Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful Ghost Stories
Review: This is a wonderful anthology of Algeron Blackwood's Stories. The Willows and The Wendigo are two of my all-time favorites. There are some rare gems that are missing from the collection, such as The Kit-bag and The Scamp; and I don't think the novella Max Hensig was an appropriate closing to a book of "Ghost Stories".I must also admit that I'm not a fan of psychic investigator John Silence. I think that horror tales lose a lot when there is a pseudo-scientific attempt to rationalize the events at the end. However, the writers of the Victorian and Edwardian period were enchanted by spiritualism. And some of the barmy explanations of the occult can be mildly amusing (such as the re-occurring notion that places suck up the bad influences of previous happenings like tobacco smoke, and project them on the mind like a camera lucida), but it becomes tedious when this sort of twaddle goes on and on for a dozen pages or so. But in truth, you're not going to find a more comprehensive anthology of Blackwood's ghost stories, which is both in print and affordable, than this Dover edition.
Rating:
Summary: Great
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Wanderers Through the Borderlands
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Read and reread
Review: Yes, this is one you should buy. I don't quite agree that Blackwood is ultimately all that profound, be he manages to make you think he is for the length of the story and beyond. He really does accomplish the impossible in these stories--what is that indefinable, frightening feeling of strangeness that can come over a wild and remote place? What would it be like to return to a beloved school and find something unspeakably horrible had happened? And more. . . A fine thing about this book is that you can reread the stories for their literary qualities long past the time they stop being scary.
Rating:
Summary: Read and reread
Review: Yes, this is one you should buy. I don't quite agree that Blackwood is ultimately all that profound, be he manages to make you think he is for the length of the story and beyond. He really does accomplish the impossible in these stories--what is that indefinable, frightening feeling of strangeness that can come over a wild and remote place? What would it be like to return to a beloved school and find something unspeakably horrible had happened? And more. . . A fine thing about this book is that you can reread the stories for their literary qualities long past the time they stop being scary.
| 
