Ten Minute Stories / Day and Night Stories

Ten Minute Stories / Day and Night Stories

The author plunges with boldness, yet with consistent invention, into the realm of the fantastic. -The Outlook

Ten Minute Stories, originally published in 1914, and Day and Night Stories, from 1917, offer two superlative story collections of ghost stories, strange nature tales, weird events and dark fantasies from one of the greatest writers of supernatural fiction in the 20th century. These pieces are shorter than Algernon Blackwood usually produced, little thoughts or episodes which he often scribbled in his notebook high up in the mountains and then typed up later that day, and sold to newspapers back in England, as Mike Ashley points out in his informative introduction.

Some of these stories are humorous slices-of-life, matter-of-fact stories borne out from Blackwood’s love of human observation. Many of the Day and Night Stories were written during World War I, and are more reflective than his earlier tales. Most have at least a tinge of the mystic to them. A bonus story, The Farmhouse on the Hill, appears in book form for the first time, an early story that originally appeared in an Australian newspaper in 1907. These are stories that capture the shifting qualities of perception as daylight gradually fades into dusk, and the curtain of dreams is pulled gently across our vision–short stories of day…into night.