Our Appendix N Archeology and Adventures in Fiction series are meant to take a look at the writers and creators behind the genre(s) that helped to forge not only our favorite hobby but our lives. We invite you to explore the entirety of the series on our Adventures In Fiction home page. Appendix N Archaeology: Algernon Blackwood By Bradley K. McDevitt Contrary to what his name suggests he was, English author Algernon Henry Blackwood (1869-1951) was neither an escapee from a Charles Dickens novel nor a member of the faculty of Hogwarts. What Blackwood was, in fact, was one of the most admired writers of the early twentieth century. H.P. Lovecraft, one of the cornerstone authors of Appendix N, had this to say about one of Blackwood’s stories: “The Willows is the finest weird story I have ever read.” art by Lawrence Sterne Stevens Strong praise from a writer who took great pride in the breadth of his literary scholarship. However, Lovecraft also made this comment about Blackwood in one of his thousands of pages of correspondence to friends: “It is safe to say that Blackwood is the greatest living weirdest despite unevenness and a poor prose style.” The source of those criticisms has a simple explanation. In addition to being so admired, Blackwood was possibly one of the most prolific authors working at the time, turning out no less than fourteen novels, ten anthologies, and numerous children’s books and plays. To whit, due to the tight deadlines, he was regularly given by his newspaper clients like the Westminster Gazette, Blackwell himself ended up unsure how many stories he did complete during his long career. All, however, were of exemplary quality, with some shared themes that arose from Blackwood’s love of the travel and the outdoors. Unlike some authors who set their stories in exotic locales (like many of Ashton-Smith’s tales, set everywhere from medieval France, to the Amazon, to Mars), Blackwood delighted in setting his most chilling stories in the most banal of locales, then turning everything ninety degrees to sheer terror. As a simple example, The Occupant of the Room takes place in a small hotel suite rented by a teacher on a walking tour of the Alps while on holiday. Compared to R.E. Howard’s The Black Stone, with its setting of a decayed hamlet deep in a floridly described version of Germany’s Black...