The Empty House, and Other Ghost Stories

Algernon Blackwood, one of the founding fathers of modern ghost and horror stories, inspired generations of writers from H.P. Lovecraft to Shirley Jackson and our very own Ramsey Campbell. Blackwood’s ‘The Empty House’ is one of the most famous haunted house stories in the English language, with its carefully crafted gathering of tension and dread inference of terrors lurking at the end every corridor, around every corner, through every half-opened door. This edition includes ‘A Haunted Island’, ‘The Wood of the Dead’, ‘Skeleton Lake’ and several other ghoulish tales. AUTHOR: 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.