Lanterna Rally

Author: Algernon Blackwood

Publisher:

Published: 2019-12-05

Total Pages: 48

ISBN-13: 9781671989467

About Author: Algernon Henry Blackwood, CBE (14 March 1869 - 10 December 1951) was an English broadcasting narrator, journalist, novelist and short story writer, and among the most prolific ghost story writers in the history of the genre. The literary critic S. T. Joshi stated, "His work is more consistently meritorious than any weird writer's except Dunsany's."and that his short story collection Incredible Adventures (1914) "may be the premier weird collection of this or any other century".Blackwood was born in Shooter's Hill (now part of south-east London, then part of north-west Kent). Between 1871 and 1880, he lived at Crayford Manor House, Crayford and he was educated at Wellington College. His father was a Post Office administrator who, according to Peter Penzoldt, "though not devoid of genuine good-heartedness, had appallingly narrow religious ideas."After he read the work of a Hindu sage left behind at his parents house, he developed an interest in Buddhism and other eastern philosophies.Blackwood had a varied career, working as a dairy farmer in Canada, where he also operated a hotel for six months, as a newspaper reporter in New York City, bartender, model, journalist for The New York Times, private secretary, businessman, and violin teacher.Throughout his adult life, he was an occasional essayist for periodicals. In his late thirties, he moved back to England and started to write stories of the supernatural. He was successful, writing at least ten original collections of short stories and later telling them on radio and television. He also wrote 14 novels, several children's books and a number of plays, most of which were produced, but not published. He was an avid lover of nature and the outdoors, as many of his stories reflect. To satisfy his interest in the supernatural, he joined The Ghost Club. He never married; according to his friends he was a loner, but also cheerful company.Jack Sullivan stated that "Blackwood's life parallels his work more neatly than perhaps that of any other ghost story writer. Like his lonely but fundamentally optimistic protagonists, he was a combination of mystic and outdoorsman; when he wasn't steeping himself in occultism, including Rosicrucianism and Buddhism, he was likely to be skiing or mountain climbing."Blackwood was a member of one of the factions of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, as was his contemporary Arthur Machen.Cabalistic themes influence his novel The Human Chord.His two best-known stories are probably "The Willows" and "The Wendigo"Product Description: "The Willows" is a novella by English author Algernon Blackwood, originally published as part of his 1907 collection The Listener and Other Stories. It is one of Blackwood's best known works and has been influential on a number of later writers. Horror author H.P. Lovecraft considered it to be the finest supernatural tale in English literature."The Willows" is an example of early modern horror and is connected within the literary tradition of weird fiction.Two friends are midway on a canoe trip down the River Danube. Throughout the story, Blackwood personifies the surrounding environment -river, sun, wind- with powerful and ultimately threatening characteristics. Most ominous are the masses of dense, desultory, menacing willows, which "moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen sense of the horrible."Shortly after landing their canoe for the evening on a sandy island near Bratislava in the Dunajské luhy Protected Landscape Area of Austria-Hungary, the narrator reflects on the river's potency, human qualities, and his own will: After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, the Danube enters a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low willow-bushes