THE LISTENER: ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

Possible Spoilers

“The chance was a mere chance, and unworthy of record.”

This story of a striving writer who takes on a property cheap, without knowing why it is cheap in an erstwhile London.
And finds it full of things like…

“The floor of my sitting-room has valleys and low hills on it, and the top of the door slants away from the ceiling with a glorious disregard of what is usual. They must have quarreled – fifty years ago – and have been going apart ever since.”
and
“…the same uncouth figure of a man crept back to my bedside, and bending over me with his immense head close to my ear whispered repeatedly in my dreams, “I want your body; I want its covering. I’m waiting for it, and listening always.”

Cats stalking him from outside, rats inside, winds full of tricks and larks, dreams of dreams and the Listener who terrifies him as the narrator eventually follows him to the room upstairs, and thoughts fighting thoughts within the narrator’s brain he can’t control (“unusual thoughts, thoughts I have never had before, about medicines and drugs and the treatment of strange illnesses”), and mention of de Quincey alongside suicides cursed with ‘reclothing’ themselves upon earth, the sense of a closeness of a loathsome disease, a bad egg, and a landlady with a tablecloth that makes his clothes feel crooked and she also has a “son who is ‘somethink on a homnibus.’” A repeated refrain throughout of this son on an omnibus. But what is that to do with the suspensively awaited Chapter to rescue the narrator? But rescue him from what… a ghost of a leper as a mere chance decoy from a terrifying truth, so worth recording, after all?

“I am looking forward very much to Chapter’s arrival. […] I wish Chapter would come. My facts are all ready marshalled,…”
The narrator’s thoughts versus Chapter’s thoughts like two sets of bombs.
And my italics here…
“He talked and I listened. But, so full was I of the horrid thing I had to tell that I made a poor listener. I was forever watching my opportunity to leap in and explode it all under his nose.”
Some think ‘hominibus’ (Latin), cf “somethink on a homnibus.”

Hic liber a duobus hominibus scriptus est.

My previous reviews of Algernon Blackwood: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/01/19/ancient-sorceries-and-other-chilling-tales-by-algernon-blackwood/

The UNFINISHED BUSINESS context of above review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/12/07/unfinished-business-a-ghost-story-anthology/

PS: (14.12.22) – Diary format versus Novel?
Narrator versus Author?

Above image by Tony Lovell for the Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies (2011)