“The Willows” is a bit front-heavy with notes as Blackwood establishes geography, but they quickly thin out as the story progresses.Īs a Foreword, we have included Grace Isabel Colbron’s 1915 essay Algernon Blackwood: An Appreciation, which we believe helps place his work into the proper context and perspective, especially if you are a first-time reader of Blackwood’s work. We have, however, updated several hyphenated words to reflect their modern usage, either dropping the hyphen entirely to form a single word or returning them to two separate words.Īdditionally, we have added our customary footnotes where we felt they were needed.

Here, for your reading pleasure, we have collected two of Algernon Blackwood’s best-known weird short stories: “The Willows” and “The Wendigo.” Given that Blackwood was British, we have retained nearly all of the British spellings throughout. Lovecraft to praise Blackwood as “the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere.” He was an avid lover of nature and the outdoors, which many of his stories reflect, especially two of his best-known works “ The Willows,” in which two friends on a canoe trip become temporarily marooned on a river island only to discover the willow trees are not what they seem, and “ The Wendigo,” where a Canadian hunting party encounters the mythical beast of legend – stories that led H.P.

The son of a preacher, Blackwood rebelled against his strong Catholic upbringing and had a life-long interest in the supernatural, spiritualism, and the occult, later joining several occult societies. Algernon Henry Blackwood (1869–1951) in his rich and varied lifetime was an English broadcasting narrator, Canadian farmer, New York newspaper reporter, hotel operator, journalist, bartender, secretary, mystic, teacher, adventurer, novelist, and short-story writer, and among the most prolific ghost story writers in the history of the genre.

The willows and the wendigo