'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.
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