Last Thursday, I spotlighted Nancy Collins's short story "From Hell's Heart," which employs the Wendigo as its antagonist. The story got me thinking about the supernatural, cannibalistic entity, so I decided that I would hold a Wendigo Week here at Macabre Republic. Over the course of the next five days, I will publish posts dealing with the Wendigo's manifestations in fiction, film, and television.
First up, a link to the text of the seminal novella written by Algernon Blackwood: "The Wendigo." This weird tale (the first to take to the mythical Wendigo as its subject) is a masterpiece of steadily-mounting dread. H.P. Lovecraft has extolled its virtues in Supernatural Horror in Literature, noting how readers "are confronted by horrible evidences of a vast forest daemon about which North Woods lumbermen whisper at evening. The manner in which certain footprints tell certain unbelievable things is really a marked triumph in craftsmanship."
For further background info about the Wendigo, you can check out its Monstropedia entry.
I'll be back tomorrow to review the best movie to ever draw upon the Wendigo myth.
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