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Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre
1967. First Edition Thus. 400 pages. No dust jacket. Red cloth. Well bound and clean pages, with mild tanning to text block edges. Some rub-marking and tanning to pastedowns and endpapers. Boards have mild shelf wear with light rubbing and corner bumping. Some light marking and sunning. Boards are slightly bowed.
400 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 1962
7 people are currently reading
146 people want to read
About the author
Algernon Blackwood
1,343 books1,175 followersAlgernon Henry Blackwood (1869–1951) 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 (today part of south-east London, but then part of northwest Kent) and 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." Blackwood had a varied career, farming in Canada, operating a hotel, as a newspaper reporter in New York City, and, throughout his adult life, an occasional essayist for various periodicals. In his late thirties, he moved back to England and started to write stories of the supernatural. He was very successful, writing at least ten original collections of short stories and eventually appearing on both radio and television to tell them. He also wrote fourteen 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, and many of his stories reflect this.
H.P. Lovecraft wrote of Blackwood: "He is the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere." His powerful story "The Willows," which effectively describes another dimension impinging upon our own, was reckoned by Lovecraft to be not only "foremost of all" Blackwood's tales but the best "weird tale" of all time.
Among his thirty-odd books, Blackwood wrote a series of stories and short novels published as John Silence, Physician Extraordinary (1908), which featured a "psychic detective" who combined the skills of a Sherlock Holmes and a psychic medium. Blackwood also wrote light fantasy and juvenile books.
Blackwood was born in Shooter's Hill (today part of south-east London, but then part of northwest Kent) and 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." Blackwood had a varied career, farming in Canada, operating a hotel, as a newspaper reporter in New York City, and, throughout his adult life, an occasional essayist for various periodicals. In his late thirties, he moved back to England and started to write stories of the supernatural. He was very successful, writing at least ten original collections of short stories and eventually appearing on both radio and television to tell them. He also wrote fourteen 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, and many of his stories reflect this.
H.P. Lovecraft wrote of Blackwood: "He is the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere." His powerful story "The Willows," which effectively describes another dimension impinging upon our own, was reckoned by Lovecraft to be not only "foremost of all" Blackwood's tales but the best "weird tale" of all time.
Among his thirty-odd books, Blackwood wrote a series of stories and short novels published as John Silence, Physician Extraordinary (1908), which featured a "psychic detective" who combined the skills of a Sherlock Holmes and a psychic medium. Blackwood also wrote light fantasy and juvenile books.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
February 20, 2021
Really enjoyed this. Wide variety of ghost stories, odd tales and some cosmic horror not reliant on Lovecraft's mythos. Proved for smooth, engaging reading. Will definitely hunt up his other collection, Tales of the Uncanny and the Supernatural.
December 18, 2024
3.64⭐
Chinese Magic 3.5⭐
First Hate 4.25⭐
The Olive 3.5⭐
The Sacrifice 3⭐
The Damned 3.5⭐
Wayfarers 4⭐
The Sea Fit 4⭐
The Attic 3⭐
The Heath Fire 3.5⭐
The Return 4⭐
The Transfer 3⭐
Clairvoyance 3.25⭐
The Golden Fly 3.25⭐
Special Delivery 4.25⭐
The Destruction of Smith 3.5⭐
The Tryst 3.5⭐
The Wings of Horus 3.25⭐
Initiation 4.25⭐
A Desert Episode 3⭐
Transition 3.25⭐
The Other Wing 4.5⭐
By Water 4.25⭐
A Victim of Higher Space 4.25⭐
Chinese Magic 3.5⭐
First Hate 4.25⭐
The Olive 3.5⭐
The Sacrifice 3⭐
The Damned 3.5⭐
Wayfarers 4⭐
The Sea Fit 4⭐
The Attic 3⭐
The Heath Fire 3.5⭐
The Return 4⭐
The Transfer 3⭐
Clairvoyance 3.25⭐
The Golden Fly 3.25⭐
Special Delivery 4.25⭐
The Destruction of Smith 3.5⭐
The Tryst 3.5⭐
The Wings of Horus 3.25⭐
Initiation 4.25⭐
A Desert Episode 3⭐
Transition 3.25⭐
The Other Wing 4.5⭐
By Water 4.25⭐
A Victim of Higher Space 4.25⭐
November 12, 2024
3.5 Stars
A good collection of short stories from a writer considered a master of the genre, but really only a few stories stood out to me. I find that writers of the 1800s-early 1900s tend to "overwrite", but I suppose that's just how prose was done at the time. That's just my personal preference, as most readers really enjoy Blackwood's work. Still, overall a good collection.
A good collection of short stories from a writer considered a master of the genre, but really only a few stories stood out to me. I find that writers of the 1800s-early 1900s tend to "overwrite", but I suppose that's just how prose was done at the time. That's just my personal preference, as most readers really enjoy Blackwood's work. Still, overall a good collection.
September 22, 2017
This a classic short story collection from the 1960s if you can find it you really it love it
March 30, 2024
Would have been better if this edition didn’t have so many typos …
February 12, 2022
Tales of the Sublime and Transcendent
Most of the early 20th-century stories by Algernon Blackwood collected in Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre (1967) don’t suit the title of the collection or the lurid red and black and blue demonic face on the cover. Two of the twenty-three stories, “The Damned” and “The Transfer,” do build intense macabre suspense, but they don’t traffic in crude horror, and the other stories explore the supernatural or divine that lies just behind surface reality ready to burst through to challenge our preconceived notions of the universe and human experience. A better title for the collection would be Tales of the Sublime and Transcendent. Or Tales of Life and the Epiphanic.
The collection gives a varied sample of Blackwood’s many kinds of psychological, supernatural, metaphysical, and sublime stories. They occur in England, Canada, Europe, Arizona, Switzerland, and Egypt; in sublime mountains, harsh deserts, dense forests, pastoral countrysides, and crowded cities; in an old chateau, a country estate, a Cairene hotel, a sea-side bungalow, and an alpine inn; in the present and the past; in situations of romance, male-bonding, haunting, dreaming, and dying. And so on. The stories feature either sensitive and imaginative or obtuse and practical people who experience some awesome supernatural phenomena, for “Science does not exhaust the Universe.” By the way, both Blackwood and H. P. Lovecraft wrote more-to-the-world-than-we-usually-see stories, but the former imagined a universal sublime life force behind the scenes, the latter a horrifying set of powerful and malevolent demonic aliens.
Here is an annotated list of the stories.
1. Chinese Magic (1930): The conflict between Beauty and Reality, involving a bachelor psychologist, love at first sight, the allure of the orient, and the Perfume of the Garden of Happiness.
2. First Hate (1920): Just as animals instinctively and instantly know their dire enemies, so too do we humans. An unpleasant hunters’ story.
3. The Olive (1921): Italian olives, a mysterious girl, an erotic evening featuring fauns, nymphs, and Pan, and a desire to be altogether in life.
4. The Sacrifice (1914): Life is a Cecemony in the great temple of the world—if you can go mountain climbing during a time of crisis.
5. The Damned (1914): An increasingly suspenseful novella that demonstrates how the places lived in by strong-willed enough past people (especially the religiously intolerant) can influence (if not dominate) the present.
6. Wayfarers (1914): Time slips and eternally reincarnating lovers: “Have you so soon forgotten . . . when we knew together the perfume of the hanging Babylonian Gardens, or when the Hesperides were so soft, to us in the dawn of the world?”
7. The Sea Fit (1910): The Great Powers of Nature are still very much alive, and their appearance before us should not be a matter of terror but of triumphant singing.
8. The Attic (1912): A short, moving tale of a family (and cat) still grieving for the death of a beloved child, and of their haunted attic where a usurer hanged himself.
9. The Heath Fire (1912): An artist in Surrey, unlike most Englishmen, wants to embrace mystery, seeking in a burnt heath the “Soul of the Universe.”
10. The Return (1911): “The hierophantic, sacerdotal Power that had echoed down the world since Time began and dropped strange magic phrases into every poet’s heart” may touch even the most practical of middleclass businessmen.
11. The Transfer (1911): A governess recounts what happened when a successful vampiric uncle encountered a hungry patch of barren garden earth.
12. Clairvoyance (1912): A man who can hear but not see ghosts spends the night in a haunted room full of the ghosts of children in the house of a mismatched couple: the young wife is too sensitive and fertile, her old husband too obtuse and narrow.
13. The Golden Fly (1912): A devastated businessman observes the “lordly indifference of Nature,” so as to realize his “world of agony lay neatly buttoned up within the tiny space of his own brain. Outside it had no existence at all.”
14. Special Delivery (1912): When traveling in the mountains and staying in an inn, heed any warnings Nature might send your way.
15. The Destruction of Smith (1912): As a dying person may communicate with us in the moment of their death, so too may an entire town. An unlikeable “western” yarn.
16. The Tryst (1917): A complex psychological study of what happens to a person who works for fifteen years to become able to marry a sweetheart, with a horripilating climax.
17. The Wings of Horus (1914): The dangers of not having an outlet for one’s creative imagination, especially if one is a genius in Egypt under the influence of Horus.
18. Initiation (1917): The Beauty of nature transcends business, banks, and cities if you open yourself to it: “Fear slipped away, and elation took its place.”
19. A Desert Episode (1917): The desert outside Cairo is the perfect place to learn that through love, Life and Death are “unchanging partners” providing immortality.
20. Transition (1913): An ordinary man is bringing his ordinary family ordinary Christmas presents while remembering a play called Magic when a traffic accident provides him a moment of “hearty, genuine life at last.”
21. The Other Wing (1915): A brave, imaginative little boy has a real dream adventure in the closed wing of his family's mansion, and then decades later has cause to recall it.
22. By Water (1914): Vividly demonstrating what it's like to be lost in the Sahara and to drown there without knowing that one is drowning.
23. A Victim of Higher Space (1914): What happens when you become able to enter the 4th dimension without being able to control your coming or going? Better visit the Psychic Doctor John Silence for some advice and empathy. An unusually funny story.
The Spring Books edition is well made (binding, pages, and print), but marred by jarring typos, at least one per story, whether the wrong words spelled correctly (e.g., the/that, tall/tell, if/it, etc.) or the right words spelled incorrectly (e.g., bpon/upon, dakrness/darkness, lefet/left, hitory/history, etc.).
From the standpoint of contemporary mores, some of Blackwood’s stories have embarrassing elements of gender (e.g., twenty-five year old “girls” with “little” feet and hearts) and race (e.g., “Redskins, whatever they may feel, show little”), and he wasn’t at his best channeling Western pulps (e.g., “Ain’t it jest possible”), but given his era he open-mindedly viewed cultural, religious, scientific, and romantic matters, and his stories champion tolerance of different ways of understanding the divine or supernatural. And the stories here are mostly beautiful, thoughtful, powerful, and well-written fantastic literature.
Most of the early 20th-century stories by Algernon Blackwood collected in Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre (1967) don’t suit the title of the collection or the lurid red and black and blue demonic face on the cover. Two of the twenty-three stories, “The Damned” and “The Transfer,” do build intense macabre suspense, but they don’t traffic in crude horror, and the other stories explore the supernatural or divine that lies just behind surface reality ready to burst through to challenge our preconceived notions of the universe and human experience. A better title for the collection would be Tales of the Sublime and Transcendent. Or Tales of Life and the Epiphanic.
The collection gives a varied sample of Blackwood’s many kinds of psychological, supernatural, metaphysical, and sublime stories. They occur in England, Canada, Europe, Arizona, Switzerland, and Egypt; in sublime mountains, harsh deserts, dense forests, pastoral countrysides, and crowded cities; in an old chateau, a country estate, a Cairene hotel, a sea-side bungalow, and an alpine inn; in the present and the past; in situations of romance, male-bonding, haunting, dreaming, and dying. And so on. The stories feature either sensitive and imaginative or obtuse and practical people who experience some awesome supernatural phenomena, for “Science does not exhaust the Universe.” By the way, both Blackwood and H. P. Lovecraft wrote more-to-the-world-than-we-usually-see stories, but the former imagined a universal sublime life force behind the scenes, the latter a horrifying set of powerful and malevolent demonic aliens.
Here is an annotated list of the stories.
1. Chinese Magic (1930): The conflict between Beauty and Reality, involving a bachelor psychologist, love at first sight, the allure of the orient, and the Perfume of the Garden of Happiness.
2. First Hate (1920): Just as animals instinctively and instantly know their dire enemies, so too do we humans. An unpleasant hunters’ story.
3. The Olive (1921): Italian olives, a mysterious girl, an erotic evening featuring fauns, nymphs, and Pan, and a desire to be altogether in life.
4. The Sacrifice (1914): Life is a Cecemony in the great temple of the world—if you can go mountain climbing during a time of crisis.
5. The Damned (1914): An increasingly suspenseful novella that demonstrates how the places lived in by strong-willed enough past people (especially the religiously intolerant) can influence (if not dominate) the present.
6. Wayfarers (1914): Time slips and eternally reincarnating lovers: “Have you so soon forgotten . . . when we knew together the perfume of the hanging Babylonian Gardens, or when the Hesperides were so soft, to us in the dawn of the world?”
7. The Sea Fit (1910): The Great Powers of Nature are still very much alive, and their appearance before us should not be a matter of terror but of triumphant singing.
8. The Attic (1912): A short, moving tale of a family (and cat) still grieving for the death of a beloved child, and of their haunted attic where a usurer hanged himself.
9. The Heath Fire (1912): An artist in Surrey, unlike most Englishmen, wants to embrace mystery, seeking in a burnt heath the “Soul of the Universe.”
10. The Return (1911): “The hierophantic, sacerdotal Power that had echoed down the world since Time began and dropped strange magic phrases into every poet’s heart” may touch even the most practical of middleclass businessmen.
11. The Transfer (1911): A governess recounts what happened when a successful vampiric uncle encountered a hungry patch of barren garden earth.
12. Clairvoyance (1912): A man who can hear but not see ghosts spends the night in a haunted room full of the ghosts of children in the house of a mismatched couple: the young wife is too sensitive and fertile, her old husband too obtuse and narrow.
13. The Golden Fly (1912): A devastated businessman observes the “lordly indifference of Nature,” so as to realize his “world of agony lay neatly buttoned up within the tiny space of his own brain. Outside it had no existence at all.”
14. Special Delivery (1912): When traveling in the mountains and staying in an inn, heed any warnings Nature might send your way.
15. The Destruction of Smith (1912): As a dying person may communicate with us in the moment of their death, so too may an entire town. An unlikeable “western” yarn.
16. The Tryst (1917): A complex psychological study of what happens to a person who works for fifteen years to become able to marry a sweetheart, with a horripilating climax.
17. The Wings of Horus (1914): The dangers of not having an outlet for one’s creative imagination, especially if one is a genius in Egypt under the influence of Horus.
18. Initiation (1917): The Beauty of nature transcends business, banks, and cities if you open yourself to it: “Fear slipped away, and elation took its place.”
19. A Desert Episode (1917): The desert outside Cairo is the perfect place to learn that through love, Life and Death are “unchanging partners” providing immortality.
20. Transition (1913): An ordinary man is bringing his ordinary family ordinary Christmas presents while remembering a play called Magic when a traffic accident provides him a moment of “hearty, genuine life at last.”
21. The Other Wing (1915): A brave, imaginative little boy has a real dream adventure in the closed wing of his family's mansion, and then decades later has cause to recall it.
22. By Water (1914): Vividly demonstrating what it's like to be lost in the Sahara and to drown there without knowing that one is drowning.
23. A Victim of Higher Space (1914): What happens when you become able to enter the 4th dimension without being able to control your coming or going? Better visit the Psychic Doctor John Silence for some advice and empathy. An unusually funny story.
The Spring Books edition is well made (binding, pages, and print), but marred by jarring typos, at least one per story, whether the wrong words spelled correctly (e.g., the/that, tall/tell, if/it, etc.) or the right words spelled incorrectly (e.g., bpon/upon, dakrness/darkness, lefet/left, hitory/history, etc.).
From the standpoint of contemporary mores, some of Blackwood’s stories have embarrassing elements of gender (e.g., twenty-five year old “girls” with “little” feet and hearts) and race (e.g., “Redskins, whatever they may feel, show little”), and he wasn’t at his best channeling Western pulps (e.g., “Ain’t it jest possible”), but given his era he open-mindedly viewed cultural, religious, scientific, and romantic matters, and his stories champion tolerance of different ways of understanding the divine or supernatural. And the stories here are mostly beautiful, thoughtful, powerful, and well-written fantastic literature.
December 12, 2012
Really solid collection of imaginative short stories. The Olive is a beautiful, little tale and my personal favourite from this book.
January 1, 2026
The editor’s comment about the author conveying awe is spot-on. Each story has a fairly standard, or at least unsurprising, plot. Some even led me to predict the ending within the first page or two. But the bulk of the prose in each story was spent in conveying atmosphere and feeling. Sometimes this goes on for several pages. It was a bit too florid for me at times, but frequently the effects were beautiful. Another interesting aspect of the stories is that, in *most* of them, the protagonist survives the tribulations in the story, but usually comes out the other end profoundly changed. Very interesting take on the ghost story genre.
October 4, 2024
What more is there to say.
Blackwood is up there with M R James as a master wordsmith of the uneasy and supernatural.
A great mix of stories.
Blackwood is up there with M R James as a master wordsmith of the uneasy and supernatural.
A great mix of stories.
November 26, 2025
I remember this being a vivid and well-written collection of short stories. Some beautiful imagery, and truly weird stuff.
January 7, 2023
If I was slightly less enchanted by his Best Ghost Stories on my latest read than I was after first reading it, I think I can claim after finishing this collection of short weird tales by turn of the twentieth century English writer Algernon Blackwood, that these tales are definitely not his best. While a couple of the stories included here do make an appearance in the latter collection, the majority of these “tales of the mysteries and macabre” don’t really do much for me. Perhaps it was a side effect of reading the musty, yellowed pages of my copy of the book, but these tales felt just as musty and dusty. Many of Blackwood’s common motifs appear here; the mysterious power of nature, fraught relationships between characters, a strong build up of emotion, but all were better realized in some of his other tales of supernatural horror included the Best Ghost Stories collection and after a while felt quite repetitive.
The best of the pieces included in Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre are, like “The Heath Fire,” “The Wings of Horus” or “A Victim of Higher Space,” merely slightly more boring examinations of themes explored more effectively in Blackwood’s other stories. It didn’t help that many of them are particularly fraught with Blackwood’s period English racial attitudes and condescension, none worse than the first tale included, “Chinese Magic,” in which the entire shocking revelation of the story is that an English antiquarian loves China so much he delusionally believes his own wife is Chinese! Oh, the horror! One can only be thankful that it’s all in the poor chap’s head, the narrator concludes. All in all, these stories are only for completionists, I feel, and you can really stick with The Best Ghost Stories for a stronger representation of Blackwood’s ideas and moods with none of the works here being at all essential.
The best of the pieces included in Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre are, like “The Heath Fire,” “The Wings of Horus” or “A Victim of Higher Space,” merely slightly more boring examinations of themes explored more effectively in Blackwood’s other stories. It didn’t help that many of them are particularly fraught with Blackwood’s period English racial attitudes and condescension, none worse than the first tale included, “Chinese Magic,” in which the entire shocking revelation of the story is that an English antiquarian loves China so much he delusionally believes his own wife is Chinese! Oh, the horror! One can only be thankful that it’s all in the poor chap’s head, the narrator concludes. All in all, these stories are only for completionists, I feel, and you can really stick with The Best Ghost Stories for a stronger representation of Blackwood’s ideas and moods with none of the works here being at all essential.
November 19, 2009
Amazing...!!!!!
August 6, 2011
I read this anthology when I was about 13 - and fell in morbid love with many of the stories. This is I think the first horror collection I ever read.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews