In Phoenix, fall is a time of relief and regrowth. If fall cultivates fearsome thrills for upper-northern hemisphere inhabitants because of the primal threat of cold and isolating long nights, then spring can be somewhat dread-inducing for us due to the searing and isolating long days to come. In terms of seasonal alignment, my year peaked with the April release of Sinners (and the film’s don’t-you-dare-spoil-it scene of utter cosmic ecstasy amid mundane and supernatural horrors).
I moved to Phoenix from Los Angeles in August 2017, and it was in those first few summers that I came to pair horror with the season traditionally celebrated by traveling, seeing some sights, and generally enjoying oneself outside your everyday environment.
That was also when I revived an old screenplay, determined to translate it into a novel and, in doing so, teach myself how to write fiction. I was trying to capture a then-unarticulated ecstatic fear of ‘nature’ (with all the partitioning the word implies). So I read John “Father of the National Parks” Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra and Algernon Blackwood’s cosmic horror/weird fiction novella The Willows.
The latter, published in 1907, is a first-person account of a fictional canoe trip down the Danube. The unnamed protagonist spends two nights in awe-scoured terror stranded on an ephemeral island surrounded by threatening, otherworldly willows. The story catalogs every nuance of the protagonist’s shifting fears in response to the environment and their unimaginative, dull companion. I am very much not alone in considering The Willows a favorite.
A few years later I read T. Kingfisher’s 2020 novel The Hollow Places, a reinterpretation of The Willows. Kingfisher’s story unfurls from the setting of a contemporary rural US museum of curiosities that relies on tourist foot traffic to pay the bills. The protagonist Kara discovers a watery willow-world via a hole in the wall. With forensic curiosity, Kara explores the willow-world with her new friend Simon and, seemingly, brings the threat home. I’ve revisited The Hollow Places a few times since, but for whatever reason, I didn’t go back and re-read The Willows until now.
The Willows is not a mystery. But knowing the connection between the two turns The Hollow Places into a mystery of the echoic, ‘it’s happened before, it’s happening again’ variety. Both examine trespassing and familiarity, known versus unknown dangers, and other asymmetries of comfort, sense, and fear by which the cosmic slips into mysteries and horror alike.
Perhaps because I experienced The Hollow Places as a mystery, I brought a splinter of mystery back to The Willows with me. Perhaps I still know The Willows too well to experience its horror fresh. But this time the protagonist’s unceasing survey of observations, thoughts, and denials reminded me of a detective.
The Willows and The Hollow Places establish early their respective protagonists’ ease in uneasy environments. The Willows’ protagonist explains that their facility with the mercurial Danube currents is hard-won experience. The Hollow Places’ Kara recalls that she grew up in her uncle’s Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities, and Taxidermy, and was never frightened of the collection.
Their stories are about these familiar environments becoming strange to them. Strange as a visitor might feel at first glance, but from experience and a depth of familiarity that a visitor would never understand. As both protagonists stray from these strange-but-known settings, they compare the transition to the uncanniness of storytelling media. From The Willows:
“The change came suddenly, as when a series of bioscope pictures snaps down on the streets of a town and shifts without warning into the scenery of lake and forest.”
From The Hollow Places:
“If you play video games, sometimes you’ll encounter a bug where you suddenly fall through the world... and suddenly you see that the whole virtual world is only a pixel deep…”
This comparison never fails to remind me of a period in 2021 when I became mesmerized by randomizer runs of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a game that anchored my childhood. In this type of gameplay, unofficial modification programs scatter useful items, shuffle background soundtracks, and decouple doorways from the game designers’ intended destinations. For whatever reason, I found the ‘that door isn’t supposed to take you to that chamber’ sequence breaks endlessly soothing. Randomizers of Ocarina’s already-weird sequel Majora’s Mask didn’t have the same effect, possibly because I didn’t play it until I was an adult. It was seeing something I was gut-instinct familiar with, chopped up and made wrong, that I enjoyed.
The Willows’ bioscope lakes and forests, and The Hollow Place’s video game, are both environs or representations of environs in which each character spends their leisure time. The Willows’ protagonist can find footing in a range of biomes, and since Kara’s a gamer, she’s learned how to inhabit virtual worlds in ways that nongamers would find difficult and disorienting.
These are cosmic analogies. Incidentally, The Willows contains as fine of an explanation for the cosmic analogy as any I’ve come up with:
“An explanation of some kind was an absolute necessity, just as some working explanation of the universe is necessary—however absurd—to the happiness of every individual who seeks to do his duty in the world and face the problems of life.”
Spoilers ahead.
Both protagonists flirt with the idea that they’ve been transported to another dimension, though in the case of The Hollow Places, this is more clearly objectively true. While The Willows is the story of a leisure explorer wandering into the territory of the willows, The Hollow Places embraces one idea of the willows as extra-dimensional colonizers and picks up a century-plus further into their invasion. The willows come to Kara where she lives—a space intended for tourists’ enjoyment that is nevertheless her home. Kingfisher is a playful and conscientious author, and I believe this reversal is inspired by one of The Willows’ protagonist’s anxieties.
A local previously warned them that the Danube’s water level may fall to the point that the canoe will be stranded without help or hospitality for miles. This is a known, learned danger, since the river has ‘disappeared’ periodically, though less disastrously, previously during the journey. The unworldly willows are a new threat that at first only plays upon the old, soaking up the water and clogging the way.
Once their otherworldly properties become perceived, the protagonist’s traveling companion, known only as ‘the Swede’, speculates that someone will become a ‘victim’ to the willows: “a radical alteration, a complete change, a horrible loss of oneself by substitution—far worse than death, and not even annihilation.” In the end, they see a body floating along the river. They were never so alone, and it was, presumably, one of the more local residents of the willow-invaded river that the willows took instead.
Kara’s driving fear is that her uncle will wander into the willow-world, and that the willows will come through and hurt the people in her town. Because her fear is focused on others, it follows that her exploration and investigation of the willows’ dimension concentrates on the people there. She finds people that have been horrifically changed as the Swede predicted in The Willows. She converses with these victims, reads diaries and makes conclusions about her situation based on the information she gathers. Her relationship with her companion is forthright, accepting, and supportive, even in discussing Simon’s extrasensory perception.
Kara gains understanding and fear of the willows by seeing their effects on others. It’s not enough to gain total comprehension of the situation—what kind of cosmic horror would this be if she did?—but it’s enough to protect her home.
The fears of The Willows’ protagonist are, conversely, initially turned inward. The protagonist constantly surveys and accounts for known dangers and unknown dangers, re-evaluating winds, currents, and the willows’ growth as the elements seem to shift allegiances between the tangible world and unseen entities. “I have never been so clearly conscious of two persons in me—the one that explained everything, and the other that laughed at such foolish explanations, yet was horribly afraid,” the protagonist reflects. Clearly accustomed to the exercise of metacognition, but not at this level of difficulty.
What struck me in this reading of The Willows is that so much of it is dedicated to describing the various sounds and silences that comfort and plague its protagonist:
“At first I heard only the deep note of the water and the hissings rising from its turbulent surface. The willows, for once, were motionless and silent. Then a sound came to reach my ears faintly, a peculiar sound—something like the humming of a distant gong.”
(I tried to search for an audio drama interpretation that emphasizes these sounds. If anyone knows of such a recording, please share!)
All word-based fiction is a cooperative exercise between the author and the reader’s imagination—I default to imagining tamarisks in the Grand Canyon despite Blackwood’s descriptions of endless flatlands. Blackwood asks the reader to imagine not just the things that the characters see, but the things the characters don’t see. The reality-media-sensory gulf echoes that bioscope comparison and parallels the protagonist’s struggle to make sense of their willows-invaded reality. Even though true comprehension isn’t in the cards for the protagonist, their observations are a masterclass in the kind of interiority that makes unknowns tangible.
In all this cosmic turmoil, the big twist is that the protagonist isn’t so excellent at picking up on the truth of their surroundings even under ordinary circumstances. Their companion, the Swede, isn’t unimaginative or dull, but so attuned to the unseen world that he’s found it necessary to construct a persona of blandness to survive in contemporary society. The Swede’s inner self becomes the voice of practicality. The protagonist cannot perceive what Swede perceives, and the Swede cannot precisely articulate what is happening, but they can trust each other in the absence of understanding. The Hollow Places’ Kara, working cooperatively with her friend and neighbor Simon, gains enough understanding to protect their home. The Willows’ protagonist gains a new understanding of their long-time friend, and together they escape.
MINUTE MYSTERIES
A coda to all that fear centered on willows as the tools of unnatural invaders:
This year I went to PHX Zine Fest and (among so much else) picked up Desert FeelZ, a zine produced by ASU Desert Humanities Initiative and edited by Ron Broglio and Marina Zurkow, with illustrations by Marina Zurkow.
Desert FeelZ contains meditations on orienting oneself to the Sonoran Desert. Among them is ‘Adopt/Abandon’, a short essay by Matthew Chew on the tamarisks of the Grand Canyon. “Along a desiccated channel, amorphous thickets hunker over thick, twiggy duff…”
These are the trees that often represent Blackwood’s willows in my imagination. Chew’s essay chronicles the spread, scapegoating, and destruction of tamarisks, imported to the American west as tools of human recreation and land management.
⏳︎
I’m still working my way through the stack of cosmic mystery novels I found/was recommended but didn’t read while I was writing my manuscript. Every time I go to pick up a hold or drop off an only-slightly-overdue book, I stop first at the Friends of the Library bookstore to see if a book on weaving is for sale. This has so far resulted in a small collection of vintage oddities, but nothing easily applicable to my apartment-friendly 16” rigid heddle loom.
Last time I spotted a hardback edition of The Nitpicker’s Guide for X-Philes (Unauthorized! Uncensored! Uncanny!) that I owned when I was a kid. For sure a Y2K-era CinemaSins, and for that a prophetic glimpse at Internet-era fandom. Since I picked up weaving to have something to do with my hands while watching whatever, I’m considering this a sign to revisit The X-Files, my very first cosmic mystery.