Algernon Blackwood

Most episodes involved a protagonist in dire life or death straits, and this series featured more science fiction and supernatural tales than suspense did.

Some of the most famous episodes included an adaptation of the most dangerous game featuring Hans Connery, Algernon Blackwood's Confession.

and Vincent Price in Three Skeleton King.

And that was a tale of three men trapped in an isolated lighthouse by thousands of rats.

There's so many good things because like with folk horror, you just talk to old folks or people out in the boonies, like all those like folk tales.

Like if you like existential dread, uh, like Algernon Blackwood stuff is really good.

Chamberlain's works are really great.

Uh, author, uh, mentions with like the white people is a really good inspiration too.

Ah, there we go.

I was thinking there's definitely some of that same DNA you could see follows through into Blackwood's work there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Silence was the next big one.

I mean, that's quite a jump, that's like 10 years, because the John Silence stories were collected in 1908.

This was a big deal.

Blackwood was already a fairly big name at the time, but this was a huge publishing release.

So much so that I think, I don't know, I was speculating that the best known story in the collection, and one that we're actually going to be doing as our Christmas ghost story reading on the Good Friends server this year, is Ancient Sorceries.

Today we escape to a remote section of Wales and a strange village between two worlds.

As Algernon Blackwood described it in his eerie story, Ancient Sorceries.

I had spent a week's vacation in Wales, and was returning to London by train when it all began.

It was late afternoon.

Escape.

Produced by William N. Robeson and directed by Norman MacDonald.

Today brought to you Ancient Sorceries by Algernon Blackwood...

Adapted for radio by Les Crutchfield, with Paul Freese as Arthur Llewellyn, Kay Brinker as Ilsa, Anne Morrison as Madam, and William Conrad as the Doctor.

I've been reading a lot of his works recently and he is so good.

Like he and Algernon Blackwood are so good at describing environment and really getting into that, that you can find those like fun words, fun combinations of words that stick with you.

Lovecraft's.

Oh, wasn't the outsider.

If you missed part one, go back and start there.

This is The Willows by Algernon Blackwood, part two.

Chapter Four The sun was high in the heavens when my companion woke me from a heavy sleep and announced that the porridge was cooked and there was just time to bathe.

The grateful smell of frizzling bacon entered the tent door.

awful mark.

And when I turned my eyes again from his ghastly face to the river, the current had done its work, and the body had been swept away into midstream and was already beyond our reach and almost out of sight, turning over and over on the waves like an otter.

Algernon Blackwood made this trip himself in 1900 in a Canadian canoe with a friend.

He wrote a travel piece about it afterward.