“He had always been tremblingly aware that he stood on the borderland of another region, a region where time and space were merely forms of thought, where ancient memories lay open to the sight, and where the forces behind each human life stood plainly revealed, and he could see the hidden springs at the very heart of the world.”—Algernon Blackwood, from “The Insanity of Jones”
The Empty Room and Other Ghost Stories is Algernon Blackwood’s first collected work, ten original stories submitted by an old friend of Blackwood’s, who thought so highly of them that he sent them to a new publisher by the name of Eveleigh Nash. Nash was so impressed, he offered Blackwood an immediate advance and brought the stories out to the British public that same year in 1906. Filled with chilling, unsettling and unnerving tales of ghostly visitations, The Empty Room serves as the perfect introduction to the world of Blackwood.
But it wasn’t until The Listener and Other Stories, his second collection, was published by Nash in 1907 that the true brilliance of this master storyteller was revealed to the reading public. Here you will find the otherworldly stories for which Blackwood is best known, true nightmares of supernatural fiction: “The Listener,” “Max Hensig,” “The Insanity of Jones,” the poignant “The Dance of Death”…and, of course, his classic, “The Willows,” in which two men on a boat trip down the Danube discover that there are more things in Nature than Man should ever know.
