The Complete John Silence Stories: The doctor is in

The Complete John Silence Stories by Algernon Blackwood

For English author Algernon Blackwood, success as a writer came fairly late in life. Although today deemed one of the 20^th century’s greatest purveyors of supernatural and “weird” fiction, Blackwood evinced little interest in the field until he was in his mid-30s. Up till that time, he had tried his hand in numerous professions – from a dairy farmer in Canada to a NYC journalist, from hotel operator to model, from personal secretary to bartender. It wasn’t until Blackwood turned 37 that his first short-story collection, The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories, was released in 1906. The book sold only moderately well, and its follow-up, The Listener and Other Stories (1907), fared little better. But then things changed drastically for the author. Blackwood’s third collection, John Silence: Physician Extraordinary, was a tremendous success. Released in 1908, when Blackwood was already 39, the book was a bona fide smash, abetted by an aggressive advertising campaign, and allowed the author to move to Switzerland and there create some of his most memorable works.

John Silence was one of the first Blackwood titles that I ever experienced, all of 25 years ago. I just loved it back then, and have been wanting to reread it for some time now. The book led me to explore many more Blackwood titles over the years, to the point where he has become one of my favorite writers. When originally released by the British publisher Eveleigh Nash in 1908 as a hardcover edition, the book contained five John Silence adventures. It would be another nine years before Blackwood penned a sixth Silence tale, which appeared in his 1917 collection Day and Night Stories. For those readers desirous of reading all six tales, I can recommend my Dover edition, The Complete John Silence Stories, which was released in 1997 and contains a wonderfully erudite introduction by S. T. Joshi. Another option for readers today: the Stark House Press edition, which not only includes all six tales, but also Blackwood’s 1916 novel of Egyptian reincarnation, The Wave, as well.

But who, or what, is John Silence, I can almost hear you asking yourself at this point. Well, I suppose that, on a superficial level, Silence is still another in the long line of Victorian/Edwardian supernatural detectives; something on the order of William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, The Ghost-Finder (1913) and Alice and Claude Askew’s Aylmer Vance stories of 1914. Silence, it seems, is a doctor of the supernatural; a healer of the psychically troubled; an expert in “genuine cases of spiritual distress and out-of-the-way afflictions of a psychic nature.” We are told that Silence had at one time vanished for five years and immersed himself in “long and severe training, at once physical, mental and spiritual.” The results include the slim, bearded doctor being able to divine others’ thoughts, to practice psychometry (learning about the history of inanimate objects by touching them), to see in the dark, and to have a working knowledge of ancient religions, magics, and arcane lore. The six tales presented here to the reader cover a wide range of subject matter: a traditionally haunted house, a French town full of feline shapeshifters, an Egyptian fire elemental, devil worship, a nontraditional werewolf, and multidimensional space. Each of the six tales – some of them of novelette length – is exquisitely written and just dripping with mood and sensuous atmosphere … not to mention the slow buildup of suspense and dread that Blackwood so excelled at. And each of the six stories is quite eerie and oh-so chilling. Blackwood would go on to create over 150 short stories and 14 novels before his passing in 1951, at age 82, but for this reader, these six tales are some of his very finest. Some of the stories are told by an omniscient narrator; some by Silence’s assistant, Hubbard; some related to the good doctor by one of his patients. But all are fascinating exercises in the outré and the macabre.

As for the stories themselves, the collection opens in a very big way with “A Psychical Invasion,” in which Silence comes to the aid of one Felix Pender, a writer of humorous stories. But lately, Pender’s writing had begun to take a rather dark turn, and after blithely experimenting with a liquid preparation of Cannabis indica (!), he’d become aware of a malevolent presence in his home … a woman of “appallingly evil” nature. Thus, Silence investigates the Pender home during the course of one long and foggy night, accompanied by two highly sensitive animals, the cat Smoke and the collie Flame. I’ve got to tell you, of all the tales in this collection, this is the one that most effectively showcases Blackwood’s startling ability to engender mood and suspense. It is a bravura display of the author ratcheting up tension to the breaking point, while Blackwood’s descriptions of the cold dark study in which Silence and the two animals ensconce themselves, of the crackling fire on the hearth and the bizarre reactions of Smoke and Flame, will linger long in the memory. This is a traditional haunted-house story done to a turn, and serves as a wonderful introduction to John Silence and his methods.

“Ancient Sorceries,” the next story up, is one in which Silence is not in the spotlight much at all. Rather, the strange tale is related to him by a patient, mild-mannered milquetoast Arthur Vezin, after which Silence offers an explanation of sorts. Vezin, it seems, had been traveling through France and had impulsively decided to leave his oppressively stifling train and stay over in some nameless little town. From the first, he’d felt that the town’s strangely catlike residents were secretly observing him, and yet he’d grown more and more spellbound there, and unable to leave. And this reluctance to depart had become even more pronounced when he’d begun to fall in love with a young woman named Ilse, who had urged Vezin to join the townsfolk in one of their sacred rites. A rather surprising ending comes courtesy of John Silence’s subsequent investigations. This story, at first blush, would seem to be related by an omniscient narrator, but ultimately we learn that it had rather been given to us by one of Silence’s assistants, presumably Hubbard. It is another beautifully told and genuinely creepy tale that yet ends on a note of sadness.

One of the collection’s longest stories, the novelette-length “The Nemesis of Fire,” follows, and it just might be the finest horror exhibition in this collection. Here, Hubbard narrates, and we learn of how one Colonel Wragge had called upon Silence and his assistant to aid him in a very terrible matter. Years earlier, his brother had been burnt beyond recognition by … something, and now globes of fire had been spotted in the woods close to the colonel’s country home, and a sensation of heat had pervaded the area. Thus, Silence arrives on the scene, and soon uncovers a case of a violated Egyptian mummy, an ancient wizard and fire elementals! Highlights of this masterful horror tale include Silence’s pursuit of a fire elemental through the woods, a séance of sorts utilizing freshly spilled pig’s blood, and the discovery of that entombed and desecrated mummy. And oh my goodness, what lovely writing here! To wit:

…The dainty messengers of coming hoar-frost were already in the air, a search for permanent winter quarters. From the wide moors that everywhere swept up against the sky, like a purple sea splashed by the occasional grey of rocky clefts, there stole down the cool and perfumed wind of the west. And the keen taste of the sea ran through all like a master-flavour, borne over the spaces perhaps by the seagulls that cried and circled high in the air….

All this, plus a shockingly downbeat ending, result in a horror story that comes close to being a Blackwood masterpiece.

Another man who spontaneously exits his train only to find himself in major-league trouble is found in this collection’s next offering, “Secret Worship.” Here, the man is a successful, middle-aged silk merchant named Harris, who abruptly decides to switch trains in Strasbourg and visit the monks in his boyhood school, in the Black Forest region of southern Germany. (The author, Joshi reminds us in his intro, had spent some years of his own childhood at a school run by the Moravian Brothers, in Konigsfeld.) But when he arrives in the dead of night, he is astonished to find that many of the monks therein are the ones he remembered from 30+ years before; brothers who now gaze at him with evil, suggestive leers. And as it turns out, these monks now worship something far, far different than they had three decades earlier! Once again, Blackwood increases the tension level to the snapping point, and John Silence’s advent on the scene almost comes as a miraculous salvation of sorts. A wonderful three-word sentence caps this truly shivery exercise in horror; one without a bit of flab to be found. I suggest you have a good German dictionary at hand before venturing in, however.

Another masterful novelette is to be found in “The Camp of the Dog,” one more tale narrated by Hubbard. Here, Silence’s assistant and four others – the Reverend Timothy Maloney with his wife and daughter, as well as one of his students – go on a two-month camping trip on one of the lonely, uninhabited islands in the Baltic. The primitive environment, however, has the effect of making the quintet progressively more uninhibited, and indeed, begins to turn one of them – no, I won’t say whom – into nothing less than a semimaterial werewolf! It is only when Maloney’s daughter, Joan, is attacked in her tent that Hubbard sends for John Silence’s assistance. Blackwood’s very first story, “A Haunted Island” (1899), was set in the Canadian backwoods in which the author used to camp, and this later tale finds him once again reveling in the outdoor life and extolling the beauty and awesome splendor of Nature. Not surprisingly, the tale is beautifully written, and eventually evolves into a love story the likes of which you have probably never run across before. But make no mistake: The monstrous beast that prowls this lonely Baltic island is a dangerous one, and even Silence’s great abilities are here put to the test.

And finally, we have the short story “A Victim of Higher Space”; the John Silence tale that was written almost a decade after the other ones, and that serves as a sort of coda to this collection. I suppose that Silence himself is a decade older here; at least, he has a new assistant, a clairvoyant Cockney named Barker. But at bottom this is the story of a little mathematician with the curious and unlikely handle of Racine Mudge, who arrives one day at Silence’s London office in fairly desperate straits. Mudge, apparently, had been investigating the fourth, fifth and other dimensions, with the result that he had actually found a way to enter into those horrifying zones. The only problem is that now Mudge has been entering the zones more and more often … and not of his own volition! This tale allows us to learn more about Silence’s ingenious office setup than any of the others, and happily ends with the good doctor actually finding a cure for his patient’s predicament, as it also brings down the curtain on this stunning group of tales.

Trust me … when you turn over the final page of this Blackwood book, it will be with a pang of regret that the author didn’t write many more stories featuring Dr. John Silence. When I first read this book 25 years ago, it was over the course of a week of chilly October evenings, for which it was the perfect accompaniment. This time, however, I read it while flying to Amsterdam in the summer, and then during the quiet moments of a cruise to Scotland and Iceland. And you know what? It made for perfect company once again. I would thus urge all fans of astonishingly well-written and intelligently presented supernatural horror to pounce on this one, and most likely become fans of “The Ghost Man,” Algernon Blackwood, themselves…