The Whisperers and Other Stories A Lifetime of the Supernatural

'Back from the shouting floor and ceiling came the chorus of images that stormed and clamoured for expression. Jones lay still and listened; he let them come. There was nothing else to do.'

Algernon Blackwood was one of the most influential writers of twentieth-century weird and supernatural fiction. He once told a correspondent that every story he wrote was based on either a personal experience or that of someone he knew, and thus the vast collection of short stories and novels published in his lifetime can be seen to form a kind of autobiography.

In this collection of his most atmospheric and uneasy tales, Mike Ashley provides the facts of Blackwood’s life which inspired each story – including experiences as an intelligence agent in the First World War and adventures in New York – to tell the parallel tale of the author’s lifetime of the supernatural.

Mike Ashley is an author, anthologist and editor with a specialism for seeking out rare strange stories from the periodicals and magazines of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is an expert in the fields of weird fiction and classic mystery stories, and a leading authority on the history and development of the occult detection tale.

Algernon Blackwood (1859–1951) was an English author, broadcasting narrator and journalist who published over 230 short stories and 47 books in his lifetime. He was deeply interested in occult and mystic studies, and powers that lie beyond normal human recognition. His regular appearances narrating stories on radio and early television programs garnered him the epithet of ‘The Ghost Man’.