Finding More Stories to Record

As I mentioned in my last post, I started with "Entrance and Exit" because I already knew the story. But, then, after thoroughly enjoying the reading of that story, I decided to look for other stories by Algernon Blackwood. I admire, first of all, the chance to delve into the literary structure and discipline that goes with his writing... I had several terrific English teachers growing up, and I know that I am fairly competent with the written expression of my language, but I am often thrilled to discover something that I did not know. For example...

The coloring of an infinitive
What I discovered upon one of my readings solidified something that I had begun to realize before: that, in "standard English," one is not supposed to insert an adverb into the middle of an infinitive. I realized this by noticing, in the first sentence of the sixth paragraph of a story by Blackwood called "The Dance of Death," how he wrote, "The spontaneous jollity natural to a boy and girl dance served, however, to emphasize vividly the contrast of his own mood..." Notice the phrase that I italicized (it is not italicized in the story). In English, a trouble that we sometimes have is that our infinitives - to go, to run, to stop, to love, etc. - consist of two words, and that we often insert our adverbs into the middle of those phrases - to boldly go, to quickly run, to abruptly stop, to madly love. Of course, there are practicality issues... Who really cares if people do it or not? The answer to this could be a resounding "just English teachers." :) "The meaning is still there" would be a solid argument against such language harping. But, whether or not a person chooses to follow this prim practice, a writer could certainly use this device of "proper" English to give his or her writing a rustic or noble feel. But, I digress...

Making a decision
The point is that, through perusing some more Blackwood stories, and knowing that the LibriVox message thread manager wanted more ghost stories, I decided to record an entire collection, a full ten stories, by Blackwood, and send them in to the LibriVox catalog.

I settled on this particular collection after I printed off and read four Blackwood stories. (It is also worth noting that, for some reason, many of the stories on horrormasters.com, the location where I found "Entrance and Exit," are unprintable. This would be understandable if the stories were under copyright, but many are under public domain! So, if a story is on Gutenberg, one can just copy and paste the text and print from a word processing program or from the Gutenberg page itself.) I especially liked (See, I did the adverb insertion thing, too! I find that amusing to notice. :) ) "A Haunted Island" and "The Empty House." Since those two stories were of the same collection, I gave birth to a brainchild... Why not just do the whole collection?

For your convenience, the full collection, "The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories," is available on Gutenberg.org.

The first story that I will tackle is "A Haunted Island" because I enjoy its thriller qualities, which I will describe in detail when I present another post with my full analysis.