The Willows and The Wendigo: Illustrated and Annotated

Two classics of supernatural horror, in an illustrated edition with a new introduction, explanatory notes, and texts restored from early printings.

H. P. Lovecraft considered "The Willows" the finest weird tale he knew, and ranked "The Wendigo" only a little below it. More than a century later, both stories still head most lists of the best supernatural fiction ever written. Algernon Blackwood took the ghost story out of the haunted house and into the wilderness, where the threat comes not from the dead but from nature itself, and from whatever may lie behind it.

THE WILLOWS (1907). Two friends canoeing down the flooded Danube make camp on a small sandbank below Pressburg, in a vast, empty region of marshes and willow islands. A paddle goes missing, the canoe is damaged, strange hollows appear in the sand, and a humming sound comes and goes. Each event has a natural explanation, until the explanations begin to fail.

THE WENDIGO (1910). A moose hunt in the forests north of Rat Portage, in northwestern Ontario, turns to terror when a guide disappears into the night, crying out about height and fire in his feet. The search that follows, through snow and silence, leads to one of the most frightening scenes in the literature of horror.

The new introduction traces Blackwood's remarkable life: his strict evangelical upbringing, his years in the Canadian backwoods, his struggles as a New York reporter, his membership in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and his late fame as the BBC's "Ghost Man." It shows how both stories grew from real journeys, including Blackwood's own 1900 canoe trip down the Danube. It also explores the Algonquian windigo tradition, how Blackwood reshaped it, and how the two tales influenced Lovecraft, August Derleth, and the whole tradition of cosmic horror.

This edition features:

• A new introduction on Blackwood's life, the real places and journeys behind the stories, and their lasting influence
• 40 explanatory notes on places, historical references, and unfamiliar words, from Carnuntum and the "flying bridge" ferries of the Danube to voyageurs, lumber camps, and backwoods slang. The notes explain without interpreting, and none of them reveals the endings.
• 15 illustrations depicting key scenes from both stories
• Texts collated word by word with the 1917 Knopf editions, correcting the errors found in commonly circulated versions: scanning mistakes, Americanized spelling, regularized dialect, and changed or dropped words. Blackwood's British spelling and the original dialect of the guides have been restored.

For first-time readers and longtime admirers alike, this is a faithful and accessible edition of two masterpieces of wilderness horror.