Horror Novella Review – Algernon Blackwood – The Wendigo

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1910 – Spoiler alerts My favourite literary monster is The Wendigo, which features in much of my own horror writing. I can no more claim to have invented it than Anne Rice could claim she invented the vampire. Wendigos have turned up in Hulk & X-Men comics, episodes of The X-Files and Supernatural, and beyond. Wendigos are a North American and Canadian myth centred on taboos against cannibalism. Trying human flesh even once risks becoming an insatiable habit and Wendigos are demons who feed off that taboo habit. Their first mention in literature is in Longfellow’s poem The Song Of Hiawatha, which simply lists them among the evil Manitou entities. Blackwood’s story similarly bi-passes their association with cannibalism entirely. His Wendigo is encountered by a pair of unlucky hunters searching for moose in the Canadian wilderness. Two of the men split from the main group and one of them is abducted by a fast moving malevolent mostly unseen entity with strange feet. The second man gives chase hearing his friend screaming that his feet are on fire. As he tracks them, the first man sees his friends footprints mutate into smaller versions of the feet prints of the creature that has taken him. The survivor returns to his friends who form a search party who explain their own Wendigo myth. It moves like lightning and its victims lose their feet which are replaced with Wendigo feet. Their friend attacks the searchers one night in just such a state but he is ill and after beating them back to their camp (moving at Wendigo speed) he loses his memory, his mind and after two weeks, his life. A scary unlikely fable that makes great use of its forest setting as Blackwood, though English, spent much time in Canada on hunting trips himself and really gives impressive descriptions of the landscapes of his weird tales. He was a huge influence on the writings of H P Lovecraft. Arthur Chappell