John Silence

He keeps no ordinary practice. His patients are not turned away for lack of money, but accepted only if their suffering lies beyond the reach of medicine – the woman haunted by something that moves in the walls of her new house, the clergyman whose quiet life has been invaded by a presence older than Christianity, the traveller who returns from a French village with a soul not quite his own. Dr. John Silence – wealthy, learned, monkishly disciplined – is a physician of the unseen, and the cases he takes are the ones no one else dares to name. First published in 1908, this landmark collection helped invent the figure of the occult detective and remains one of the strangest, most atmospheric works in the literature of the supernatural. Blackwood, who knew the borderlands of consciousness better than almost any writer of his age, sends his calm, formidable healer into haunted houses, fire-cults, and the dreaming wildernesses of the human mind – and brings back tales that hum, even now, with a quiet and unmistakable dread. This collection contains the following stories: - A Psychical Invasion - Ancient Sorceries - The Nemesis Of Fire - Secret Worship - The Camp of the Dog - A Victim of Higher Space