The Willows, the Wendigo, and Other Horrors

Book excerpt: This illustrated and annotated edition of Blackwood's most influential and mesmerizing weird fiction, ghost stories, and strange tales is the only one of its kind available on the market. Richly annotated, bolstered with introductory essays for each story, and complete with chilling chiaroscuro illustrations, it presents a treasure trove to the ardent Blackwoodian. Welcomed by many as the most skillful practitioner of the British weird tale, Algernon Blackwood was capable of simultaneously creating a misanthropic, Lovecraftian cosmos devoid of compassion for petty, materialistic mankind, and a transcendental, Emersonian universe, pregnant with spirituality and wonder. At once horrifying and fantastical, chilling and euphoric, Blackwood's poetic prose and undisputed mastery of psychological terror make him an unavoidable giant in the realms of weird fiction, fantasy, and horror.