asandwich

I find it quite strange that I’ve never actually read any of Algernon Blackwood’s stories until now; he was, after all, one of the most prominent ghost story/weird fiction writers of the Edwardian period. Also, he has the coolest name ever - I think anyone with a name like Algernon Blackwood is probably born to write spine-tingling tales.

I decided to treat my first encounter with Blackwood’s fiction with the respect that I felt it deserved: reading one story by lamplight just before bed every night, and only when I was completely alone. And, yes - some nights I had difficulty sleeping!

There are some wonderfully creepy stories in this collection, and Blackwood’s real strength lies in his ability to expertly convey the sense of despair and creeping terror in his characters once they start to realise that something just isn’t quite as it should be. Isolation and a feeling of distant detachment from the rest of humanity is a constantly recurring theme. I get the impression that Blackwood must have been - quite literally - a scream on camping trips; I imagine many a sleepless night in wind-whipped tents (listening for any sounds beyond the ordinary) for those hapless souls unfortunate enough to have sat around a late night campfire with this man.

But, for all the good, there’s also the not so good, sadly. Some of the tales on offer here simply haven’t aged all that well, and were quite forgettable. I’d certainly recommend that everyone with an interest in the genre give Blackwood’s more memorable works a go (and, as his writing has now become part of the public domain in the UK, you can find quite a lot of it available for free on the internet), but I don’t think I would be able to consider his full body of fiction to be as essential as say, M. R. James or H. P. Lovecraft - but the good stuff is easily as good as his contemporaries, and that’s still worth an awful lot.