The Face of the Earth and Other Imaginings

The 30 stories and essays that Blackwood biographer Mike Ashley (Algernon Blackwood: An Extraordinary Life) has gathered for this volume%E2%80%94some of them never before collected%E2%80%94provide an invaluable portrait of Blackwood at the start of his literary career, en route to becoming one of the 20th century's greatest writers of weird fiction. Early ghost stories, including "The Boy Messenger," show him perfecting his skill at conveying the "emotion of chill presentiment and fear." The title tale represents one of Blackwood's first efforts to evoke a recurrent theme in his later work, that of the earth as "the physical body of some vast Intelligence." Two essays, "Down the Danube in a Canadian Canoe" and "The Psychology of Places," serve as illuminating sidebars to "The Willows" (not included), his masterpiece about the awesome and terrifying forces that animate the natural world. Readers new to Blackwood's work will find the stories satisfyingly spooky, and established fans will appreciate Ashley's bibliographic excavations. (Apr.)