Algernon Blackwood had a largely forgotten long career, first as a short story writer and later as a novelist, then broadcaster on radio and early BBC TV. At one time, he was far better known for his radio/TV appearances. I came to his work many years ago by reading one of his supernatural short stories, 'The Wendigo', in a collection of ghost stories. Most of his work is not, in fact, traditional ghost story material but falls more into the arena of strange presences in the great outdoors, since he was always a great traveller in what, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were the largely unexplored wild places of Canada and Eastern Europe.

This collection brings together the more obscure writings and broadcasts of his career, stemming from an early short story which did take a traditional haunted house as setting, through to extracts from four novels, and some stories from broadcasts, the criteria being that these are all stories not collected prior to the 1989 publication of this anthology. I won't say much about individual stories, simply because, having made the mistake of passing on my copy elsewhere before writing my review, most of it has left little impression. The only things I have retained is the gist of a propaganda story Blackwood wrote during WWII, which struck me as more suiting WWI because the soldier protagonist is suffering from shell shock, in which the convalescing soldier is visited by a special visitor with a national character Britannia, and two of the novel extracts, one where a young boy lives in an alternative world in which he is being taught by his teacher to fly, while he is actually unconscious after a serious accident, and another where the protagonist has a weird unworldly out of body experience while lying on the lawn sunbathing with the children of his hosts - that would have all kinds of dodgy connotations to a modern audience - where they visit the abode of the winds.

The stories have an older style of narrative which comes across as a bit long drawn out, though on occasions beautifully described, and the climaxes occasionally fall flat, so have rated it only 2 star. ( )

Several previously uncollected tales, not Blackwood's best, but then, even Blackwood's worse is pretty good. ( )