WeirdBlog.com

Posts Tagged ‘Short story’

By turns bizarre, unsettling, spooky, and sublime, Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories showcases nine incomparable stories from master conjuror Algernon Blackwood. Evoking the uncanny spiritual forces of Nature, Blackwood’s writings all tread the nebulous borderland between fantasy, awe, wonder, and horror. Here Blackwood displays his best and most disturbing work-including “The Willows,” which Lovecraft singled out as “the single finest weird tale in literature”; “The Wendigo”; “The Insanity of Jones”; and “Sand.”

About the Author
Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) trained as a doctor and took up a special interest in Eastern medicine and religion. He published several short story collections before becoming an undercover agent for Britain during World War I. After the war he became known for his regular appearances reading ghost stories on BBC radio and television.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s unique contribution to American literature was a melding of traditional supernaturalism (derived chiefly from Edgar Allan Poe) with the genre of science fiction that emerged in the early 1920s. This new Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition brings together a dozen of the master’s tales-from his early short stories “Under the Pyramids” (originally ghostwritten for Harry Houdini) and “The Music of Erich Zann” (which Lovecraft ranked second among his own favorites) through his more fully developed works, “The Dunwich Horror,” The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and At the Mountains of Madness.

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories presents the definitive corrected texts of these works, along with Lovecraft critic and biographer S. T. Joshi’s illuminating introduction and notes to each story.

About the Author
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was born in Providence, Rhode Island, where he spent most of his life. His relatively small body of work-three novels and sixty short stories-has nevertheless exercised an incalculable influence on horror and supernatural fiction.