'See!...The woods are alive! Already the Great Ones are there, and the dance will soon begin! The salve is here! Anoint yourself and come!' One of the greatest writers of the strange and weird, Algernon Blackwood evolved from a teller of ghost stories to a pioneering master of such emergent fictional modes as cosmic horror and nature Gothic. In tales whose settings range from the eerie North Woods of Canada to the mysterious sands of the Egyptian desert, Blackwood blurs the boundaries between human and nonhuman, living and dead, beckoning the reader into strange borderlands where alien forces lurk, waiting for the chance to break through into our world. This new selection of Blackwood's shorter fiction constitutes the most comprehensive critical edition of his work to date. Included here are such undisputed classics as The Wendigo, The Willows, and Ancient Sorceries, as well as two superbly unsettling novellas, The Man Whom the Trees Loved and A Descent into Egypt, and ten other stories short and long, drawn from collections spanning Blackwood's long writing career. Aaron Worth's introduction and notes situate these tales in the context of Blackwood's own upbringing in an evangelical Victorian household, as well as in relation to such topics as late-imperial British history and the emergence of modern ecological thought. About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Author
Blackwood was born in Shooter's Hill (today part of south-east London, but then part of northwest Kent) and educated at Wellington College. His father was a Post Office administrator who, according to Peter Penzoldt, "though not devoid of genuine good-heartedness, had appallingly narrow religious ideas." Blackwood had a varied career, farming in Canada, operating a hotel, as a newspaper reporter in New York City, and, throughout his adult life, an occasional essayist for various periodicals. In his late thirties, he moved back to England and started to write stories of the supernatural. He was very successful, writing at least ten original collections of short stories and eventually appearing on both radio and television to tell them. He also wrote fourteen novels, several children's books, and a number of plays, most of which were produced but not published. He was an avid lover of nature and the outdoors, and many of his stories reflect this. Lovecraft wrote of Blackwood: "He is the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere." His powerful story "The Willows," which effectively describes another dimension impinging upon our own, was reckoned by Lovecraft to be not only "foremost of all" Blackwood's tales but the best "weird tale" of all time. Among his thirty-odd books, Blackwood wrote a series of stories and short novels published as John Silence, Physician Extraordinary (1908), which featured a "psychic detective" who combined the skills of a Sherlock Holmes and a psychic medium. Blackwood also wrote light fantasy and juvenile books. The son of a preacher, Blackwood had a life-long interest in the supernatural, the occult, and spiritualism, and firmly believed that humans possess latent psychic powers. The autobiography Episodes Before Thirty (1923) tells of his lean years as a journalist in New York. In the late 1940s, Blackwood had a television program on the BBC on which he read . . . ghost stories!
