Nah. It cleaves to Poe’s single-sitting rule quite nicely. I certainly wouldn’t elide anything from The Willows, but I think I’d like it a little less without the repetition.

Our next selection should be announced in the next few days. Keep the eyes peeled.

We’ll probably try and keep it to every 2nd Monday from now on. Helps people remember it and it’s not a night when people generally have much on.

Anyway, I rate the repetition as a smart and effective writer’s tool, lending pacing and rhythm to a narrative easily written off as meandering and overflowing with description and blind alleys.

The question of length (ooer..) and its importance (ooer…again) is pretty interesting.

This from S. T. Joshi’s introduction to American Supernatural Tales:

Poe also recognized that compression was a key element in producing the frisson of supernatural terror…he understood that an emotion so fleeting as that of fear could best be generated in short compass, and for a century or more his example compelled the great majority of literary supernaturalists to adhere to the short story as the preferred vehicle for the supernatural.

He goes on (later) to effectively blame Stephen King (and why not?) for the death of the short story vehicle:

King’s success as a horror novelist also spelled, at long last, the downfall - at least as a publishing phenomenon - of the short story as the chosen venue for supernatural horror, even though the number of cases in which a supernatural plot can be said to be sufficiently rich and complex to be sustained over novel length is, in spite of the thousands of novels that have poured off the press in recent decades, disconcertingly small.

I find myself nodding the head in agreement. I can think of very, very few novel-length pieces of horror that come close to matching the effectiveness of the best the short story has to offer.

Where then does that leave “The Willows” - clocking in, as it does, at just under 20,000 words (2 1/2 times as long as the James story we discussed last time)? Does its length only dilute the horror and dampen the effect?

I don’t think so - but only because of the nature of the story. I think it was pretty essential to give a detailed description of the environment, the passing of time, the narrator’s changing emotions as night rolled into day and into night.

The pace serves the rhythm of the horror/awe on show. It wouldn’t work in many cases but it serves its purpose here, I reckon.

Maybe that aligns you firmly with the Swedes of the world. Let’s hope you stay attuned to crepuscular realities and maintain your saintly demeanor when our little boat encounters too much storm on haunted Lough Ree someday in the future. I’ll bring me own tent, though.

I’m rather pedestrian here, - I assumed it meant that they’d missed their chance to escape when the body tumbled and rolled like a Taytos wrapper down the river, and could only expect more of the preceding events, but with less island to hide on, this time. I feel like I’d push the story into cramped corners if I tried to make literal sense of the changing appearances of the dead and their strange yellow eyes. As it stands, I’m not at all married to the abduction angle, just struck by how these stories are often of their time - rather like sleep paralysis described as witches, succubi and old crones sleeping on your chest in one era, but as lying shackled to a metal table aboard a flying saucer in another.

Anyway, I rate the repetition as a smart and effective writer’s tool, lending pacing and rhythm to a narrative easily written off as meandering and overflowing with description and blind alleys. It works really well in Gaddis’ _The Recognitions_, as well, his alter ego in the novel overheard saying “I’d like to do for fiction what Bruckner did for music.” Maybe I just listen to too much techno.

This is one of my favorite bits:

At the moment we touched the body there rose from its surface the loud sound of humming — the sound of several hummings — which passed with a vast commotion as of winged things in the air about us and disappeared upwards into the sky, growing fainter and fainter till they finally ceased in the distance. It was exactly as though we had disturbed some living yet invisible creatures at work.

Just… eeeyuh! I can see the film in my head with sickened fascination.

“Frankie” is of innocent origins - it’s the name of one of our cats (and a more gentle soul you couldn’t find).

The Swede does, of course, try to offer himself as the sacrifice but is presented (just in time) from doing so by the narrator:

I threw myself upon him, flinging my arms about his waist and dragging him shorewards with all my strength. Of course he struggled furiously, making a noise all the time just like that cursed humming, and using the most outlandish phrases in his anger about “going inside to Them,” and “taking the way of the water and the wind,” and God only knows what more besides, that I tried in vain to recall afterwards, but which turned me sick with horror and amazement as I listened.

Then, after the narrator drags him back to the tent he says:

“My life, old man–it’s my life I owe you. But it’s all over now anyhow. They’ve found a victim in our place!”

…and promptly falls into a deep sleep. This begs the question - Does he know about the other sacrifice (one presumes he means the body they later discover) before he attempts to commit suicide or does the realisation only strike him at that moment?

Not sure why that strikes me as important…it just does!

fústar, you’re a stern taskmaster!

How appropriate that my anti spam word is now ‘frankie’ !

Love the alien, crop circle angle. And the idea that the Swede is really the sacrifice - which would suggest that the experience had driven the narrator maaaaad.

Ach, you’re cleverer than me…

My misguided cocktail has caught up to me, and I must away for some rest. I’ll endeavor to say something incisive in the morning.

Fustar has expertly steered us back into Mills and Boon territory, I see…

Shut up and get back in that tent!

I think you’re on to something with the Swede (as I suggested above). He seems so utterly doomed that it’s hard not to think that his will not be a happy ending.

The repeated reference to both bodies (if they were different) “turning over and over on the waves like an otter” struck me as memorable. What did you make of that connection?

I liked the repetition, because it lent the impression that this story had played out many, many times, and that there could only be one possible outcome. Perhaps the mysterious boatsman was a previous lodger on this strange isle, warning our narrator and the Swede from the other side, wherever - and whatever - that is. Parallels one could draw to contemporary abduction narratives, funnel-shaped scoop-marks and all, merely add to this sense of cyclic inevitability, since it happens still to yokels in cornfields with no one else to witness these events, leaving them no options but to hawk their self-published messages from the Space Brothers to the rest of the world. Accounts surveyed on Greetings Earthlings would suggest that the veil’s worn thin enough to drive a Buick, or at least a cigar-shaped flying object, through with little difficulty.

The narrator’s presumptive guilt for the price of survival may be a bit picayune when one’s just encountered a hostile Elder Race, but is terrifying nonetheless. The disassociative manner in which he refers to his old, presumably close, friend suggests - suggests! - that he may have killed the Swede, or at least didn’t try very hard to prevent his suicide. The narrator reminds us, like Joseph Conrad’s Marlowe {another river-traveler}, that the true horrors reside not in other dimensions or farflung jungle colonies, but in the human heart.

Anachronistic reading? You bet.

As it stands, I love this paceless, plodding and prolix tale. It’s of its time, and it’s of all times.