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So here I am with a weekend to myself for the first time in ages, but that isn't for good reasons, and it will probably be the first of far too many - if we're all lucky. I could sit here and write about the coronavirus, but for the sake of normality and mental health, here is a post about some ghost stories I read instead.
I started reading this collection a day or two before Christmas 2019, but I didn't finish it until after New Year 2020, so I'll count it as the first book of 2020. I have only knowingly read one Algernon Blackwood story before, which was The Willows, though I read a lot of horror short story compilations in my teens, so may well have read others. Anyway, I love The Willows, and what I love about it is that the scary supernatural entities in it are not ghosts or monsters in anything like the normal sense, but elemental forces or beings, seemingly from another dimension, which the human characters cannot see or understand. That really spoke to me and made for an immensely gripping and powerful story, so having read and enjoyed that one recently in isolation, I decided to make this, Algernon Blackwood's earliest published short story collection, the subject of this year's ghostly Christmas reading.
The table of contents runs thus:
The Empty House
A Haunted Island
A Case Of Eavesdropping
Keeping His Promise
With Intent To Steal
The Wood Of The Dead
Smith: An Episode In A Lodging-House
A Suspicious Gift
The Strange Adventures Of A Private Secretary In New York
Skeleton Lake: An Episode In Camp
Precis of all the stories (and more) may be found here, while the whole collection is online here. Some, such as The Empty House, A Case Of Eavesdropping and Keeping His Promise are standard-to-fairly standard ghost stories, though certainly very well done and typically leaving me feeling pleasantly on edge and unwilling to look behind me by the time I had finished them and was ready to turn out the light. But others reflect ( the same interest in the unknowable, the occult or the divine as The Willows )
Blackwood's interest in stories of this kind seems to be grounded in ( his real-world interests )
Two stories also place a significant emphasis on ( the act of story-telling itself )
Finally, again in line with the last Stoker novel I read and because it very much needs to be acknowledged, ( there is some full-blown racism in this collection too )
I started reading this collection a day or two before Christmas 2019, but I didn't finish it until after New Year 2020, so I'll count it as the first book of 2020. I have only knowingly read one Algernon Blackwood story before, which was The Willows, though I read a lot of horror short story compilations in my teens, so may well have read others. Anyway, I love The Willows, and what I love about it is that the scary supernatural entities in it are not ghosts or monsters in anything like the normal sense, but elemental forces or beings, seemingly from another dimension, which the human characters cannot see or understand. That really spoke to me and made for an immensely gripping and powerful story, so having read and enjoyed that one recently in isolation, I decided to make this, Algernon Blackwood's earliest published short story collection, the subject of this year's ghostly Christmas reading.
The table of contents runs thus:
The Empty House
A Haunted Island
A Case Of Eavesdropping
Keeping His Promise
With Intent To Steal
The Wood Of The Dead
Smith: An Episode In A Lodging-House
A Suspicious Gift
The Strange Adventures Of A Private Secretary In New York
Skeleton Lake: An Episode In Camp
Precis of all the stories (and more) may be found here, while the whole collection is online here. Some, such as The Empty House, A Case Of Eavesdropping and Keeping His Promise are standard-to-fairly standard ghost stories, though certainly very well done and typically leaving me feeling pleasantly on edge and unwilling to look behind me by the time I had finished them and was ready to turn out the light. But others reflect ( the same interest in the unknowable, the occult or the divine as The Willows )
Blackwood's interest in stories of this kind seems to be grounded in ( his real-world interests )
Two stories also place a significant emphasis on ( the act of story-telling itself )
Finally, again in line with the last Stoker novel I read and because it very much needs to be acknowledged, ( there is some full-blown racism in this collection too )
