Some people are christened to their art: parents beware, when you start flicking through that baby name book, you might be doing more than just choosing a name, you might be fixing the pole to which your child’s life is forever aligned. Put Chanelle around her neck and, I’m afraid, the best she will ever aspire to is coming third on Big Brother. Usain Bolt – well, what else. And the parents of Algernon Blackwood had clearly decided they wanted their son to write weird fiction – particularly when they added in to the cocktail of potential the combination of genes that meant little Algie grew up to look like this:

Luckily – although that may not be quite the right word – Blackwood turned out to have the literary and imaginative gifts necessary to write ghost stories – and other fictions, that skate around the edge of the supernatural and indefinable, hinting at things that, if seen, would either shrivel in the light of sight, or shrivel sight in the light of seeing.

In The Willows, one of the stories in this collection, and the best known, one of the characters says:

‘All my life I have been strangely, vividly conscious of another region – not far removed from our own world in one sense, yet wholly different in kind – where great things go on unceasingly, where immense and terrible personalities hurry by, intent on vast purposes compared to which earthly affairs, the rise and fall of nations, the destinies of empires, the fate of armies and continents, are all as dust in the balance; vast purposes, I mean, that deal directly with the soul, and not indirectly with mere expressions of the soul…

[He continues] ‘You think it is the spirit of the elements, and I thought it was perhaps the old gods. But I tell you now it is – neither. These would be comprehensible entities, for they have relations with men, depending upon them for worship or sacrifice, whereas these beings who are now about us have absolutely nothing to do with mankind, and it is mere chance that their space happens just at this spot to touch our own.’

 Now, this is pretty well what I think. Our seemingly so, so solid world is cut through by other realities, most of which are completely beyond our reck. But, sometimes, things slip, in the thin places, the rubbed through areas, and worlds that were not meant to meet, mix, for a while, before the wheels of creation drive them apart again.

So, I loved this collection of short stories. While Blackwood might not have the wit (or sheer talent) of our best known contemporary writer of weird fiction, Neil Gaiman, he has one great advantage: he knows he’s dealing with something more than mind stuff, and that imbues his work with the edge, the bottom, to use an old-fashioned word, that Gaiman lacks.

But at least Gaiman isn’t subjected to the dubious talents of whatever artist drew the cover illustration for this book: isn’t it dreadful. Blackwood must be blue.