The Unknown

This new selection of Algernon Blackwood’s essays and short stories is a unique combination of supernatural writing and the author’s own reflections on the art of fiction, and the themes and impulses that created these remarkable stories. Blackwood (1869-1951) is one of the great names in Weird writing, and one of the foremost British writers of horror, supernatural and ghost stories. His talent for expressing unknown fears come through strongly in these tales of the Canadian backwoods, Alpine mountaineering and desert loneliness. His deep interest in extending consciousness beyond human faculties produced short stories to lead the reader into wild and remote settings, to face nature at its most awe-inspiring and terrifying, and to sense, if only briefly, the immensity of the unknown forces beyond. Stories include: 'Skeleton Lake’, 'The Wolves of God’, 'The Glamour of the Snow’, 'The Sacrifice’, 'The Insanity of Jones’, 'The Tarn of Sacrifice’, 'By Water’ and 'Imagination’. Essays include: 'Mid the Haunts of the Moose’, 'The Winter Alps’, 'On Reincarnation’ and 'The Genesis of Ideas’. This selection of Blackwood’s writing has been curated with an Introduction by Henry Bartholomew, of the University of Plymouth.