Algernon Blackwood

PROWLING, predatory, ravenous, merciless, cunning, brutal viscous, savage, beastly. These words have been used to describe human beings nearly as frequently as they are used to describe the most violent carnivores that scour our wildernesses. Perhaps it only makes sense that at one point in human history, the metaphor was used far more literally: a man who went on a rampage, killing his parents and his wife and fleeing to the lawless protection of the forest was surely more monster than man. Surely, he had received a sort of summons from his vestigial animalistic nature - a summons that had overwhelmed the nobler, restrained instincts of humanity. Perhaps he was a werewolf. This book contains a variety of werewolves and shapeshifters. Not all are wolves, per se: some are panthers, some cats, some are simply beastly. Some of these stories are subtle, mystical, or poetic. Some are powerful, gothic, and indulgent. There are tales of campers disappearing into the woods, of women stopped on the forest road by wolf man, of degenerate family curses, of cannibalistic women, of men who lure children into the woods before both disappear forever, of were-cats and were-panthers, of men trapped in their wolf form by unfaithful wives, and wives killed in their animal form by unsuspecting husbands. They are tales of desire and hunger, power and violence, transformation and degeneration. They are tales of men. They are tales of wolves. And they are tales of the dark and shadowy territory that binds the two.

Algernon Henry Blackwood, (1869 - 1951) was an English short story writer and novelist, one of the most prolific writers of ghost stories in the history of the genre. His work is more consistently meritorious than any weird writer's and that his short story collection Incredible Adventures (1914) is the premier weird collection of this century. His two best known stories are probably "The Willows" and "The Wendigo". He would also often write stories for newspapers. Though 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, which climaxes with a traveller's sight of a herd of the mythical creatures. In this book: The Centaur The Extra Day The Garden of Survival The Human Chord

Full text. Two friends are midway on a canoe trip down the Danube River. Throughout the story Blackwood personifies the surrounding environment-river, sun, wind-and imbues them with a powerful and ultimately threatening character. Most ominous are the masses of dense, desultory, menacing willows, which "moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen sense of the horrible." It is one of Blackwood's best known works and has been influential on a number of later writers. Horror author H. P. Lovecraft considered it to be the finest supernatural tale in English literature. The Willows is an example of early modern horror and is connected within the literary tradition of weird fiction.