This image is the cover for the book The Garden of Survival, Classics To Go

The Garden of Survival, Classics To Go

The Garden of Survival, written in 1918, began in Blackwood’s usual polished and expressive style. His protagonist, Richard, a former military man now making a living as a foreign diplomat in Africa, details in epistolary format his musings of life and love. We are informed of his having been married for a very short time --his wife, a vision of beauty and possessing a special talent to bewitch admirers by playing her alluring harp for them is ‘Je ne se quoi’ personified, it seems. And given the short duration of the marriage, as well as a few well-placed ominous descriptions of her penchant for attracting the opposite sex, the reader soon gets the idea that this woman is most definitely not what she seems.

Algernon Blackwood

Algernon Henry Blackwood, CBE (14 March 1869 – 10 December 1951) was an English short story writer and novelist, one of the most prolific writers of ghost stories in the history of the genre. He was also a journalist and a broadcasting narrator. S. T. Joshi has stated that "his work is more consistently meritorious than any weird writer's except Dunsany's" and that his short story collection Incredible Adventures (1914) "may be the premier weird collection of this or any other century”. (Wikipedia)

OTB ebook