Product Description

Algernon Henry Blackwood, (1869 -1951) was an English writer of supernatural fiction. Blackwood was also a journalist and a broadcasting narrator. Blackwood had a varied career, farming in Canada, operating a hotel, a newspaper reporter in New York, and essayist for various periodicals. His works included ten collections of short stories, fourteen novels, children's stories, and several plays. Many of his stories reflect his love of nature and the outdoors. His two best-known stories are "The Willows" and "The Wendigo". An excerpt from The Willows reads "They first became properly visible, these huge figures, just within the tops of the bushes -- immense, bronze-colored, moving, and wholly independent of the swaying of the branches. I saw them plainly and noted, now I came to examine them more calmly, that they were very much larger than human, and indeed that something in their appearance proclaimed them to be not human at all. Certainly they were not merely the moving tracery of the branches against the moonlight. They shifted independently. They rose upwards in a continuous stream from earth to sky, vanishing utterly as soon as they reached the dark of the sky. They were interlaced one with another, making a great column, and I saw their limbs and huge bodies melting in and out of each other, forming this serpentine line that bent and swayed and twisted spirally with the contortions of the wind-tossed trees. They were nude, fluid shapes, passing up the bushes, within the leaves almost - rising up in a living column into the heavens. Their faces I never could see. Unceasingly they poured upwards, swaying in great bending curves, with a hue of dull bronze upon their skins . . .. For the longer I looked the more certain I became that these figures were real and living, though perhaps not according to the standards that the camera and the biologist would insist upon."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1070947 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 60 pages

Customer Reviews

who will read this edition?
This is only the only story in a very slim edition, accompanied with outrageously gargantuan chapter numbers and first-letter-of-sentence characters at the beginning of every chapter. The typesetting is quite ugly, but the story is classic and holds the attention. One can find the story elsewhere: in the Penguin Classics and Dover editions with other fine Algernon oddities. This book is overpriced, as is the The Wendigo, by the same publisher. For its price, you should have more to read, in a better layout.

Excellent Edition, and for Free!
As a recent purchaser of a Kindle, I naturally wanted some content, but felt somewhat bewhildered by the vast range of pricing--from free to relatively expensive--for what appeared to be identical works. In order to test the "free" works, I decided to download Algernon Blackwood's short novel, "The Willows," fully cognizant of the old adage that one gets what one pays for.

Well, the edition here is superb. No misspellings or misplaced punctuation that I saw; the only flaws were a handful of missing paragraph indentations, and they did not interfere with the flow of the story. I heartily commend those who took the time to transcribe this story for their excellent work.

As for the story itself, it remains a very unnerving read. Like Lovecraft, Blackwood spends most of the time building up a near palpable atmosphere of dread, with only a few fitful sightings to give shape to that dread. "The Willows" remains one of his best tales, and this edition is highly recommended.

Free SF Reader
A Horror Fiction Story

Wind in the tree monsters.


4.5 out of 5