Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories

By Algernon Blackwood and S. T. Joshi

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."

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Release date: Aug 27, 2002
• ISBN: 9781101157152

Algernon Blackwood

Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) was an English journalist, novelist, and short story writer. Born in Shooter’s Hill, he developed an interest in Hinduism and Buddhism at a young age. After a youth spent travelling and taking odd jobs—Canadian dairy farmer, bartender, model, violin teacher—Blackwood returned to England and embarked on a career as a professional writer. Known for his connection to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Blackwood gained a reputation as a master of occult storytelling, publishing such popular horror stories as “The Willows” and “The Wendigo.” He also wrote several novels, including Jimbo: A Fantasy (1909) and The Centaur (1911). Throughout his life, Blackwood was a passionate outdoorsman, spending much of his time skiing and mountain climbing. Recognized as a pioneering writer of ghost stories, Blackwood influenced such figures as J. R. R. Tolkien, H. P. Lovecraft, and Henry Miller.

Reviews for Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories

[dmsteyn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

H.P. Lovecraft called Blackwood ‘the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere’, and, for once, this is not a hyperbolic blurb to increase sales. Blackwood really is brilliant at creating an atmosphere of otherworldly terror and uncanny intrigue. I picked up this collection of Blackwood’s stories in desperate need of some short fiction, preferably of a speculative bent. Blackwood did not disappoint. Although I was never terrified out of my mind (my cosy nook in our sitting room prevented that) I can definitely say that Blackwood’s stories are a cut above most supernatural tales.Blackwood spent much of his life travelling around the more remote parts of the world: from the Canadian backwoods, to the secluded parts of the Danube river basin, from the ancient tombs of Egypt, to the Swiss Alps, Blackwood visited them all at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Obviously, these places were more isolated back then, and their seclusion had a salient effect on Blackwood’s imagination. Most of his best tales are situated in these out-of-the-way places, and it is the solitude of his characters as they are faced with forces of cosmic proportion that really stays with one.One of the interesting things about Blackwood’s stories is that the main characters rarely, if ever, come face-to-face with the source of their terror; they nearly always only experience the sensations of horror at a remove. It is usually something that they manage to just avoid, or they experience it vicariously through another character who faces the horror head-on. This has the interesting result of increasing the isolation of the main character and, concomitantly, that of the reader. Blackwood has an insidious way of increasing the horror of his stories by what he does not show. It is, he seems to be saying, that which we imagine for ourselves which really terrifies us. Even in his longer stories, he rarely reveals the true nature of the horror, opting for more indirect ways of exposing the dreadfulness of the situation. Of course, one might argue that these obfuscatory practices conceal the fact that Blackwood himself does not know what the true nature of the horror is. Perhaps it serves to conceal a confusion of the subject-matter on Blackwood’s part. I would argue against this, although it is probably true that Blackwood sometimes does not describe the horror because it is inherently indescribable. Whether this is obfuscation, I leave up to other readers to decide.What I can say, is that I really enjoyed this selection of Blackwood’s tales. As always, S.T. Joshi, the editor of the collection and many other Penguin collections of weird tales, has done a wonderful job with his introduction and notes. This is one for the connoisseur of the speculative genre.