Book reviews

The Wendigo makes distance feel like a temptation

A gap between footprints becomes an impossible scale drawing. Blackwood makes the freedom of a vast forest seductive, then asks what a human body would lose by keeping pace.

Whimsical Woes editorial ·

One of The Wendigo's best pictures is a gap in the snow. Simpson measures a stride of eighteen feet, then tries a running jump and cannot cover half the distance. Algernon Blackwood makes a human body into a scale bar. An enormous creature is easy enough to announce. That failed jump makes its passage feel horribly measurable.

The story follows a moose-hunting expedition north of Rat Portage. Simpson, a Scottish divinity student, goes out with the guide Joseph Défago while his uncle and another guide hunt elsewhere. At first, the great distances promise freedom. Later, the miles between the little parties measure how difficult help would be to reach. Blackwood makes the same space exhilarating and disastrous without needing to change the scenery.

Défago's practical work matters. He hides the canoe, stows its paddles and marks trees with his axe so Simpson could find it again. There is a small, usable pattern within the overwhelming forest. The guide has already imagined an emergency and provided instructions. Watching that competent man become afraid unsettles the story more effectively than another declaration that the woods are terrible.

Feet before a face

The first alarming change arrives inside a song. Défago's singing dwindles as he attends to something Simpson cannot detect. An ordinary performance loses its rhythm before any creature appears. Later, Simpson hears the guide sobbing in the tent and gently covers his exposed feet with an extra fold of blanket. That small act of care gives those feet a human importance before the story makes them frightening.

The voice that calls Défago is huge, but also strangely sweet. His answering flight combines anguish with something like delight. The danger offers him speed and height beyond ordinary travel. That mixture keeps the encounter from settling into a simple pursuit. Something can terrify him and still appeal to the part of him that loves these immense spaces.

The tracks develop this seduction without showing a complete monster. The human stride lengthens beside the larger prints. Then the smaller tracks begin to resemble the bigger ones. Following becomes imitation, and imitation suggests a bodily cost. An illustrator could make the change legible through spacing alone before adding any anatomical detail. Blackwood eventually lets Simpson hear a voice overhead, giving the forest a dreadful vertical dimension. The trail has stopped being a route a person could follow.

Who gets to explain the woods?

When Simpson reaches his uncle, Dr. Cathcart, embarrassment affects what he tells him. He leaves out details that sound preposterous, and the doctor assembles a confident explanation from the reduced account. This is a sharp complication. Simpson wants an explanation he can bear to repeat. Cathcart wants evidence that fits what he already understands. Their conversation changes the story before either can settle what happened.

The narration has its own, more damaging habits of explanation. It treats Punk, the Indigenous cook, as a carrier of inherited instinct, compares his perception to animals and describes his people as a vanishing race. He supplies atmosphere and foreknowledge while receiving little room to explain himself. Those are racist choices in the telling. Blackwood's horror fiction should not be treated as reliable documentation of Indigenous beliefs. Its authority becomes especially shaky when it assigns a whole people one shared fear.

The prose also circles its terrors insistently. Readers wanting a brisk encounter may tire of repeated descriptions of vastness and panic. The trail sequence earns its scale, but some surrounding explanations labour to make sure we have noticed it. The racist narration is a substantial limitation, not a small inconvenience tucked behind the scenery.

The Willows offers another Blackwood landscape that overwhelms its visitors; The Voice in the Night brings care into an encounter with bodily horror. Here, the vulnerable person and the impossible distance belong in the same picture. Remembering Simpson pulling that blanket over Défago's feet makes the later cries much harder to receive as exciting monster noises.

Questions from the crypt

Which text of The Wendigo is discussed here?

The complete original English text presented as the 1910 story in Project Gutenberg ebook 10897. The Wendigo is included in The Lost Valley and Other Stories, published by Eveleigh Nash in 1910. The linked electronic reading text does not identify the particular print copy used for its transcription.

Is Blackwood's story a reliable reference for Indigenous beliefs?

It should be read as Blackwood's supernatural fiction. The narrator's racial generalizations and the hunters' explanations are features of that literary work, rather than reliable cultural documentation. The Indigenous character Punk is given little opportunity to explain his knowledge in his own words.

How graphic and fast-moving is The Wendigo?

Much of its tension comes from prolonged anticipation, disorientation and frightening sounds. There is bodily distortion, suffering and intense mental distress, alongside racist language and characterization. Readers seeking a quick creature encounter should expect substantial descriptive passages and arguments about what the characters think they experienced.

Sources & further reading

Keep reading