The Wendigo and Other Stories

One of the greatest writers of the strange and weird, Algernon Blackwood evolved from a teller of ghost stories to a pioneering master of such emergent fictional modes as cosmic horror and nature Gothic. In tales whose settings range from the eerie North Woods of Canada to the mysterious sands of the Egyptian desert, Blackwood blurs the boundaries between human and nonhuman, living and dead, beckoning the reader into strange borderlands where alien forces lurk, waiting for the chance to break through into our world.

This new selection of Blackwoods shorter fiction constitutes the most comprehensive critical edition of his work to date. Included here are such undisputed classics as The Wendigo, The Willows, and Ancient Sorceries, as well as two superbly unsettling novellas, The Man Whom the Trees Loved and A Descent into Egypt, and ten other stories short and long, drawn from collections spanning Blackwoods long writing career. Aaron Worths introduction and notes situate these tales in the context of Blackwoods own upbringing in an evangelical Victorian household, as well as in relation to such topics as late-imperial British history and the emergence of modern ecological thought.