Blackwood, Alegernon

Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories (Penguin Classics)

By turns bizarre, unsettling, spooky, and sublime, Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories showcases nine incomparable stories from master conjuror Algernon Blackwood. Evoking the uncanny spiritual forces of Nature, Blackwood's writings all tread the nebulous borderland between fantasy, awe, wonder, and horror. Here Blackwood displays his best and most disturbing work-including "The Willows," which Lovecraft singled out as "the single finest weird tale in literature"; "The Wendigo"; "The Insanity of Jones"; and "Sand."

Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood

"If a ghost is seen, what is it interests me less than than what sees it?" Thus Algernon Blackwood describes his fascination with human beings' ability to sense invisible powers and stirrings in the universe, a fascination he developed most famously in his stories about mystical, ineffable encounters with nature. This collection, selected by renowned scholar of the supernatural, E. F. Bleiler, is an excellent sample of Blackwood's work, including 12 of his best ghost stories and a crime story as well. Blackwood is acknowledged today as the author who made the ghost story into a respectable literary form.

Complete John Silence Stories (Dover Horror Classics)

The Wendigo

Algernon Blackwood's classic tale, The Wendigo. An influential novella by one of the most best-known writers of fantasy and horror, set in a place and time Blackwood knew well. A coordinated edition of Blackwood's The Willows is available. Copper Penny Press books are in an easy to read and easy to read aloud sixteen-point format.

The Empty House and 130 pages of other Ghost Stories Guaranteed to Get Your Blood Pumping (Ghosts and the Unknown)

Over 130 pages of scary stories to get your blood a pumping - including: A Haunted Island; The Wood of the Dead; Skeleton Lake: An Episode in Camp; and several more bone-chilling stories!

Certain Houses, like certain persons, manage somehow to proclaim at once their character for evil. In the case of the latter, no particular feature need betray them; they may boast open countenance and an ingenuous smile; and yet a little of their company leaves the unalterable conviction that there is something radically amiss with their being: that they are evil. Willy nilly, they seem to communicate an atmosphere of secret and wicked thoughts which makes those in their immediate neighborhood shrink from a thing diseased.

And Perhaps, with houses, the principle is operative, and it is the aroma of evil deeds committed under a particular roof, long after the actual doers have passed away, that make sthe gooseflesh come and the hair rise. Someofthing of the original passion of the evil-doer, and of the horror felt by his victim, enters the heart of the innocent watcher, and he becomes suddenly conscious of tingling nerves, creeping skin, and a chilling of the blood. He is terror stricken without apparent cause.

The Book of Doppelgangers

The face in the mirror is yours, but ever so slightly different. A shadow haunts your house, but it walks in places you've never gone. You grew up with a boy who had your face and your name, except he always did everything right, while you never could. Evil twins, double images: these are the tales of the Doppelganger: eight outre tales of the doubly weird by J. Sheridan LeFanu, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Algernon Blackwood, Guy de Maupassant, Honore de Balzac, Hans Christian Andersen, Henry James, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

The Lost Valley and Other Stories

Included in this volume of tales of terror are the classic Blackwood stories, "The Lost Valley," "The Wendigo," "Old Clothes," "Perspective," "The Terror of the Twins," "The Man from the 'Gods,'" "The Man Who Played upon the Leaf," "The Price of Wiggins's Orgy," "Carlton's Drive," and "The Eccentricity of Simon Parnacute."

The Willows

"They first became properly visible, these huge figures, just within the tops of the bushes -- immense, bronze-colored, moving, and wholly independent of the swaying of the branches. I saw them plainly and noted, now I came to examine them more calmly, that they were very much larger than human, and indeed that something in their appearance proclaimed them to be not human at all. Certainly they were not merely the moving tracery of the branches against the moonlight. They shifted independently. They rose upwards in a continuous stream from earth to sky, vanishing utterly as soon as they reached the dark of the sky. They were interlaced one with another, making a great column, and I saw their limbs and huge bodies melting in and out of each other, forming this serpentine line that bent and swayed and twisted spirally with the contortions of the wind-tossed trees. They were nude, fluid shapes, passing up the bushes, within the leaves almost - rising up in a living column into the heavens. Their faces I never could see. Unceasingly they poured upwards, swaying in great bending curves, with a hue of dull bronze upon their skins. . . . For the longer I looked the more certain I became that these figures were real and living, though perhaps not according to the standards that the camera and the biologist would insist upon." (Jacketless library hardcover.)

Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) was one of the all-time great supernatural writers, and "The Willows" is his masterpiece, praised as one of the greatest horror stories ever written. This edition adds a new introduction by John Gregory Betancourt. H. P. Lovecraft, in his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature," wrote: "Less intense than Machen in delineating the extremes of stark fear, yet infinitely more closely wedded to the idea of an unreal world constantly pressing upon ours is the inspired and prolific Algernon Blackwood, amidst whose voluminous and uneven work may be found some of the finest spectral literature of this or any age. Of the quality of Mr. Blackwood's genius there can be no dispute; for no one has even approached the skill, seriousness, and minute fidelity with which he records the overtones of strangeness in ordinary things and experiences, or the preternatural insight with which he builds up detail by detail the complete sensations and perceptions leading from reality into supernormal life or vision. Without notable command of the poetic witchery of mere words, he is the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere; and can evoke what amounts almost to a story from a simple fragment of humourless psychological description. Above all others he understands how fully some sensitive minds dwell forever on the borderland of dream, and how relatively slight is the distinction betwixt those images formed from actual objects and those excited by the play of the imagination."

Three Supernatural Classics: "The Willows," "The Wendigo" and "The Listener"

The Man Whom the Trees Loved (Dodo Press)

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), which climaxes with a traveller's sight of a herd of the mythical creatures; and Julius LeVallon (1916) and its sequel The Bright Messenger (1921), which deal with reincarnation and the possibility of a new, mystical evolution in human consciousness. His best stories, such as those collected in the book Incredible Adventures (1914), are masterpieces of atmosphere, construction and suggestion.