British Weird: Selected Short Fiction 1893-1937 (James Machin, Handheld Press)

In his introduction to this anthology editor James Machin suggests that British weird fictions can be distinguished from the perhaps more well-known American variant due to their “refusal to fully reveal their horrors, relying on ominous hints, telling detail and atmosphere, instead of the full reveal”. It’s an interesting position to offer and one, I admit, I can easily agree with. After all, Lovecraft is justifiably derided for too-often calling his terrors “indescribable” whilst simultaneously almost always following up with quite a lot of lurid, adjective-heavy description. MR James, on the other hand, uses his Some Remarks on Ghost Stories essay to remind us that while weird fiction shouldn’t be “mild and drab” some level of what he calls “reticence” should be maintained; “Reticence may be an elderly doctrine to preach, yet from the artistic point of view I am sure it is a sound one. Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it”. Is this due to the British tendency to be more reserved but, equally, more spiteful than our cousins across the water? Perhaps. It wouldn’t be very British of me to admit it, now would it?

What I can say is that the very best of the tales in this anthology, of which there are many, demonstrate this sense of reticence beautifully. First amongst these, largely due to being one of the best pieces of weird fiction ever written, is Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows. Blackwood tells us of two travellers, canoeing down the Danube from Vienna to Budapest, and how they discover a “kingdom that was reserved for the use of others who had a right to it, with everywhere unwritten warnings to trespassers for those who had the imagination to discover them” amongst the river’s sand-bars and eponymous willows. Blackwood’s story charts the way in which human control over nature is revealed as little more than a facade – the pair’s canoes appear to give them control over the river but they are, in fact, as much at its mercy as any piece of driftwood – when compared to the “inhuman sound” that howls behind reality. I find The Willows to be a genuinely terrifying triumph of weird fiction almost entirely because, rather than Lovecraft’s tentacles and slimes, Blackwood gives the mundane – rivers, trees, sand – an awful sense of agency. In one section, Blackwood shows us “an immense army of dancing, shouting willow bushes, closing from all sides, shining with spray and clapping their thousand little hands”. This could almost be a scene from a child’s story-book but, through Blackwood’s shimmering lens, it becomes a glimpse of something nearly unbearable.