The principle characters are the narrator, Bill, his sister, Frances, and their friend, Mabel.
Mabel had been married to Samuel Franklyn, a rich banker who was also a religious zealot. This story in many ways is highly auto- biographical. Blackwood's father, who had been somewhat of a free spirit in his younger days experienced a religious conversion. Just as reformed alcoholics are often the most ardent foes of alcohol and people who once smoked but later quit are royal pains in the neck to those who still smoke, the sinner who has found religion is often quick to damn and condemn those who do not seek the same salvation that he thinks he has found. Blackwood suffered greatly for his father's religious zeal. There is little doubt that his father made him feel as if he were damned. The character of Mr. Franklyn seems quite clearly to have been based on Blackwood's father.
Mr. Franklyn's earthly days were over but his spiritual presence was still strongly felt in the house that he occupied in life. He had dominated Mabel and all of those around him, continually preaching of fire and brimstone and declaring that all who did not believe as he believed would be damned.
Mr. Franklyn's home in Sussex was called 'The Towers' and he had made it into sort of a religious retreat. But, rather than being a place that invited the world in for insightful revelation, 'The Towers' was a place that locked the rest of the world out and damned it to hell for not seeing things through the eyes of Samuel Franklyn.
When Franklyn died, his widow, Mabel, spent a year abroad. After that she reluctantly returned to 'The Towers'. To be there alone with only the servants for company would have been too much for her to handle. She invited Francis and Bill to come stay with her for a month.
Frances accepted the invitation without a qualm and went immediately. Bill had no desire to go at all, but he reluctantly agreed to join his sister there at a later date.
Frances wrote to her brother, telling him of the manner in which the personality of Samuel Franklyn still dominated 'The Towers'.
"I'm sure that he would have sent you and me cheerfully to the stake in another century - 'for our own good'."
Bill seemed to sense some sort of impending danger in the letters that his sister sent him. He decided that he'd better high-tail it up to 'The Towers'. In theory, Bill, a writer, would work on his manuscripts there and Frances, an amateur artist, would grind out a few canvases.
But Bill found the atmosphere so apprehensive that he was unable to write and the paintings that his sister produced seemed to hint at a hidden evil that flowed from the heart of the dwelling. So hints of cloaked malevolence and unseen menace begin to be stacked one on top of the another to start the foundation of a pile that is going to become taller than 'The Towers' itself. We are already thinking that the payoff to all this anticipation must be really, really good. Somewhere at the end of these pages full of teasers there must be an ending that's going to turn our hair white and make our eyes pop right out of their sockets. Right?
Wrong! We're on a road to nowhere. Its like being the victim of a fraud. A Poe, or a Lovecraft, would have delivered the shock that the audience had been prepped for, but Blackwood's story ends with a whimper, not a bang. As Frances, herself, puts it;
"There is this endless anticipation - always on the dry edge of a result that never materializes."
Mabel was like a prisoner in the property that she owned. It was more like the property owned her. Eventually, we learn that the house stands on ground once controlled by the Romans. Later, Druids held it. Then a violent Catholic. Still later an Orthodox Jew.
The argument is made that each group of religious fanatics damned all who did not believe as they believed and that the various damnations canceled each other out, but all of this metaphysical hexing has left a residue in the house that even Liquid Plummer can't unclog.
Mabel sells the place to a religious group that doesn't damn others for their beliefs and Blackwood makes us wonder what he was smoking when he wrote this lame morality tale. Perhaps he thought the concept of religious tolerance was profound and maybe in his time and circumstances it was. My own book, Intercourse With the Dead, tries to show the evils of fundamentalism, but I try to accomplish the goal by telling a disturbing, frightening story. Blackwood, on the other hand, has given us lengthy analysis of vibrations floating through the atmosphere. This is not one of his better works.
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ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
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