by Daniel V. Garcia
Daily Lobo
Today, in case you don't already know, is Halloween.
So, I have decided to open the inner sanctum in my den of horror digs to find some fine old freaky literature for the occasion.
Stephen King is too popular, and we've read Edgar Allan Poe since middle school. H.P. Lovecraft is great, but his works are highly accessible, and his mythos has been incorporated into such archetypes of terror as Dracula and Frankenstein.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
Instead of discussing these fantastic writers, let's take a look at a writer Lovecraft himself regarded as having written the best weird tale of all time: Algernon Blackwood.
Blackwood was a British writer born in the latter half of the 19th century. His fiction mostly took place in nature, for which his great love translated into a keen ability to detail its grandiosity and sublimity into atmospheric tales. "In The Willows", the story Lovecraft called the best weird tale, sees Blackwood capturing the concept of a raging storm on the Danube River so terrifyingly that it becomes a character of its own within the story.
Though he died in 1951, his images and themes have resonated in the works of several authors who have paid homage to him by incorporating some of his ideas into their own work. "In The Willows" features "a spot held by the dwellers in some outer space ... whence they could spy upon the earth ... where the veil between had worn a little thin."
This concept figures prominently in the plot development of King's magnum opus The Dark Tower, a series of books in which he borrows the idea of a "thinny" as a place that is dangerous because interdimensional separation is thin there.
Another story influenced by him is found in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, a horror collection that is marketed for kids, but whose images are so terrifying that it is No. 1 on the American Library Association's list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000. I remember reading this book in the third grade and having nightmares for months afterwards. One of its tales borrows the name of a character directly from Blackwood's "The Wendigo."
If invoking a demon in a satanic rite doesn't do it for you, or you're too bored to snatch bags from the trick-or-treaters, get some of Blackwood's stories this Hallows Eve. His material is no longer copyrighted in the U.S., so you can easily download most of his stories.
They may be just the thing to help you stave off that diabetic coma you will self-induce by ingesting copious amounts of sugar.
Algernon Blackwood
