“The Terror of the Trees”: Algernon Blackwood, Vegetal Entanglement, and Pantheist Legacies

This paper seeks to critically weave three discourses together: Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s interrogation of deployments of pantheistic monsters, critical plant studies through Dawn Keetley’s “tentacular ecohorror” alongside recent discussions of plant consciousness (Zoe Schlanger), and the weird fiction of Algernon Blackwood’s “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” to think through how plant horror might also reveal some contours of a vegetal mysticism needed to take plants seriosuly the present. And it will ask if such an immanent plant mysticism might help to reclaim a more complicated view of pantheism (e.g., Roland Faber’s ‘transpantheism’), panpsychism, or new materialism (e.g., Jane Bennett) in turn.