From: fi@grebyn.com (Fiona Webster)
Subject: Re: Algernon Blackwood
Organization: Grebyn Timesharing
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1992 13:39:35 GMT

A woman with the charming moniker of Heather Darling writes:
>I recently came across a volume of short horror fiction by Algernon
>Blackwood. I'm wonderuing if anyone can give me any background on him or his
>writing since I know nothing about it?

Well, since horror fiction is supposed to be my area of expertise :-),
let's see if I can't whip out a brief bio here...What I know of
Algernon Blackwood (English, 1869-1951) is that not only was he
a very prolific writer of ghost stories, he was also a fascinating
character.  He was a robust outdoorsman who enjoyed traveling, skiing,
mountain-climbing--especially in Canada and Switzerland.  He was a
loner (he never married), and also a devotee of various hermetic
traditions.  Like W. B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, and Aleister Crowley,
Blackwood joined the Order of the Golden Dawn, a short-lived occult
society (1888-1903) that is known to many neo-pagans because of its
long-reaching influence on interpretations linking the Tarot to both
kabbalistic and astrological systems.  He also studied Rosicrucianism
and Buddhism--his writings reflect, and are sometimes marred by, his
interest in mystical explanations for psychic phenomena.  He was an
earnest, optimistic man with a resemblance to H. G. Wells, in that his
tales feature "the average man"--a man of outgoing character who is
mostly free of the guilt and morbid obsessiveness that appear in many
other spooky stories.  At the climax of a typical Blackwood tale, the
hero experiences a numinous revelation of terror or beauty (they're
closely linked), and is stimulated to a new level of awareness of how
puny, irrelevant, etc., he is in comparison to the power of Nature. 
(I dislike the phrase "happy ending," but oddly enough, that's how many
describe these tales.)  Blackwood was more philosophically (metaphysically?)
ambitious than his contemporary, M. R. James, whose ghost stories seek
to elicit subtle shudders rather than grand epiphanies.  Those ambitions
sometimes tripped him up, leading him to insert silly-sounding and
over-explanatory passages in what is otherwise a delightfully lyrical
prose style (which is also "richly textured," whatever that means,
according to critic Jack Sullivan).

An amusing trivia bit: in his old age, Blackwood narrated stories for
the BBC, and got the nickname "Ghost Man," which apparently annoyed him.

Blackwood has two principal types of stories--those that are
oppressive, claustrophobic "haunted house" tales, set indoors, and the
more original ones that occur outdoors in a natural setting.  "The
Willows," often cited as Blackwood's best tale, is an example of the
latter.  If you're only going to read one Blackwood tale, read "The
Willows."  It's been anthologized countless times, such as in the
recent collection _Dark_Descent_ edited by David G. Hartwell
(currently being reissued in three mass-market-size volumes--the one
containing "The Willows" is titled _A_Fabulous_Formless_Darkness_).

                              --wishing you many numinous encounters
                                 with the Great Beyond,

                                             Fiona Webster
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books