This article discusses Algernon Blackwood's engagement with sexuality and the erotic in stories published between 1908 and 1948. It argues that a focus on Blackwood's spiritual and mystical interests, along with his apparent celibacy, has meant that his representations of sexual desire have been overlooked or subsumed into wider considerations of the gothic and supernatural in his fiction. Through close readings of stories such as ‘Ancient Sorceries’ (1908), ‘The Glamour of the Snow’ (1912), and ‘The Olive’ (1922), it provides a fresh outlook on Blackwood's fear of what he termed ‘sex-fever’ and the dangers it presents for his male protagonists.

Blackwood's Canadian stories offer a version of Gothic wilderness-tourism terror, informed by an inherent ambivalence and repressed guilt about the British ‘colonizer’ entering traditional Indigenous territory. The encounter with Indigenous peoples and cultures, even as these cultures are recognized as more holistic and authentic than rational British subjects, is marked by a distinct discomfort. The British tourists, for all that they want to become one with nature, experience themselves encompassed by a hostile natural environment in which they are aware of themselves as intruders. Indigenous cultures in these stories are either threatening spectres (‘The Valley of the Beasts’; ‘The Haunted Island’; ‘The Wendigo’) or forlorn remnants (‘Running Wolf’), in both instances highlighting the irrepressible guilt that stalks the white intruder who unconsciously courts an experience of self-dissolution as expiation. If the repressed content in these stories is the fact of colonization, entering the territory as a foreign element, an invader, represents a form of uncanny intrusion through which the disowned past returns. However, in Blackwood's stories, the characters seek out this memory of disownment. As a form of colonial expiation, Blackwood's Canadian gothics enact the process identified by Renée Bergland in The National Uncanny, whereby Indigenous ghosts (and monsters) are internalized within the colonizer's imagination as spectres of both guilt and desire.

This article explores how Algernon Blackwood's spiritual and mystical beliefs complicate his relationship with the Gothic genre. Rather than adhering strictly to Gothic conventions, Blackwood blends supernatural elements with a sincere evocation of the numinous, creating a literature of possibilities rather than impossibilities. Writing at a time when distinctions between psychic phenomena and scientific materialism were fluid, he challenges conventional horror by framing the supernatural as an expression of heightened consciousness rather than external terror. This discussion also considers authorial intent. While Wimsatt and Beardsley's ‘Intentional Fallacy’ warns against privileging authorial intention in literary criticism, Blackwood's nonfiction and autobiographical writings offer valuable insight into his creative process. By analysing ‘The Willows’ (1907) alongside his travelogue ‘Down the Danube in a Canadian Canoe’ (1901) and essay ‘The Psychology of Places’ (1910), I argue that Blackwood's concept of ‘dramatised emotions’ transforms the supernatural into a means of communicating subjective reality. Using the pantheist notion of divine indwelling in nature, I propose the term ‘weird immanence’ to describe how Blackwood employs genre to articulate subjective truths more potently than mimetic realism. Unlike the traditional Gothic sublime, in which the natural world mirrors human drama, ‘The Willows’ represents an authentic emotional response to landscape, intensifying the eerie potency of Blackwood's fiction.

Processes of becoming, of transformation or transmutation, are central to Algernon Blackwood’s ghostly weird fiction. In the vast majority of his short stories, everyday people, places, and events are rendered potential entryways to other forms of life and consciousness – portals to ‘elsewhere and otherwise’, as he liked to put it. Across his fiction, he explores the possibilities and enmeshments of human and nonhuman psyches, and the rapturous dialectic of joy and terror that follows when the bounded human subject comes undone. Using stories such as ‘A Descent Into Egypt’, ‘The Wings of Horus’, and ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’ as case studies, this article argues that Blackwood achieves these enmeshments through a Gothic feeling-with – a ‘dark empathy’. This dark empathy accommodates and gives shape to a dis-anthropomorphic aesthetics, one that is ultimately better suited to the entanglements between the physical and the nonphysical that characterise his fiction.

Algernon Blackwood's fascination with the concept of the personal ‘cage’ and the potential for liberation is central to both his worldview and literary legacy. This article explores these themes in his early, often-overlooked story, ‘The Eccentricity of Simon Parnacute ’, examining its depiction of emotional repression and freedom, particularly within the context of early twentieth-century hegemonic masculinity. Blackwood employs speculative fiction to explore supernatural phenomena but also to examine the speculative possibilities of human experience and societal transformation, offering a nuanced critique of hegemonic masculinity in Edwardian England that underscores his own personal beliefs in the enduring importance of maintaining a connection to the natural world.

Conceiving all the world's phenomena as ‘natural’, Blackwood constructed haunting entities using innovative unions of mind, spirit, force, and matter, locating them in mimetic storyworlds drawn from his own travels and experiences, including skiing and mountaineering. In ‘The Glamour of the Snow’, conflict between the modern world of Alpine ski tourism and the ancient powers of elemental winter produces a seductive, ghostly snow-being who lures the imaginatively-sensitive protagonist nearly to his death on a night-time ski trip in the high mountains of the Valais. This sport, which enabled skiers to experience the winter Alps in new ways, sprang from the same rapidly developing modernity putting mountain environments under pressure. Blackwood's story uses the agencies of snow and skis to explore the possibilities of new understandings between the human world and the natural world, as well as the dangers inherent in the encounter.

This article situates Blackwood's First World War stories within debates about the tensions between orthodox religious beliefs and the more heterodox beliefs championed at the time by spiritualists and others in publications such as The Occult Review. The article argues that Blackwood's interest in esoteric beliefs is placed under severe pressure during World War One as he perceives them as endorsing a type of primordial violence that manifests in the carnage of war. These tales reflect on the conflicting demands placed on the subject as they are pulled between the impulse to revel in violence and the ambition to assert a moral stance. Ultimately, a conventional form of Christian piety defeats other beliefs which celebrate violence, sexual desire, and freedoms from orthodox moral constraint. The article also explores how these issues relate to ideas of patriotism, gender, and models of qualified revenge.