Nemesis Fire & Others Collected Short Fiction

This second volume of Algernon Blackwoods complete short stories includes the six stories he wrote about the psychic detective John Silence. Only five of them were collected in John SilencePhysician Extraordinary (1908), which became a bestseller and allowed Blackwood to spend the next six years in financial security. The John Silence stories set the pattern for the psychic detective, and dozens of authors have imitated the detectives pursuit of the strange and supernatural. For Blackwood, the John Silence stories allowed him to express some of his most deeply held beliefs as well as to adapt elements from his own life. "Secret Worship" is based on Blackwoods time with the Moravian Brotherhood in Germany. "Ancient Sorceries" is a haunting tale of metempsychosis, where the inhabitants of a French town turn into cats at night. "The Camp of the Dog" is a powerful werewolf story. Other stories are innovative ghost stories or tales of peculiar happenings in ordinary settings. Many of these appeared in leading British periodicals of the day, but not all of them were gathered into Blackwoods several collections of this period The Lost Valley and Other Stories (1910), Ten Minute Stories (1914), and others. The book concludes with Blackwoods provocative introduction to a 1942 edition of John Silence. The volume has been edited by S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on weird fiction who has established the most accurate text of Blackwoods tales. | Algernon Blackwood The Nemesis of Fire & Others: Collected Short Fiction of