A Woman's Ghost: Paranormal Parlor, A Weiser Books Collection

By Algernon Blackwood and Varla A. Ventura

Varla Ventura, Coast to Coast favorite, Weird News blogger on Huffington Post, and author of The Book of the Bizarre and Beyond Bizarre, introduces Weiser Books’ new Collection of forgotten occult classics. Paranormal Parlor is an eerie assemblage of affordable digital editions, curated with Varla’s sixth sense for tales of the weird and unusual.

Master of horror Algernon Blackwood brings this chilling tale of a woman, her ghost, and the surprising love between them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser
• Release date: Apr 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781619400672

Algernon Blackwood

Algernon Henry Blackwood, CBE (1869–1951), was an English broadcasting narrator, journalist, novelist, and short story writer, and among the most prolific ghost story writers in the history of the genre. The literary critic S. T. Joshi stated, “His work is more consistently meritorious than any weird writer’s except Dunsany’s” and that his short story collection Incredible Adventures (1914) “may be the premier weird collection of this or any other century.”

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You Can Be My Master of Horror Anytime

What I wouldn't give to be the woman in this story. Not because of what happens to her, but more because of the storyteller: Algernon Blackwood.

Perhaps one of the most prolific horror writers of all time and well deserving of the title Modern Master of Supernatural Horror (so dubbed by the one and only H.P. Lovecraft), Blackwood was not always the horror-fiction god that we know him as today. His earlier careers included farmer, essayist, journalist for The New York Times, private secretary, bartender, model, businessman, and even violin teacher. He spent a good deal of his twenties and thirties exploring the United States and Canada. When he moved home to his native England, he was already in his late thirties, and it was only then that he began to write tales of terror.

In his lifetime he penned more than a dozen novels, several plays, more than thirty short-story collections, and nearly two hundred short stories. The vast majority of these were horror and supernatural based, though he did have a handful of children's stories and novels published as well.

I imagine myself in 1907 England, my long dress gliding across the floorboards of the parlor as I extend a gloved hand to make Mr. Blackwood's