Concupiscent Atrocity:
Existential Uncertainties in "The Windigo of Frigheim IX"

by Dr. Maximilian Tundra

"What does it mean to be born a mammal, with an emotional legacy that makes me capable of caring for others, breeding with the ovaries of a primate, possessing the mind of a human being? To be a semi-continuously sexually receptive, hairless biped, filled with conflicting aspirations and struggling to maintain her balance in a rapidly changing world?"

Emily Chesley's diary
March 30, 1906
Baden Baden, Bavaria

Original artwork for the story commissioned by Reggie String for Fixated Editions, in 1917

This quotation from Chesley's journal goes to the heart of the matter in "The Windigo of Frigheim IX". One is immediately struck by the use of the word "balance" in this excerpt. When confronted with the powerful urges inherent in our mammalian nature, surely the idea of balance is a relative one? Einstein's Theory of Relativity was clearly in her mind when Chesley asked these questions, as no doubt was the burgeoning discipline of psychoanalysis. (She had met Carl Jung slightly before writing this entry.)

Originally written in 1906, it took Emily quite a few years to find a publisher for "The Windigo of Frigheim IX." Eventually, her old friend and mentor -- Reggie String - agreed to print it at his latest press, Fixated Editions, in 1917. String intended to use the shocking piece as the centre point of a series of short stories based on Native American myths. However, Fixated was shut down by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police before the first magazine in String's newest line could be printed, so Windigo never found its way onto a press.

And it might well have been lost forever, if I had not had the good fortune to stay at the very same hotel where Chesley first penned the story that the editor of The Globe described as "moral excrescence" in a caustic letter

The circumstances around my discovery of this manuscript are actually as mysterious as . . .

[Note: essay ends here, most likely due to Dr. Tundra's need to go to the Sherksbury-on-Whimple Spa for a "bit of a rest". He left both the unfinished essay and the unpublished story to The Squire in his Last Will and Testament.]