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Book Review: The Willows by Algernon Blackwood

cover art for The Willows by Algernon Blackwood

Bookshop.org  |  Project GutenbergAmazon.com )

The Willows by Algernon Blackwood

ISBN-13 : 978-1081920890

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, Project Gutenberg

 

Having just finished T. Kingfisher’s book The Hollow Places, I discovered in the afterword that she had been inspired by a novella by Algernon Blackwood titled The Willows, which was much admired by H.P. Lovecraft as an example of horror and weird fiction. The story follows the narrator and his traveling companion (referred to throughout as “the Swede”) as they journey down the Danube River, which is almost a character in the story. Having left the town of Pressburg during a rising tide, with the threat of a storm on the way, they are washed out of the main channel of the river and into a wilderness of islands, sandbanks, and swamp covered with willow bushes, a “separate little kingdom of wonder and magic… with everywhere unwritten warnings to trespassers.”

With the waters still rising and the winds blowing the two find an island large enough to camp on that they are sure they will not be washed away. The rising water, the shouting wind, the crumbling islands, and the masses of willows all together create a sense of unease and terror in the narrator, which he tries to dismiss by focusing on practical matters. He and his companion avoid speaking about their current situation, even when all they have to occupy themselves with is conversation. Alone, collecting driftwood for the fire, the narrator describes the willows as “utterly alien,” a vast army of “innumberable silver spears”. Although he suspects his companion shares his feelings of disquiet, the two men don’t speak about their unease. After their first night on the island, the narrator sees that the islands, covered in willows, have moved closer to their own, which is washing away. His companion has discovered that they cannot leave right away, though, because one of their steering paddles is missing, the second has been filed so it will break on usage, and there is now a hole in the bottom of their canoe, and believes the damage was done to make them victims of a sacrifice. The narrator, not wanting corroboration for his feelings of unease and fear, attempts to come up with logical explanations, but neither of the two can really believe them. Both men are terrified of their upcoming fate, but his companion advises him that it’s best to neither talk nor think of the willows who may be searching them out and hope that, in their insignificance, the creatures of the “beyond region” they have strayed into, will fail to find them.

A camping trip with a friend doesn’t sound like it would be ominous and terrifying, but Blackwood’s vivid descriptions of the natural world and the narrator’s disintegrating state of mind turns what seems at first like a river inlet filled with willow bushes that might be a good place to stay overnight, into an unnatural, dread-inducing enviroment. It’s creepy in the “I can’t believe these characters slept at all on the island” kind of way. You will never look at willows without seeing them as sinister again.

Blackwood’s descriptions of the willows as an “unearthly region” where the beings “have nothing to do with mankind” marks this story as an early work of weird fiction, and you can clearly see the influence on Lovecraft’s work. It’s easy to see why Blackwood is considered a master of the genre. Highly recommended.

Note: I read the Project Gutenberg edition of this novella, not the one pictured above.

Book Review: Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones

cover art for Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones

Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones (  Bookshop.org  |  Amazon.com )

Tor.com, 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-1250752079

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

 

Night of the Mannequins is a short book, a rocket-fuel ride from beginning to end. It is narrated by teenage Sawyer, one of an offbeat, close-knit group of friends who have known each other forever and are about to graduate high school and go their separate ways. Stephen Graham Jones does a genius job with Sawyer’s narrative voice: it really feels like he is talking right to you. After they’re thrown out of a movie theater where their friend Shanna works, the friends come up with the idea of sneaking a discarded mannequin in to prank Shanna and the manager. Instead, the prank fizzles, the mannequin disappears, and Sawyer is certain he saw it walk out of the theater. After one of the Shanna is killed, along with her family, when a truck plows into her house, Sawyer is convinced the mannequin is the culprit and that he and his friends and their families are all in danger of death by mannequin. He is certain he has seen the mannequin and that the mannequin is stealing and eating Miracle-Gro to turn into a gigantic monster. Sawyer decides he has to act before the monster mannequin can. Jones takes us far down the rabbit hole in this surreal and disturbing tale as Sawyer’s perceptions become more and more skewed,  especially once he starts covering his face with a mannequin mask.

We don’t get to know the other friends well, but Sawyer’s feelings for them seem genuine, so you feel for them and their families when gory tragedy strikes. And wow, does it strike. Sawyer describes it in detail, and Jones does not pull his punches.

This is not intended to be a YA book but it very easily could appeal to YA horror readers looking for a bite-sized read. It’s short, fast-paced, and, unusual in YA horror these days, has a teenage boy as protagonist. With Night of the Mannequins you could hook someone who loves slasher movies but hasn’t shown much interest in reading.  Recommended for ages 15+

 

Book Review: Dear Laura by Gemma Amor

Dear Laura by Gemma Amor

Self published, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-797875-7-12

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

 

There are a lot of horrors in modern reality that don’t require monsters and boogeymen.   When combined, child abduction and fear of the unknown are two of the most effective ones.  In Gemma Amor’s quick 120 page novella, she uses them well.  This is a fast story with no drag between the pages, although the minimalist style she writes with may be off-putting to readers who prefer heavily developed stories.   Those who get squeamish about child abduction and murder in their fiction may want to look elsewhere, although there are no gory details.

 

Laura is a 14-year-old girl, who has the misfortune to leave her best friend and first boyfriend, Bobby,  alone at the bus stop for five minutes.  She returns to see him violating the #1 rule for kids: don’t ever get in a van with a stranger.  The van leaves, and that’s the last anyone ever hears from Bobby.  It’s not the last Laura hears, though.  On her birthday, she receives her first letter from ‘X,’ who claims to have taken Bobby.   Thus begins a bizarre game of quid pro quo, where X reveals a little more of Bobby’s fate with each yearly letter, as long as Laura leaves a personal object he requests at a specified location.  Some of the objects are mundane, and some require a personal and painful sacrifice of a physical nature from Laura.  This continues for decades, until the story resolves in the final few pages.

 

The story is told in the third person, and only from the point of view of the protagonist, it never shifts away from Laura.  The narration throughout Dear Laura is a very stripped-down, bare bones type of writing.  There is little time given to description in this book, and the backstory to the characters is essentially non-existent.  Dialogue?  Forget about it, there’s only ~10-15 lines of dialogue scattered throughout Dear Laura‘s 117 pages.  This is very straightforward writing: it tells what is happening, and doesn’t elaborate on anything.  Does the simplistic style weaken the writing?  No, it doesn’t.  Considering the bleakness of the subject matter, the basic style that author Amor uses lends to the curiously odd appeal.   People always seem to want answers to everything in life, and when people read books, they don’t want to just know what the villain did; they want to know WHY he did it.  Amor doesn’t waste time elaborating on such niceties, as they would get in the way and slow down the story.  That’s why her sparse writing style really shines with the novella’s subject matter. Sure the reader will have more questions than answers at the end of the story, but often, that’s what life is like anyhow.  Considering how often people in this world do evil things for no particular reason, the overall lack of explanation for actions of certain characters in Dear Laura make it all the more interesting…and realistic.

 

For readers that want an interesting, quick-paced story with no wasted time, Dear Laura should land right in their wheelhouse.  Most readers should find this appealing, the only exceptions being people who require densely layered stories and no plot holes.  Recommended.

 

Contains: violence, child abduction

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

 

 

Editor’s note: Dear Laura was nominated to the final ballot of the 2019 Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a First Novel.