Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood

This is hardly a comprehensive collection of Blackwood's work - nor, as the title suggests, does it contain all of his best - but it is certainly representative of the author's best-known and most influential stories, and the price is right.The lesser portion of the book contains some of Blackwood's earlier and more negligible stories, though even most of these are elevated by their style. The greater portion is devoted to his novellas of cosmic terror, where wanderers in various borderlands encounter The Unknown - in one form or another. The most famous, leading off the collection, is "The Willows," which H. P. Lovecraft - upon whose subsequent development this story shows - called the best horror story written. In it, a pair of voyagers down the Danube come to rest on an island that seems somehow to be tenanted by invisible entities from some other dimension that plan on keeping at least one of the travelers permanently with them. It reads a great deal like Lovecraft's "Shadow Over Innsmouth," and, if anything, is a great deal creepier for the insidious tenuosness of its horrors.Similarly, "The Wendigo" finds a pair of hunters in the Canadian wilderness stalked by a never-seen creature from Indian folklore, which spirits one of them away in the night to a terrible fate. Another traveler finds himself drawn into wintry isolation by "The Glamour of the Snow." A middle-aged student returns to the much-changed school of his youth in the German woods, where he is preyed upon by wraiths who practice "Secret Worship." A tourist discovers the distant French village in which he has unwittingly become trapped is the site of "Ancient Sorceries."Perhaps the crowning gem in this collection is the rarely reprinted novella "Max Hensig," which is not a conventional ghost story at all, but a brilliant crime thriller worthy of Alfred Hitchcock, in which a newspaper reporter is stalked by an acquitted homicidal psychopath who has targeted him for murder owing to his stance against him in the press.Great reading, especially for fans of the horror genre.

It's unfortunate that this collection of unequalled horror and suspense pieces goes by the name "ghost stories." In fact, there are almost no ghosts to be found in this book. Blackwood (1869-1951), who must rank as one of the greatest English language fiction writers ever, is also one of literature's best-kept secrets, a genius who exquisitely married mind-bending metaphysical revelation with unbearable suspense.Calling these "ghost stories" is like calling Moby Dick a "fishing tale" or Les Miserables a "detective story" -- it simply doesn't begin to reveal the scope and depth of what is contained. It's hard to compare Blackwood with any other writer, because he was so unique. He was a major influence on H. P. Lovecraft, but was vastly more compelling, subtle and profound. You might think of him as Hermann Hesse meets a maturer version of H. P. Lovecraft. The place to start in the collection is with Blackwood's hallmark stories, The Willows and The Wendigo. They could just as well be titled The Camping Trip From Hell and The Hunting Trip From Hell respectively, and I do mean Hell. Presumably the movie The Blair Witch Project drew its inspiration from those metaphysical shockers, in comparison to which The Blair Witch Project is just a romp in the woods (no pun intended!).Yet Blackwood is not difficult to follow or to begin to understand. His prose ceaselessly crackles with sublime, cumulative thrills on every page. A suggestion: Read Blackwood slowly, without distractions, so you can savor and ponder every line. You won't be disappointed, but be prepared to never look at the world quite the same again.

Algernon Blackwood ranks with M.R. James and Sheridan LeFanu as one of the three best writers of ghost stories in the English Language. In the Dover collection under review the stories " The Willows " and the " Wendigo " best illustrate Blackwood's talent for taking an ordinary event i.e., a canoe trip in " The Willows " and a hunting expedition in " The Wendigo " and gradually revealing the supernatural landscape into which the characters have unwittingly trespassed. Implicit in Blackwood's work is a notion akin to Melville's " mask of appearance " that ordinary experience is a mere crust beneath which lies the truly supernatural and terrible reality that is human existence. In " The Willows " Blackwood's characters discover a rent in the fabric of ordinary experience that is truly terrifying and in " The Wendigo " Blackwood demonstrates what happens when one tries to return from a fall through that crust. Blackwood is a metaphysician in the same sense that Melville and Hawthorne and Dostoevsky are metaphysicians. These writers show us the depths beneath ordinary experience which we seldom visit, and as Blackwood shows us, for good reason.

Blackwood's tales are some of the most terrifying stories I have ever encountered (in a lifetime spent hunting good horror fiction), and his ability to sustain that feeling of dread throughout the entire tale is amazing. In this collection readers will find The Wendigo, which I can honestly say is the most disturbing horror tale I have ever read. In addition, The Willows and The Listener are two others that will chill you to the bone and make you sleep with the lights on, no matter how old you are.