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"Running Wolf" is a vivid story of an encounter between a lone huntsman in the Canadian backwoods and a timber wolf with strangely human behaviours.
Blackwood builds the tension from the outset, with vague warnings from local hunters about the areas around Medicine Lake that Hyde should avoid, through to the unsettlingly gradual approach of the preternatural wolf and its silently urgent appeal.

"Ancient Sorceries" is one of my favourite stories. It is redolent of cats, and feline imagery is woven throughout it, but how many actually appear? ?
Meek suburbanite, Arthur Vezin feels overwhelmed by the raucous behaviour of fellow English tourists aboard a train travelling through Northern France, and takes the uncharacteristically spontaneous step of debarking at a medieval village, becoming enmeshed in an autumnal twilight world, where ⬇️

Onto the next story, "Ancient Sorceries", a classic that includes cats?‍⬛, a psychic detective (Dr. John Silence), cats?‍⬛, an eldritch French village, cats?‍⬛, witches, and cats?‍⬛. Did I mention cats??‍⬛
I love the facing illustration and decorated title for this story.

"Here was a place unpolluted by men, kept clean by the winds from coarsening human influences, a place where spiritual agencies were within reach and aggressive. Never, before or since, have I been so attacked by indescribable suggestions of a "beyond region," of another scheme of life, another evolution not parallel to the human. And in the end our minds would succumb under the weight of the awful spell, and we would be drawn across the ⬇️

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

"After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Buda-Pesth, the Danube enters a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low willow-bushes."
"The Willows" by Algernon Blackwood, illustration by Sidney Stanley

The tales are "queer" as in "peculiar", and with that wonderful name and that characterful face, what other kind of tale was Algernon going to write?
I've read the title story and "Ancient Sorceries" in a modern edition, the edition I'm reading now being the 1925 one shown in the image, though sadly my copy no longer has that excellent dust jacket. It is illustrated, though, and I'll post some of them as I go along ?

I enjoyed 99 Stories of God more, but this one has some gems, too. And #72 made me guffaw.

Doing so little reading lately thanks to so much working! 😣 But this lovely bookmail from Mariner certainly makes me hope some free time magically appears soon!! 😍

My last post having been an anti-capitalist one, I have to admit that I made a rare purchase from Am@zon for this one 😞
Checking out bibliographic details of the book, I saw that they had a returned copy at a ridiculously low price and, as I definitely wouldn't have paid full price anywhere, I gave in to temptation! 🧚‍♂️🪄
Stableford edited a series of 18th century French contes de fées, which weirdly have overly-sexualised images of ⬇️

Talk about beautiful stories that bring happiness- wow 🤩