A fine collection of weird and horrific tales

books:

	• Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories (Penguin Classics) Algernon Blackwood Penguin Classics, 2002 - 374 pages average customer review:based on 8 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Some Good, some not

I can't say that Algernon Blackwood is my favorite eerie writer. I prefer Lovecraft's neo-gnosticism to Blackwood's pagan naturalism. To each his own, I guess. Clearly, I am biased in favor of the former type of story over the latter, although there were many good stories.
So, with the standard disclaimers out of the way:

"An Episode in a Lodging House" - very Lovecraftian feel, including mystic text for doing Terrible Things (publication date 1906 predates HPL)

"The Willows" - can't say that I got into the spirit of this one. It reminded me of pleasant camping trips and hikes, not anything awe- or terror- inspiring. Other people seem to like it though.

"The Insanity of Jones" - an interesting story about karma and supposed justice. I was curious to see whether the central character would choose vengeance or mercy.

"Ancient Sorceries" - this lengthy story about witchcraft and a town's dark history was a good read. I found the love interest to be creepy and added to the atmosphere.

"The Wendigo" - this was my favorite. The Wendigo was what I thought The Willows should have been. The isolation, the dark, unexplored corners of the North, the terrifying abduction, all came together to be really eerie.

"The Man whom the Trees Loved" - if pagans wrote evangelistic tracts, they would be this. I felt that the writer was trying to proselytize more than write a good story. It took up a large portion of the book as well. Caveat emptor...

"Sand" - good use of suspense, realms beyond knowing. This story and the Lodging House really show the source of many of Lovecraft's ideas (who was the inspiration for many other writers such as Robert Bloch and Stephen King, who influence us today).

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The scariest of ghost story writers

Algernon Blackwood really is the most frightening to me of all horror story writers: he has a way of capturing mood and setting that outdoes any of his many followers (among whom H. P. Lovecraft was proudly one of the most preeminent). The three most famous stories in this book--the title story, "The Wendigo," and above all "The Willows"--emblematize his skill. The title story is set in an ancient French townn where the townspeople seem to have a peculair habit of transforming into something else, and authentically captures the creepiness of medieval towns at night. Even more frightening is "The Wendigo": set in the North Woods, it realizes whatever fears you've ever had walking alone in the snowy woods. "The Willows" was Lovecraft's nomination for the finest horror stopry ever written, and it clearly may have inspired THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT: two canoers traversing through the Middle European forests find themselves stranded on an island by unknown forces that won't let them leave. Part of the pleasure of Blackwood is that he never overdoes it: he has a marvelous light touch, and reads quite crisply at the level of the sentence.

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A fine collection of weird and horrific tales

Having started reading Algernon Blackwood with the Dover-edition of his "Best Ghost Tales of..." I knew that there would be some overlapping between the books. This is indeed the case, and included in this book are the excellent tales that really hit home with me; "The Willows", "The Wendigo", "The Glamour of the Snow" and "The Man Whom the Trees Loved". All of the tales deals in encounters between an omnipotent nature, and what it contains, against spiritual man. "The Willows" details a canoe-trip in the swamps of Eastern-Europe, along the banks of the Donau, where the campers have quite an encounter with powerful forces. Decidedly one of my favourite horror-tales, right up there along several H. P. Lovecraft tales. Not for nothing that H. P. Lovecraft named this tale the greatest weird tale in existence.

The other tales are also often very good, but they just lack a certain something in various ways. "Smith: An Episode in a Lodging-House", "The Insanity of Jones", "Ancient Sorceries", "The Man Who Found Out" and the final one "Sand". All of these are great, but "The Man Who Found Out" was not my type of tale. That being said, Blackwood has a very annoying habit of letting you know that the tale ends "happily" right in the middle of the action, which really destroys the tale in my opinion. If I wanted to read some unrealistic tale where I know the end before I start, I'd watch "James Bond" or some other rubbish.

Included is also explanatory notes to the tales by renowned Weird literature scholar, S. T. Joshi, and in addition a very fine introduction and bibliography to Blackwood written by the very same scholar. The printing and paper is much better than the Dover-book, so that could be another good reason to buy it. He's no Lovecraft, but some of the tales are excellent nonetheless.

Recommended.

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Cumulative and Subtle Supernatural Terror

Algernon Blackwood's stories are beautifully crafted, allusive, understated and often rather quiet in tone: their subtle and lasting impact upon the imagination resides in the eerie ability Blackwood possessed to evoke certain rare interactions with remote spheres of primaeval power long anteceding modern man and his circumscribed world of reassuring rationalism: AB's narratives reveal the domain of vast elemental beings and ancient presences haunting the outer spaces of woods and the wilderness of untamed nature and lurking behind the veil of appearances, emerging betimes from behind the facades of seeming normality, often to ensorcel and lure certain susceptible humans from this world into an unknown existence in secret realms of immense mystery. AB's tales, truly connoisseur-fare for the lover of supernatural terror, almost all concern the contact, whether intentional or inadvertent, with that which lies beyond the liminal borders of the mundane, pressing invisibly in upon us but unsuspected by the greater mass of humanity. 'The Willows' is unsurpassed in the genre, a genuinely unsettling story involving unseen alien potencies which threaten two men camping on a remote river island in Middle Europe. Likewise 'The Wendigo' reveals the fearful reality which underlies Indian folklore and dwells far beyond the familiar places of humankind, in the virgin forests of Canada. 'The Man Who The Trees Loved' is an exceedingly strange account of the secret arboreal world and its claim over a human soul and 'Ancient Sorceries' is possibly the best tale of Witchcraft i have ever read, capturing the furtive and oblique feline atmosphere of the hidden life which a sleepy French town conceals beneath it's deceptive surface. I should have liked to have seen some other old favourites included such as that wondrous story 'The Trod', the quiet and fog-bound lycanthropic horror of 'The Empty Sleeve', 'The Glamour of the Snow', 'The Doll', 'The Touch of Pan' and 'The Man Who Was Milligan' and the mysterious poetic conjurations of 'The House of the Past' and 'The South Wind'. I fell under the spell of these wonderful tales when i read AB's 'Tales of the Uncanny & Supernatural' in childhood around 1973. Their appeal has not diminished with the passing of the years but only grown stronger. AB's tales of spiritual terror will lead one into a truly disquieting ambience of the supernatural which will endure in your imagination for long years afterwards.

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more depressing than spooky

I've been on a big horror/fantasy kick and had high hopes for this book, but after the first couple stories I was describing it as "odd and mildly entertaining," not really what I was looking for. If I believed in spiritualism, these would probably be really creepy, but I don't. The Wendigo scared the daylights out of me, and from then on the book lived up to my expectations. But almost all the stories depend on the idea that Nature is alien and hostile, which isn't nearly as interesting to me as stories where the danger comes from human (or formerly human, or nearly-human) evil.

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reviews: page 1, 2

By turns bizarre, unsettling, spooky, and sublime, Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories showcases nine incomparable stories from master conjuror Algernon Blackwood. Evoking the uncanny spiritual forces of Nature, Blackwood's writings all tread the nebulous borderland between fantasy, awe, wonder, and horror. Here Blackwood displays his best and most disturbing work-including "The Willows," which Lovecraft singled out as "the single finest weird tale in literature"; "The Wendigo"; "The Insanity of Jones"; and "Sand."

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