The four stories in this collection -- "The Insanity of Jones," "The Man Who Found Out," "The Glamour of the Snow," and "Sand" -- are counted among the author's best. Blackwood wrote over 200 short stories and 12 novels, and is considered by some to be the greatest supernatural writer of the early 20th century. His stories are most often set in an ordinary world, so that when the horror and ghostly elements appear, they surprise the narrator and the reader. Even the most innocent meeting (as in "The Glamour of the Snow" can turn into an event of terror. "The girl stood in front of him, very near; he felt her chilly breath upon his cheeks; her hair passed blindingly across his eyes; and that icy wind came with her. He saw her whiteness close; again, it seemed, his sight passed through her into space as though she had no face."

Author Biography

Algernon Henry Blackwood (1869 - 1951) was an English short story writer and novelist, one of the most prolific writers of ghost stories in the history of the genre. He was also a journalist and a broadcasting narrator. S. T. Joshi has stated that "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."