Algernon Blackwood 1 hr 32 min read

He paints trees by some divining instinct of their essential natures, catching the living personality of each, and the great forest beside his cottage begins, slowly, to love him back.

Algernon Blackwood's 1912 novella is a masterpiece of nature-mysticism and quiet supernatural dread. Atmospheric, profound, superbly told. Read it for one of the great weird tales, an old painter drawn ever deeper into communion with a sentient wood, and the wife who watches, helpless, as the trees claim her husband's soul.

In its time

Published in 1912, during the 1910s, lost worlds and interplanetary adventure.

Reading it

1 hr 32 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).