During a career spanning sixty-one years, Algernon Henry Blackwood wrote more stories and novels in the realms of the psychic, mystic, and supernatural than any other contemporary. Much of his neoromantic fiction is of high quality and particularly excels at evoking atmosphere, leading no less an expert than H. P. Lovecraft to refer in 1927 to Blackwood's work as "some of the finest spectral literature of this or any age." E. F. Bleiler more recently confirms Blackwood's position as "the foremost British supernaturalist of the twentieth century." However, Blackwood has often been misleadingly labeled as simply a ghost-story writer and thus underrated, though he deals with a vast array of psychological and spiritual states in stories ranging from the psychologically realistic to portrayals of nature as alive and potentially threatening to the evocation of mystical union with the divine. His novels in particular have been underrated. On this larger...