Word: blackwood
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...tales in this volume, culled from his nine books of short stories, give readers their first new chance in more than a decade to take a full evening of that old Blackwood magic. In general, it still works. In fact, the Tales may win for his old age (he is now 81) a literary reputation he never enjoyed at the height of his fame. They show him to be one of the most original writers in the line that descends from Edgar Poe to the authors of Mandrake the Magician, and in which he has few peers (some of them...
Space Is a Weapon. Anybody looking for a strong sense of human reality wil not find it in Blackwood. In The Man Whom the Trees Loved, for instance, he maunders through a 70-page vagary in which a man is slowly taken over into the vegetable kingdom. Blackwood provides no human motives whatever for this slow mutation. However, he provides such sinister vegetable ones that a nervous reader may take to watching his peas and cucumbers in quite a new way. In The Terror of the Twins, space is somehow seized as a weapon in the invisible hands...
...eagerness to read everything, from the hearts of celery to the mind of God, as well as in the gingerbread elaborations of his style, Author Blackwood is more a Victorian than a modern. Yet, far more than most Victorians, Blackwood has a fervor for the inhuman, subhuman, or superhuman, and a distaste for the world of men. The story in which Black wood expresses his keenest distaste for actual life is perhaps his most carefully composed one, The Lost Valley. Twin brothers, who have lived only for each other for 35 years, find themselves in love with the same woman...
...hard, at the end of the book, not to feel that Author Blackwood is a man who could express his sense of life only indirectly, by writing horror stories about...
Life Is Terrible. For a man who seems to have found life usually unpleasant and often terrible, Algernon Blackwood has lived quite a lot of it. He was born into the British upper classes, the son of the Duchess of Manchester and her second husband, a gentleman usher to Queen Victoria. Algernon was such a dreamy...