Algernon Blackwood

"We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all." -WILLIAM JAMES, A Pluralistic Universe "... A man's vision is the great fact about him. Who cares for Carlyle's reasons, or Schopenhauer's, or Spencer's? A philosophy is the expression of a man's intimate character, and all definitions of the Universe are but the deliberately adopted reactions of human characters upon it." -Ibid "There are certain persons who, independently of sex or comeliness, arouse an instant curiosity concerning themselves. The tribe is small, but its members unmistakable.

Thus, in a roundabout sort of way, the child ought to have been thankful to the governess; and perhaps, in a roundabout sort of way, he was. But that comes at the far end of the story, and is doubtful at best; and in the meanwhile the child had gone through his suffering, and the governess had in some measure expiated her fault; so that at this stage it is only necessary to note that the whole business began because the Empty House happened to be really an Empty House-not the one Jimbo's family lived in, but another of which more will be known in due course. Jimbo's father was a retired Colonel, who had married late in life, and now lived all the year round in the country; and Jimbo was the youngest child but one.

"And, look here, Fanny," I said, putting a hand upon her shoulder as I crossed the room, "it would be the very thing for you. You're worn out with catering and housekeeping. Mabel is your oldest friend, besides, and you've hardly seen her since he died-" "She's been abroad for a year, Bill, and only just came back," my sister interposed. "She came back rather unexpectedly, though I never thought she would go there to live-" She stopped abruptly. Clearly, she was only speaking half her mind. "Probably," she went on, "Mabel wants to pick up old links again." "Naturally," I put in, "yourself chief among them." The veiled reference to the house I let pass. It involved discussing the dead man for one thing. "I feel I ought to go anyhow," she resumed, "and of course it would be jollier if you came too. You'd get in such a muddle here by yourself, and eat wrong things, and forget to air the rooms, and-oh, everything " She looked up laughing.

As Felix Henriot came through the streets that January night the fog was stifling, but when he reached his little flat upon the top floor there came a sound of wind. Wind was stirring about the world. It blew against his windows, but at first so faintly that he hardly noticed it. Then, with an abrupt rise and fall like a wailing voice that sought to claim attention, it called him. He peered through the window into the blurred darkness, listening. There is no cry in the world like that of the homeless wind. A vague excitement, scarcely to be analysed, ran through his blood. The curtain of fog waved momentarily aside. Henriot fancied a star peeped down at him. "It will change things a bit-at last," he sighed, settling back into his chair. "It will bring movement " Already something in himself had changed. A restlessness, as of that wandering wind, woke in his heart-the desire to be off and away. Other things could rouse this wildness too: falling water, the singing of a bird, an odour of wood-fire, a glimpse of winding road. But the cry of wind, always searching, questioning, travelling the world's great routes, remained ever the master-touch. High longing took his mood in hand. Mid seven millions he felt suddenly-lonely.

"Blackwood is one of those writers who can scare you simply by a turn of phrase ... These stories are downright spooky " - Hollis George, Bram Stoker, Without Fangs Algernon Blackwood was a master of the ghost story. No, not gore and zombies and such. A descriptive writer, he knew how to tell a story that would raise goosebumps on your arm without resorting to dripping blood, claws, or gnashing teeth of a physical monster. The creak of a footstep on the stairs, a limb brushing against the roof, a shadow on the wall, Blackwood knew how to scare you without saying, "Boo " Here are ten of his finest stories, a collection to read by flashlight (or e-reader glow) under the covers late at night. This is the illustrated edition.

Although Blackwood wrote a number of horror stories, his 2 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;

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." Just after managing to land their canoe for the evening on the shifting, sandy islands just downstream across the Austria/Hungary frontier, the main character reflects on the river's potency, human qualities and will: Sleepy at first, but later developing violent desires as it became conscious of its deep soul, it rolled, like some huge fluid being, through all the countries we had passed, holding our little craft on its mighty shoulders, playing roughly with us sometimes, yet always friendly and well-meaning, till at length we had come inevitably to regard it as a Great Personage. Blackwood also specifically characterizes the silvery, windblown willows as sinister: And, apart quite from the elements, the willows connected themselves subtly with my malaise, attacking the mind insidiously somehow by reason of their vast numbers, and contriving in some way or other to represent to the imagination a new and mighty power, a power, moreover, not altogether friendly to us. At one point the two men see a man in a "flat-bottomed boat". However, the man appears to be warning the two, and ultimately crosses himself before hurtling forward on the river, out of sight. During the night and into the next day and night, the mysterious, hostile forces emerge in force, including large, dark shapes that seem to trace the consciousness of the two men, tapping sounds outside their tent, shifting gong-like sounds, and the appearance that the willows have changed location. In the morning the two discover that one of their two paddles is missing, there is a slit in the canoe that needs repair, and some of their food has disappeared. A hint of distrust arises between them. The howling wind dies down on the second day and night, and humming calm ensues. During the second night, the second man, the Swede, attempts to hurl himself into the river as a "sacrifice," "going inside to Them," but he is saved by the first character. The next morning, the Swede claims that the mysterious forces have found another sacrifice that may save them. They find the corpse of a peasant lodged in roots near the shore. When they touch the body, a flurry of living presence seems to rise from it and disappear into the sky, and later they see the body is pockmarked with funnel shapes as had been formed on the sands of the island during their experience. These are "Their awful mark " the Swede says. The body is swept away, resembling an "otter" they thought they had seen the previous day, and the story ends. The precise nature of the mysterious entities in "The Willows" is unclear, and they appear at times malevolent and treacherous, and at times simply mystical, almost divine: "a new order of experience, and in the true sense of the word unearthly," and a world "where great things go on unceasingly...vast purposes...that deal directly with the soul, and not indirectly with mere expressions of the soul." These forces are also often contrasted with the fantastic natural beauty of the locale, itself a vigorous dynamic. In sum the story suggests that the landscape is an intersection, a point of contact with a "fourth dimension" - "on the frontier of another world, an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows."

John SilenceAlgernon BlackwoodWEIRD TALESA man's experimentation with drugs opens his mind to an attack by a supernatural force. The tale is based on both Blackwood's own experiments with drugs and his occult learning whilst in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Algernon Henry Blackwood, CBE (14 March 1869 - 10 December 1951) was an English short story writer and novelist, one of the most prolific writers of ghost stories in the history of the genre. He was also a journalist and a broadcasting narrator. S. T. Joshi has stated that "his work is more consistently meritorious than any weird writer's except Dunsany's" and that his short story collection Incredible Adventures (1914) "may be the premier weird collection of this or any other century."