I read The Regeneration of Lord Ernie. It certainly wasn't *bad* but for me personally I just found the descriptions too long winded - you could reasonably cut half of it and I wouldn't feel like I'd missed much. I think part of the problem is I just really can't get a good mental image from all the descriptions - I find them quite repetitive even when he's describing things changing. The Willows suffers from this problem a bit but I felt the uniqueness of some of the images really lingered with me. This one not so much.

“I want to see mountains again, Gandalf, mountains,” said Bilbo in the Fellowship of the Ring, and one cannot but touch the craving, the dramatic yearning for the high, snow-crested peaks, the pillars of the Sky, and all adventures hiding amidst these ranges and beyond them. Mountains are deeply embedded with epic feeling, magically so – there is something uncanny in their majestic countenance.

In the first two stories of his 1914 book “Incredible Adventures” Algernon Blackwood brings to life such mountains as we have only gazed upon through great storms and deep snow, in dreams and songs. Great awe and enchantment lie upon their slopes, waiting to be communed by the wanderer, yet never yielding their secrets to one who comes with conquest in heart.

The Regeneration of Lord Ernie

A tutor travels with his student around the world, ending up in the mountains of Switzerland, where the vast majority of this story takes place. The student, Lord Ernie, is a youth seemingly devoid of Will and lust for life, a sluggish being. All this changes up there, at the pagan peaks of western Switzerland, where fires roar at night like the Gondor beacons of yore. In this, the best story of the book, Algernon Blackwood masterfully evokes the spirit of the mountains, of pagan nature, of the terrible, beautiful majesty of the occult working. And what bursts forth from this grandeur is a celebration of vigorous and colorful pagan life, a ritual that blends all participating mortal units in an omnipotent current:

“He saw the human faces, symbols of spiritual dominion over all lesser orders, each one possessed of belief, intelligence and will. Singly so feeble, together so invincible, this assemblage, unscorched by the fire and by the wind unmoved, seemed to him impressive beyond all possible words. And a further inkling of the truth flashed on him as he stared: that a group of humans, a crowd, combining upon a given object with concentrated purpose, possessed of that terrific power, certain faith, may know in themselves the energy to move great mountains.”

Here enchantment is praised, not feared; it doesn’t evoke horror but wonderful awe – and that is where the magic of Blackwood writing really shines: in the fact that he embraces the occult from inside, not alienating it. Here lies the acceptance of the Other, the revelry in Its weirdness and otherness, a vast contrast to the majority of horror and occult fiction writers who use the occult as a menacing Other that must be either overcome (thus re-establishing banality and routine) or be a herald of Doom. Algernon Blackwood’s Golden Dawn training was crucial for this outcome – one can trace in here the descriptions of the fire and air elements in the magical society’s papers, though in the story the implementation of said characteristics and nature is done with infinitely more poetic and effective language. This is the rejoicing of occult ecstasy, a view towards a new paradigm.

The Sacrifice



Paysage d’Hiver’s namesake release is graced with an evocative and minimalistic cover art, of a figure going down a slope. Now multiply the scale by the hundreds, reverse the direction, and you get a glimpse of this story’s iconography. This is less a story than a poetics of ritual working and transcendence, for the premise is extremely simple: a man who thinks that he has lost his gods undertakes a mountain expedition before dawn, an expedition which is slowly revealed to be doubling over as a ritual. Mountains again, more unapproachable and cosmic in nature this time, more black and white one could say (it is pre-dawn after all). The long-winded ascent is set with mastery, reminiscent of a vast, divine game board. And in a short paragraph Algernon Blackwood manages to capture what is probably the essence of magick, corporality:

“That knowledge arises from action; that to do the thing invites the teaching and explains it. Action, moreover, is symbolical; a group of men, a family, an entire nation, engaged in those daily movements which are the working out of their destiny, perform a Ceremony which is in direct relation somewhere to the pattern of greater happenings which are the teachings of the Gods. Let the body imitate, reproduce—in a bedroom, in a wood —anywhere—the movements of the stars, and the meaning of those stars shall sink down into the heart. The movements constitute a script, a language. To mimic the gestures of a stranger is to understand his mood, his point of view—to establish a grave and solemn intimacy. Temples are everywhere, for the entire earth is a temple, and the body, House of Royalty, is the biggest temple of them all.”

Unfortunately, the three remaining stories are somewhat lesser in execution, though not in ideas. “The Damned” is a brooding haunted house story with some amazing descriptions of environment (the goblin garden for instance) and the overlapping of past genius locii in the house, yet is quite tiring due to the slowness of unraveling, the scarcity of events, the laden language, and the absence of a climax, (which nevertheless was intentional). “A Descent into Egypt” is a story that examines Time, contrasts the unmoving and eternal Past with the ever-fleeting Present, a play upon the themes of Cyclical and Linear Time one could say. Unfortunately, it also suffers from garrulity, especially from never-ending monologues, though it does get better, at least image-wise, at the second half. Finally the little story, “Wayfarers”, also deals with the matter of time and the conquering of it by Wills, yet it also suffers from heavy language and a thinness of plot.

In his momentous essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” Lovecraft wrote that “It may be well to remark here that occult believers are probably less effective than materialists in delineating the spectral and the fantastic, since to them the phantom world is so commonplace a reality that they tend to refer to it with less awe, remoteness, and impressiveness than do those who see in it an absolute and stupendous violation of the natural order.” He may be right as far as the remoteness department is concerned, but not the awe and impressiveness ones are a different matter. For the phantom world can never be considered commonplace. In this collection, Algernon Blackwood is revealed as a writer for those of us searching a glorious contact with the occult Other, full of awe and longing, leaving alienating fear aside. A shining if somewhat uneven demonstration of The Magician-Writer casting a spell. ( )

Ghost stories (without any ghosts) religious fervour, spiritualism, acrophilia, passion, mystery and an uncanny weirdness set these tales apart, from anything I have read before. Algernon Blackwood makes his readers believe in events that probably exist just in the minds and heightened senses of his characters; does anything really happen? no nothing happens Blackwood repeatedly tells us in the longest story: “The Damned”. These stories are all about mood and atmosphere and the writing is fine enough for the reader to be caught up in the mysteries and then wonder at the denouement….. they linger afterwards.

The Regeneration of Lord Ernie is the first story and is set in an Alpine village. Hendricks is a tutor to the young Lord Ernie and they are travelling back to England after a year long European tour, where Hendricks has been trying to find something that will spark some life into his pleasant, amiable companion. The Alpine village is a last throw of the dice and Hendricks arranges for them to stay at a catholic priests house that he remembers from his own youth, and an unrequited love affair. It is the season of wind and turbulence in the mountains above the village where a tribe of mountain people take part in pagan like rituals. Their huge bonfires are clearly visible from the village and messengers arrive sporadically from the mountains to lure villagers up to their dancing rituals. Lord Ernie for the first time has found something of interest and the priest suggests that they hike up and observe the rituals for themselves the next evening. Lord Ernie is literally captivated and a fight ensues to summon him back down to normality.

The second story: “The Sacrifice” is also set in the high mountains. Limasson is a man who has dabbled in all sorts of religions and a series of personal tragedies has led him to the high mountains, which are the only places where he can find peace. He plans a series of solo expeditions to fully engage his skills and more importantly his mind. One evening at the hotel he meets a couple of other climbers who coincidently are planning to conquer an unclimbed peak that Limasson is thinking of tackling, they agree to climb together. There is a brilliant description of setting off in the dark of the early morning for a strenuous climb, but who are Limasson’s two companions, do they really exist or are they a fantasy invented by a man who is seeking some sort of answer to his life difficulties.

The third story: “The Damned” is the longest and is a curious tale of a haunting. Mabel Franklyn has been widowed for a year and her late husband (Samuel) was a larger than life lay preacher of hell and damnation. She is desperately alone in her large house and invites Bill and Francis (brother and sister) who are old friends to stay with her for a month. We observe the events through Bill’s eyes, who finds that he cannot settle in the house and sees that Mabel is both physically and mentally ill. Both Bill and Francis believe that it is the after presence of Samuel who is causing a psychic disruption and Bill has a feeling of layers of people damned through the ages who are seeking to drag down the current occupants of the house. This is the story where nothing happens it is all in the minds of the occupants and after a fruitless panic one night when a strange noise upsets everybody and Bill goes on a midnight exploration of the house things seem to settle down.

A Descent into Egypt is my favourite story of the five here. Again written in the first person; the unnamed speaker travelling in Egypt meets an old friend George Isley. George has just returned from an archeological dig where he has spent the last couple of years and the speaker has an impression that part of George is still out there amongst the ruins. He stays in the hotel with George who seems to need his company, but observes that less and less of the old George is evident, he seems to be lost in the landscape. The speaker is also affected and Blackwood ramps up the atmosphere with some fine writing describing the two men gazing out of the dinning room in the hotel:

“Across the glare and glitter of the uncompromising modern dining-room, past crowded tables, and over the heads of Germans feeding unpicturesquely, I saw—the moon. Her reddish disc, hanging unreal and enormous, lifted the spread sheet of desert till it floated off the surface of the world. The great window faced the east, where the Arabian desert breaks into a ruin of gorges, cliffs, and flat-topped ridges; it looked unfriendly, ominous, with danger in it; unlike the serener sand-dunes of the Libyan desert, there lay both menace and seduction behind its flood of shadows. And the moonlight emphasised this aspect: its ghostly desolation, its cruelty, its bleak hostility, turning it murderous. For no river sweetens this Arabian desert; instead of sandy softness, it has fangs of limestone rock, sharp and aggressive. Across it, just visible in the moonlight as a thread of paler grey, the old camel-trail to Suez beckoned faintly. And it was this that he was looking at so intently.”

A sense of danger and fear is evoked and when another character from their past: Moleson joins them and talks of the old religions and the sun worshippers; the speaker feels that George is barely functioning in the present; his mind is with the sun worshippers. Moleson breaks the introspection by playing the hotel piano, but his playing of popular tunes segues into a chant that evokes old Egypt and the three men are back under the influence of the past. They walk trance like out of the hotel into the desert and the speaker imagines his two companions expanding in size to take on the stone like qualities of the statues of the old Gods. Blackwood’s story brilliantly captures a sense of something different, something from the past that is taking over the minds of these men heightening their senses and feverish imaginings.

The final story Wayfarers is the shortest and its simple telling harks back to the subject matter of the previous four stories. A man is travelling in a motor vehicle on the way to a climbing expedition; there is a crash, he blacks out and wakes up in a familiar room. He is being nursed by a woman who is the love of his life but is married to his best friend, they kiss they declare their love. He slips in and out of consciousness and the woman becomes more remote, as his health improves from the bullet wound, she finally says that they must part for the time being. He awakes to find his mountain climbing friend by his bedside.

How much of these stories are in the feverish imaginings of the minds of Blackwood’s characters is anyones guess, but this goes a long way in building the mystery, however some excellent writing and observations of the natural world give them a unique feeling of time and place that provides tension and frisson to all that happens (or doesn’t happen). These tales may be a little slow for some readers and a lack of plot may frustrate, but I found them incredibly exciting in the way that they build levels and layers of mystery. I read this as part of my reading novels published in 1914 project, but I will certainly be dipping into more of Algernon Blackwood. A five star read. ( )