H.P. Lovecraft called Blackwood ‘the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere’, and, for once, this is not a hyperbolic blurb to increase sales. Blackwood really is brilliant at creating an atmosphere of otherworldly terror and uncanny intrigue. I picked up this collection of Blackwood’s stories in desperate need of some short fiction, preferably of a speculative bent. Blackwood did not disappoint. Although I was never terrified out of my mind (my cosy nook in our sitting room prevented that) I can definitely say that Blackwood’s stories are a cut above most supernatural tales.

Blackwood spent much of his life travelling around the more remote parts of the world: from the Canadian backwoods, to the secluded parts of the Danube river basin, from the ancient tombs of Egypt, to the Swiss Alps, Blackwood visited them all at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Obviously, these places were more isolated back then, and their seclusion had a salient effect on Blackwood’s imagination. Most of his best tales are situated in these out-of-the-way places, and it is the solitude of his characters as they are faced with forces of cosmic proportion that really stays with one.

One of the interesting things about Blackwood’s stories is that the main characters rarely, if ever, come face-to-face with the source of their terror; they nearly always only experience the sensations of horror at a remove. It is usually something that they manage to just avoid, or they experience it vicariously through another character who faces the horror head-on. This has the interesting result of increasing the isolation of the main character and, concomitantly, that of the reader. Blackwood has an insidious way of increasing the horror of his stories by what he does not show. It is, he seems to be saying, that which we imagine for ourselves which really terrifies us. Even in his longer stories, he rarely reveals the true nature of the horror, opting for more indirect ways of exposing the dreadfulness of the situation. Of course, one might argue that these obfuscatory practices conceal the fact that Blackwood himself does not know what the true nature of the horror is. Perhaps it serves to conceal a confusion of the subject-matter on Blackwood’s part. I would argue against this, although it is probably true that Blackwood sometimes does not describe the horror because it is inherently indescribable. Whether this is obfuscation, I leave up to other readers to decide.

What I can say, is that I really enjoyed this selection of Blackwood’s tales. As always, S.T. Joshi, the editor of the collection and many other Penguin collections of weird tales, has done a wonderful job with his introduction and notes. This is one for the connoisseur of the speculative genre. ( )

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