Considered by many, MR James among them, to be the foremost British supernaturalist (Damn fine word.) of the twentieth century, Algernon Blackwood has come to worthily occupy such a revered, if unfamiliar, place in such an arch and august pantheon. He certainly left some hefty footprints in the meandering pathways through the densely packed and dangerous forests of the mind.
I came across a copy of the book The Best Of Algernon Blackwood many years ago in The Strand Bookstore in New York. A dream of a bookstore with miles and miles of books covering all the highways and byways of literature with literal archipelagos of subjects and themes. i picked it up and returning home to Belfast next to a ventriloquists doll I also picked up on that trip.Somehow,while waiting at the baggage carousel my suitcase came down the conveyor belt with the doll's grinning head poking out of the partially opened zipper.
"Thats definately your bag" my traveling companion pointed out.
The Algernon Blackwood sat in my book collection for quite some time before I got around to complete reading it. Thus, I missed out for far too long on what an intriguing and beguiling writer he truly was. Not neglected, just perhaps taken for granted. by all reckonings he led an interesting and event filled life as he traveled the world experiencing all its ups and downs, triumphs and painful disapointments. Algernon Blackwood's literary output, his many stories, mirror the passions that drove him in his personal lif and informed the characters that inhabit his fictions. He was a great lover of the outdoor life and distant remote places but he was also no stranger to the seedy noirish underbelly of great cities like New York.
There are thirteen stories in the anthology I read; The Best Of Algernon Blackwood published by Dover press. there are ,off course, two of the most highly regarded and powerfully influential stories in this collection' The Willows and The Wendigo. That is the names of the two stories, by the way. Not the name of a wrestling tag team. They have been read and reprinted for the best part of a century and are probably scattered through your own book collection, just waiting to be reread.
Go do so, whoever you may be.
