A master of the weird and unparalleled influence on a host of authors from William Hope Hodgson and H.P. Lovecraft to Ramsey Campbell, Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951) did not set out to be the prolific novelist and short story writer that he became. Born in what was then north-west Kent, England, the son of a Post Office administrator, he worked jobs as varied as dairy farmer and violin teacher, from Canada to New York. He did, however, write for periodicals occasionally and on returning to England he began crafting supernatural stories, no doubt inspired by his interest in eastern philosophy, mysticism and the occult. He wrote innumerable short fiction collections, which included his novellas ‘The Willows’ and ‘The Wendigo’, as well as 14 novels and some plays.
Ruth Heholt (Introduction) is Associate Professor of Dark Economies and Gothic Literature at Falmouth University. She is author of Catherine Crowe: Gender, Genre, and Radical Politics (Routledge, 2020). She is co-editor of several collections: Gothic Animals, Gothic Britain: Dark Places in the Provinces and Margins of the British Isles (2018), The Victorian Male Body (2018), and Haunted Landscapes (2017). She has organized several conferences including Folk Horror in the Twentieth Century (Falmouth and Lehigh Universities 2019) and is editor of the peer reviewed journal Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural.
