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Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood Dover Mystery Detective Other Fiction Algernon Blackwood EF Bleiler Books

Download As PDF : Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood Dover Mystery Detective Other Fiction Algernon Blackwood EF Bleiler Books

Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood Dover Mystery Detective Other Fiction Algernon Blackwood EF Bleiler Books

Blackwood is sadly obscure. If you like supernatural tales that are also psychological and very human, or deal more with the nature of people's ideas of the supernatural then he is great. In this compilation "The Willows" is the first short story and it is even better than something Lovecraft would write.
In fact, both H.P. Lovecraft and Henry Miller referred to him as an inspiration and great writer.

This complication does not have everything, it's mostly his short stories about the supernatural, but Blackwood's supernatural is not the common ghost story, it's much deeper than that.

The only thing I would mention as a caveat is that the title does not really suit the stories. Most of them are not actually ghost stories per se, and at least one is really a thriller. They are good stories and I loved reading them, but I wish they had just titled it "The Best Horror Stories of Algernon Blackwood" or something like that.

Anyway, if you like dark, suspenseful, psychologically intense writing these will be a great read.

His writing is a bit dry and verbose by contemporary standards, but it contributes to the atmosphere of the stories and once you get into the swing of it the writing really transports you into the world he has created. That's good writing right there!


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Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood Dover Mystery Detective Other Fiction Algernon Blackwood EF Bleiler Books Reviews

Never was there such an apt confluence of an author's face, his name, and his writings. This preternatural union of elements suggestive of ghosts is itself haunting by its sheer improbability.

Blackwood's portrait on the frontispiece immediately sets the mood for the thirteen stories in this collection. Blackwood has the face of a clairvoyant. He has piercing, deep-set eyes that are far-seeing, yet friendly. He has pronounced, elongated nose and chin that seem capable of shape-shifting, again in an unnerving, but ultimately benign way. And that's how his stories read. They are deep-set intensities filled with subtly shape-shifting entities that for good or ill beckon travelers over the border into uncharted territory.

Blackwood's classic "The Willows" is included in this collection. Many critics cite this story as one of the ten best ghost stories of all time. Like most of Blackwood's tales, it is stronger on atmospherics than on resolution. But then that's true of almost all stories of haunting and horror. The endings can never quite match the anticipation.

"The Willows" is about two traveling companions taking a canoeing trip along the Danube, starting near its source in the Black Forest, and paddling their way east with the River's unique flow through to Hungary and beyond. They soon come upon a vast stretch where the Danube is a desolation of swampy land in which solid islands briefly appear and then disappear again and which is marked by the growth of waving, interweaving willow trees.

Since European tourists so often exclaim over the vast stretches of emptiness in the American West, I'd assumed they had no such comparable days-on-end stretches of emptiness in Europe. I began to doubt that Blackwood's stories had the necessary grounding in reality before taking off on their flights of phantasm. But when I happened to mention this description of the Danube along the Hungarian/Romanian border to a friend of mine who grew up in the region, she confirmed that that was exactly the eerie, uninhabited topology of those measureless reaches. This gave me confidence that Blackwood's basic descriptions of time and place are accurate and so allowed me to believe in the picture of strange animations - of trees, of wind - that the story proceeds to paint.

Another of the classic stories included here, "The Wendigo," similarly calls on Blackwood's first-hand knowledge of ancient woods and lakes, this time of the Canadian wilderness. A couple of movies have been made based on this story, but in their excess of graphics, they failed to capture the kind of soft, primal approach of danger that the protagonist in this original story feels, as for example when he realizes that "just beyond the tent door... another sound had recently introduced itself with cunning softness between the splash and murmur of the little waves."

A number of other stories in this collection, such as "Ancient Sorceries," recount how an otherwise ordinary individual suddenly feels compelled to take an unexpected turn from his intended destination, and ends up in a forbidding place where he was yet strangely expected.

The last story in this collection has a different tone. It turns from the supernatural to the almost realistic account of the career of a (fictional) serial killer named "Max Hensig."

Most of these tales were written between 1906-1917, on the border between gaslight and electricity. That edge of one world dying into another is the strange and shifting territory that Blackwood was born to explore.
First off, the term "ghost" does not strictly refer to haunted castles, but rather to a sense of psychic unease. often related to places in nature
or the natural world. And this sense is what Blackwood does best of any writer in the English language. He is not merely a craftsman, such as his contemporary Arthur Machen, but an artist who captures an ephemeral feeling. This, perhaps, explains why I can't find anything by Blackwood in the used paperback bookstores---if your taste runs to his style, as mine does, you tend to keep those books. Therefore, to get his works---short stories (as in this volume), longer short stories, and short novels---one needs to spring for the price of a new book. And I notice a big overlap in stories between different book titles.
In this volume, there are two of his best, and most often reprinted---"The Wendigo", and "The Willows". Also included is the hard-to-find
"Max Hensig", a New York story woven around an evil German doctor and the alcoholic newspaper reporter who chases him to ground.
Blackwood, whose best and most prolific output was ~1895, might be dismissed as out-of-date and politically incorrect by, say, American readers younger than 60. To readers of this mind, I say, in another 120 years, your opinions will seem quaintly archaic too.
So lay down your cultural biases and cozy up to Algernon Blackwood. The excellent introduction by E. F. Bleiler will help pave the way. And keep this book. Don't turn it in for credit. You will amaze yourself by rereading these stories several times over the years.
Blackwood is sadly obscure. If you like supernatural tales that are also psychological and very human, or deal more with the nature of people's ideas of the supernatural then he is great. In this compilation "The Willows" is the first short story and it is even better than something Lovecraft would write.
In fact, both H.P. Lovecraft and Henry Miller referred to him as an inspiration and great writer.

This complication does not have everything, it's mostly his short stories about the supernatural, but Blackwood's supernatural is not the common ghost story, it's much deeper than that.

The only thing I would mention as a caveat is that the title does not really suit the stories. Most of them are not actually ghost stories per se, and at least one is really a thriller. They are good stories and I loved reading them, but I wish they had just titled it "The Best Horror Stories of Algernon Blackwood" or something like that.

Anyway, if you like dark, suspenseful, psychologically intense writing these will be a great read.

His writing is a bit dry and verbose by contemporary standards, but it contributes to the atmosphere of the stories and once you get into the swing of it the writing really transports you into the world he has created. That's good writing right there!