Algernon Blackwood

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Algernon Henry Blackwood (1869-1951) was an English writer of tales of the supernatural. In his late thirties, Blackwood started to write horror stories. He was very successful, writing ten books of short stories and appearing on both radio and television to tell them. He also wrote fourteen novels and a number of plays, most of which were produced but not published. He was an avid lover of nature, and many of his stories reflect this. Although Blackwood wrote a number of horror stories, his most typical work seeks less to frighten than to induce a sense of awe. Good examples are the novels The Centaur (1911) and Julius LeVallon (1916) and its sequel The Bright Messenger (1921).

She appeared to have wings, which hummed in their furious movement; she was red in the face, her eyes burned; she grinned at me and ground her little teeth together. A curious shrill noise came from her, like the screaming of a gnat or hoverfly; but no words, never any words. Gothic grotesqueries, penny dreadfuls, pulp magazines, and other darkly inventive publications have produced a dread allure across the world, infiltrating culture and influencing language, becoming the source for multiple adaptations across all forms of media. Curated and edited by C. S. R. Calloway, Horror Historia Violet brings together thirty-one of the most horrifying and heartbreaking stories of ethereal spirits. Fairies, elves, goblins, kelpies, nymphs, dryads, sirens, banshees, sprites, and even Pan himself are presented here from an assortment of writers. Calloway has captured the following tales: "Ancient Lights" and "May Day Eve" by Algernon Blackwood, "Beckwith's Case" by Maurice Hewlett, "Bells of Oceana" by Arthur J. Burks, "The Brownie of the Black Haggs" by James Hogg, "The Bottle Imp" by Robert Louis Stevenson, "By the Yellow Moonrock" and "The Washer of the Ford" by Fiona Macleod, "Carnaby's Fish" by Carl Jacobi, "The Child That Went With the Fairies" and "Laura Silver Bell" by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, "The Devil of the Marsh" by H. B. Marriott Watson, "Frank Martin and the Fairies" by William Carleton, "The Kelpie" by Manly Wade Wellman, "The Man Who Went Too Far" by E. F. Benson, "The Moon-Slave" by Barry Pain, "The Moorland Stream" by Arthur L. Salmon, "The Music on the Hill" by Saki, "A Night on the Enchanted Mountains" by Charles Fenno Hoffman, "Norah and the Fairies" by Hume Nisbet, "The Nymph of the Fountain" by Johann Karl August Mus us, "Seppi, the Goatherd" by C. B. Burckhardt, "The Shining Pyramid" and "The White People" by Arthur Machen, "The Story of a Panic" by E. M. Forster, "The Transformation" by Mary Shelley, "The Wife of Kong Tolv" by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, "The Women of the Wood" by Abraham Merritt, and the anonymously published "The Enchanted Lake," "The Nymph of the Waters," and "The Water Lady." Poems included are "Goblin Market" by Christina Rossetti, "La Belle Dame sans Merci" by John Keats, "The Sorceress of the Sea" by W., and "The Stolen Child" by William Butler Yeats. For the truly fair, collect each Horror Historia volume and complete the ultimate nightmare pantheon.

Algernon Henry Blackwood (1869-1951) in his rich and varied lifetime was an English broadcasting narrator, Canadian farmer, New York newspaper reporter, hotel operator, journalist, bartender, secretary, mystic, teacher, adventurer, novelist, and short-story writer, and among the most prolific ghost story writers in the history of the genre. The son of a preacher, Blackwood rebelled against his strong Catholic upbringing and had a life-long interest in the supernatural, spiritualism, and the occult, later joining several occult societies. He was an avid lover of nature and the outdoors, which many of his stories reflect, especially two of his best-known works "The Willows," in which two friends on a canoe trip become temporarily marooned on a river island only to discover the willow trees are not what they seem, and "The Wendigo," where a Canadian hunting party encounters the mythical beast of legend - stories that led H. P. Lovecraft to praise Blackwood as "the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere."

This second volume of Algernon Blackwood's complete short stories includes the six stories he wrote about the psychic detective John Silence. Only five of them were collected in John Silence-Physician Extraordinary (1908), which became a bestseller and allowed Blackwood to spend the next six years in financial security. The John Silence stories set the pattern for the psychic detective, and dozens of authors have imitated the detective's pursuit of the strange and supernatural. For Blackwood, the John Silence stories allowed him to express some of his most deeply held beliefs as well as to adapt elements from his own life. "Secret Worship" is based on Blackwood's time with the Moravian Brotherhood in Germany. "Ancient Sorceries" is a haunting tale of metempsychosis, where the inhabitants of a French town turn into cats at night. "The Camp of the Dog" is a powerful werewolf story. Other stories are innovative ghost stories or tales of peculiar happenings in ordinary settings. Many of these appeared in leading British periodicals of the day, but not all of them were gathered into Blackwood's several collections of this period: The Lost Valley and Other Stories (1910), Ten Minute Stories (1914), and others. The book concludes with Blackwood's provocative introduction to a 1942 edition of John Silence. The volume has been edited by S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on weird fiction who has established the most accurate text of Blackwood's tales.