The Dance of Death
Mar. 30th, 2006 11:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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darkling_talesLJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY dfordoom)
The Dance of Death and other stories is a collection of weird tales by Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951). In some ways his stories are not unlike the work of his near contemporary Arthur Machen. There’s the sense of another reality that we’re not normally aware, a world that occasionally intersects our own. It’s a reality that can be hostile, but isn’t always. In this collection The Touch of Pan and The Valley of the Beasts are the best examples of that tendency in Blackwood’s writing. The Old Man of Visions isn’t a horror story at all. It’s a wistful story of a man who finds a way to gain access to visions of other-wordly things, but then loses it. The title story is the most conventional and least interesting story in the collection but it’s still a reasonably satisfying ghostly story. The South Wind is just a brief mood piece. A Psychical Invasion is one of the many stories Blackwood wrote about psychic detective Dr John Silence. In this story Silence has two colleagues to help him in his investigation, a black cat called Smoke and an ageing collie dog called Flame (Smoke and Flame happen to be particular friends so they work well together). Blackwood tells us that both cat and dogs are able to perceive aspects of the hidden world that humans cannot see, but cats and dogs don’t see this world in the same way.
Overall this is a fine collection. There’s nothing in it to equal the greatness of with Blackwood’s finest stories like Ancient Sorceries, Nemesis of Fire or The Willows, but it’s still a consistently excellent collection, and a must for any fan of late 19th/early 20th century weird fiction. And if you’re not familiar with this type of fiction it’s not a bad starting point.
dfordoom)The Dance of Death and other stories is a collection of weird tales by Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951). In some ways his stories are not unlike the work of his near contemporary Arthur Machen. There’s the sense of another reality that we’re not normally aware, a world that occasionally intersects our own. It’s a reality that can be hostile, but isn’t always. In this collection The Touch of Pan and The Valley of the Beasts are the best examples of that tendency in Blackwood’s writing. The Old Man of Visions isn’t a horror story at all. It’s a wistful story of a man who finds a way to gain access to visions of other-wordly things, but then loses it. The title story is the most conventional and least interesting story in the collection but it’s still a reasonably satisfying ghostly story. The South Wind is just a brief mood piece. A Psychical Invasion is one of the many stories Blackwood wrote about psychic detective Dr John Silence. In this story Silence has two colleagues to help him in his investigation, a black cat called Smoke and an ageing collie dog called Flame (Smoke and Flame happen to be particular friends so they work well together). Blackwood tells us that both cat and dogs are able to perceive aspects of the hidden world that humans cannot see, but cats and dogs don’t see this world in the same way.
Overall this is a fine collection. There’s nothing in it to equal the greatness of with Blackwood’s finest stories like Ancient Sorceries, Nemesis of Fire or The Willows, but it’s still a consistently excellent collection, and a must for any fan of late 19th/early 20th century weird fiction. And if you’re not familiar with this type of fiction it’s not a bad starting point.
