A late-spooky season admission: I’ve always been a little bit afraid of trees. I blame Algernon Blackwood. I read his 1912 story, The Man Whom The Trees Loved, at an impressionable age. In the story, a young man senses a murky intelligence beneath the bark of a cedar. This special living “something” in the tree excites him; it feels animal-like. His obsession with it becomes ecstatic. He fantasizes that the forest might someday “engulf human vitality into the immense whirlpool of its own vast dreaming life.” The dark woods at the edge of his ordered cottage garden creep closer and closer, until they claim him whole.
wonderful post, as always. the novel The Hollow Kind by Andy Davidson fits in nicely here too.