 | |
| Algernon Blackwood sketched by Edgar Spence, 1935 | |
Algernon Blackwood's "The Other Wing"
commentary by rbadac
Do you have a copy of Tales of the Mysterious & Macabre, the companion volume to Tales of the Uncanny & Supernatural, both put out by Castle Books in 1974, probably the two most convenient cheap editions of Blackwood's stories?
Well if you do, I recommend you to "The Other Wing."
Young Tim has a visitor in his room nights after nurse has put him to bed; one that looks around the edge of the door & withdraws quick as lightning, & when he goes to sleep, comes in.
He becomes possessed of the notion that this entity is Sleep, & the little ones attendant to it are Dreams. They live by day in the Other Wing, a portion of the huge Victorian mansion that is customarily closed off. This wing contains, among its corridors & rooms, the Nightmare Passage, where behind closed doors that sometimes open reside nightmares.
Tim will visit this Other Wing on the eve of his coming of age, confront some of these nightmares, & meet a ghost.
This is a marvelous story with echoes of Walter de La Mare; a delicate evocation of the mysteries of childhood. It is also, rather oddly, featured in The Devil's Generation (Lancer; NY, 1973), one of the Vic Ghidalia theme colections. It will also be found in the Blackwood collections Day & Night Stories (Cassell, 1917) & Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood (Dover, 1973).