Elsewhere & Otherwise

TALES OF THE UNCANNY AND SUPERNATURAL (426 pp.)--Algernon Blackwood--British Book Centre ($3).

It was just about closing time when the corpse walked into the photographic studio of Mr. Mortimer Jenkyn. "Without speaking, he moved straight across the room and posed himself in front of the dingy back-ground of painted trees . . . seated himself in the faded armchair, crossed his legs, drew up the little round table with the artificial roses upon it ... and struck an attitude. He meant to be photographed."

When a corpse comes calling, it is perhaps wisest to do just as Mr. Jenkyn did in one of these Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural by Algernon Blackwood--he made the old boy right at home. U.S. readers might profitably do as much for the author of the stories. Algernon Blackwood doesn't write much these days, but 30 years ago he was one of fiction's most famous commuters to the Great Beyond.

The 22 tales in this volume, culled from his nine books of short stories, give readers their first new chance in more than a decade to take a full evening of that old Blackwood magic. In general, it still works. In fact, the Tales may win for his old age (he is now 81) a literary reputation he never enjoyed at the height of his fame. They show him to be one of the most original writers in the line that descends from Edgar Poe to the authors of Mandrake the Magician, and in which he has few peers (some of them: M. R. James, Henry James, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, W. W. Jacobs).

Space Is a Weapon. Anybody looking for a strong sense of human reality wil not find it in Blackwood. In The Man Whom the Trees Loved, for instance, he maunders through a 70-page vagary in which a man is slowly taken over into the vegetable kingdom. Blackwood provides no human motives whatever for this slow mutation. However, he provides such sinister vegetable ones that a nervous reader may take to watching his peas and cucumbers in quite a new way. In The Terror of the Twins, space is somehow seized as a weapon in the invisible hands of a spirit, and used to gouge the soul out of one man and prod it into another; the characters are dim as ghosts, but the malefic air is almost as palpable as a knife in the ribs.

In his eagerness to read everything, from the hearts of celery to the mind of God, as well as in the gingerbread elaborations of his style, Author Blackwood is more a Victorian than a modern. Yet, far more than most Victorians, Blackwood has a fervor for the inhuman, subhuman, or superhuman, and a distaste for the world of men. The story in which Black wood expresses his keenest distaste for actual life is perhaps his most carefully composed one, The Lost Valley. Twin brothers, who have lived only for each other for 35 years, find themselves in love with the same woman, resolve on suicide as the only way out. One of his eeriest tales, The Wendigo (a notable omission in this collection), creates an atmosphere in which it Is difficult not to believe in a grisly, devouring spirit that haunts the frozen wilderness of the Canadian north woods.

It is hard, at the end of the book, not to feel that Author Blackwood is a man who could express his sense of life only indirectly, by writing horror stories about it.

Life Is Terrible. For a man who seems to have found life usually unpleasant and often terrible, Algernon Blackwood has lived quite a lot of it. He was born into the British upper classes, the son of the Duchess of Manchester and her second husband, a gentleman usher to Queen Victoria. Algernon was such a dreamy boy

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