Ancient Sorceries

Description

A British traveller in France stops in a remote French hill town with some very unusual inhabitants and soon finds himself unable to leave; a scholar staying in a lodging house feels himself observed by a malevolent presence; two friends on a canoeing trip spend a night on a lonely willow-covered island in the middle of the Danube, haunted by the strange trees and sinister shapes in the water... Algernon Blackwood is one of Britain's greatest ever proponents of weird and supernatural stories This collection contains four of his most unnervingly curious tales: 'Ancient Sorceries', 'The Listener', 'The Sea Fit' and 'The Willows'.

Algernon Blackwood was born in Shooter's Hill, now a suburb of London, in 1869. Blackwood was raised in a strictly Christian household, but was interested in other religions from a young age and eventually came to believe in what he called 'animism' - the idea that all of nature was sentient and embued with spiritual meaning - which greatly influenced his later work. In 1880, he travelled North America where he hunted moose in the Canadian wilderness, worked as a reporter in New York and began to write his first stories. Over the rest of his life he travelled widely and wrote prolifically, producing 14 novels as well as many popular collections of weird and ghostly tales. In the 1930s he even adapted and read his own stories on the radio. Blackwood died in 1951, but today is regarded as one of the masters of the supernatural story, to rank alongside M.R James and H.P. Lovecraft,

'Of the quality of Mr. Blackwood's genius there can be no dispute' - H.P. Lovecraft