good at describing naturally desolate landscapes, and that sense of ‘oh. I should not be here.’ when you are deep in the backcountry. Which is why I do not camp! Only hike. I am not going to be tormented by Other Things cus I Leave when I get a bad vibe in the woods. This is a classic for a reason, and it has won me over like it has won over generations of writers before me. It’s worth checking out.
Signing off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 