238 pages
Published 2020
Read from June 23 to June 28
Rating: 2 out of 5
I never lost my taste for reading weird old nuggets of fantasy from bygone eras. I picked this book up from a horror-centric bookshop relatively recently, excited mainly about the “weird woods” conceit but also about the years these stories were published. It's true that I haven’t been reading many anthologies like this, though. Finishing Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment (at long last) left me with a heightened craving for musty old fantasy, on top of my standard level of interest, so this seems like a good time to start this one.
Oh, Britain and its woods. Devouring Sherlock Holmes books at an impressionable age left me with lifelong anglophilia. Learning about the horrors of English colonialism and racism in my teens and adulthood narrowed my love of things British to the archipelago’s scenery and natural environment, nurtured by the writings of Helen Macdonald, Robert Macfarlane, and Roger Deakin. (Or, more recently, Peter Fiennes.) But even my appreciation for rolling green fields and remnants of the ancient wood has been rotted by the contemporary UK’s headlong rush into fascism, environmental destruction, and bigotry. I love the wildwood, the Neolithic wood, the primordial wood, the fairy wood, and I always will — but I don’t like England all that much right now.
“The Whisper in the Wood” by Anon (1880). This was originally published in All the Year Round, one of those journals from the heyday of short fiction readership, albeit one that kept its contributors strictly anonymous. (Maybe its founder, Charles Dickens, didn’t want to share the limelight?) We might tactfully describe this story’s prose as unsophisticated: “‘Why, it is not a fortnight ago since he gave [his will] to me, poor old fellow!’ and, as the excitement of the explanation he has given subsides, his blue eyes moisten.” The plot is rote and the characters essentially made of cardboard. Still, there’s a certain naïve charm to be found, if you can indulge the Victorian taste for categorizing harmless woodland creatures like foxes and snakes as “objects in a nightmare,” and I have no complaints about the story’s moorland setting (though it takes half the yarn to get us there). Ultimately a silly, insubstantial gothic adventure, but I emerged unscathed.
“Man-Size in Marble” by Edith Nesbit (1887). This tale is mostly vibes. Newlyweds find an oddly cheap cottage near a wood and a church, and spend three months in Arcadian bliss before All Hallow’s Eve comes along and the marble effigies of two Catholic marauders (the most Victorian thing to fear) reanimate in the chancel. This story’s strengths lie in its bucolic descriptions and the (for its time) sweet depiction of wedded happiness. The supernatural horror element is little more than a shrug.
“The Striding Place” by Gertrude Atherton (1896). I couldn’t muster up much enthusiasm for this brief sketch of a sporting aristocrat who muses on the disappearance of his bosom friend (also a sporting aristocrat) as he walks through the woods, his steps inadvertently directing him to the spot that claimed his friend. Ends with a campfire story jump-scare.
“The Man Who Went Too Far” by E. F. Benson (1904). While it carries a whiff of Edwardian mustiness, this tale of man seeking apotheosis from Pan in a Hampshire wood crackles just beneath the surface with queer eroticism and animistic sensitivity. The denouement isn’t much of anything, as seems typical of this time, but it’s the best story here so far.
“An Old Thorn” by W. H. Hudson (1911). I’m indifferent about this one, a tale of a tree’s slow revenge and the tragedy of the English court system. It’s a nested series of framing devices: the narrator is trying to learn about an old hawthorn all alone on a hill, which he describes at length; he finally pries out a tale about a laborer hung for poaching, and in the middle of that tale goes into an extended flashback about the laborer’s childhood and ardent young love, showing how he inadvertently earned the tree’s ire and didn’t beg forgiveness in time. A nested structure of flashbacks can work sometimes, but it feels ramshackle here. Also, in the throes of his love, our laborer refers to his new wife’s “breasties,” which — while boldly sensual for 1911 — might be the most unappealing term I’ve read in some time.
“The White Lady of Rownam Avenue, Near Stirling” by Elliott O’Donnell (1911). A “true” ghost story from the pre-war heyday of ghost obsession. (I almost said the final heyday of Spiritualism, which would have made for a better sentence, but apparently O’Donnell claimed not to be a Spiritualist, merely a self-appointed expert on the supernatural.) Brief, unremarkable; it feels questionable to include it in an anthology of weird woods tales.
“Ancient Lights” by Algernon Blackwood (1914). Now this is more like it. There’s a wood, and it’s weird, and it certainly doesn’t want some surveyors’ clerk eyeing it for destruction in order to clear the view from someone’s dining room window. This wouldn’t appear on any all-time-greats list, but this is exactly the sort of story I’d want in a collection like this. Plus, it’s good to see we’re in a more contemporary era of storytelling at last. Not a single framing device or appeal to the reader’s belief — just a character introduced in the middle of his business, and what befalls him afterward. However, the twist at the end didn’t really feel like a twist so much as a punchline to a Goosebumps book. (Spoilers: the note which says “use the shortcut if you care to” seems to read “use the shortcut if you dare to”!!)
“The Name-Tree” by Mary Webb (1921). I haven’t read much stream-of-consciousness prose. Heck, I haven’t read enough to even say for certain that this piece is written in a stream-of-consciousness style. I can say it’s a short, ugly story about a woman passionately protective of a cherry grove (in which her name-tree grows), and the rich new landowner who strains to impose his crude sexual will upon her with bribes and blackmail. We drift from her perspective into his, one scene jumbled with the next, with a whole lotta innuendo about flowers and ripening fruit, and then it ends with an inadvertently comic turn of modernist abruptness. Groundbreaking and important at the time, I’m sure — a necessary but awkward step in the evolution of both feminist and modernist literature. I didn’t really enjoy it, though.
“The Tree” by Walter de la Mare (1922). A rigidly insular fruit merchant, unable to conceptualize anything unrelated to making money, fumes and fulminates at his artistic half-brother’s infatuation with an exotic tree slowly transforming the latter's garden and life. It’s an unsubtle metaphor for how imperialism brings change to the “home country,” told from the perspective of one of the stuffy and unimaginatively commerce-minded cogs of empire, his face purple with indignation and high blood pressure. This story is, if nothing else, determined to be descriptive. At times it successfully transcends descriptive to become atmospheric, almost in spite of itself: “A half-empty jam-pot buzzing with bees was no more appetising an object because the insects were not of the usual variety.” It’s far too long for what it is, though.
“‘He Made a Woman—’” by Marjorie Bowen (1923). Modern man Charnock — unsettled by a surfeit of civilization, no longer sure what reality might be — wants a vacation to avoid a thoroughly modern attack of nerves. He reluctantly accompanies his old tutor Blantyre into Wales, knowing that the history-laden landscape won’t soothe his modern mind. Most vexing to his search for true himbo serenity: there’s a young woman in the house! And Blantyre tells Charnock not to fall in love with her! This brief tale succeeds at conveying an atmosphere, though little else. I’ll be honest, I couldn’t stop thinking of the Futurama episode in which the moon farmer warns Bender, “Don’t you be touchin’ my robot daughters!”
“A Neighbour’s Landmark” by M. R. James (1924). A deliberate stylistic throwback — there’s even an interjection chiding the primary storyteller about his Victorian manner — which works better than most actual Victorian stories. It’s a fairly conventional ghost story (a curse bound to a wrongfully moved property boundary or something like that) that sustains a nice flow almost until the end, where the narrative just… peters out. That seems to be a common complaint with this anthology.
“N” by Arthur Machen (1936). As someone who grew up a city kid, I’ve always been drawn to the trope that a city can contain anything, that the next neighborhood over — or where the sidewalk ends — might be a realm of mystery and strangeness, a land as mythically remote as the wildwood. I’m partially certain (though I’m not invested enough to verify it) that Peter Ackroyd may have quoted this very story to illustrate that magical urbanism vibe in his London: The Biography. I liked the general outline of this one more than I enjoyed the story itself, which — despite being a contemporary of Unknown and thus the first recognizable iteration of urban fantasy fiction — eschews stakes or rising action. Machen putters in a desultory way from old-timers reminiscing about old times, to antiquarian musings on alchemy and reclaiming the lost, pre-Edenic malleability of reality, and on back to a different set of old-timers conversing in a tavern. Machen’s primary interest here appears to be the art of reproducing rambly conversations between older men. All of which is a roundabout path to not much in particular. Only the last page hints at the story this could have been, had Machen been inclined to tell it instead of what we got.
And that’s it! All in all, a shade disappointing, given the anthology’s promising title and evocative cover art. Could have used more woods and much more weird. Still, I enjoyed myself.
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