New on Librivox, for free and public domain, the audiobook for Incredible Adventures (1914) by Algernon Blackwood.
A scanned copy of Incredible Adventures is already available.
A British thesis holds a New Age review of the period, in passing…
[New Age, 6 July (1911), IX: 10, page 2. The New Age magazine discussed] the poetic failure to do justice to mystical subject matter [and stated it was] a symptom of all ‘transitional’ literature attempting to capture and represent the essence of the unseen. A review primarily of Algernon Blackwood’s Incredible Adventures (1914), but drawing on other comparable writers articulates the problem that the world created by Blackwood’s fiction is in constant flux: it is an ‘incalculable world’ such as the ‘logical mind of man, the mind of words, can have no intelligent contact’. Blackwood’s world remains alien to the reviewer of his fiction because no language, and by implication genre, has been found by which to adequately express the significance and substance of the unseen world. Hitherto a fantasy or metaphorical space in fiction, the unseen world was now being charted and co-opted by, for example, the life sciences and the sciences of the mind and a medical language being expanded with which to describe its structures and their meanings. In light of science’s demystification of occult psychical space, Blackwood’s magical composition is too vague for the modern reader and can carry therefore no weight of narrative meaning; the reliance for narrative drive on the tension between ‘white or black’ magic is further made irrelevant by the popular view of psychiatry as having triumphed over demonology.
Lovecraft, however, fully approved of the book’s subtlety and atmosphere…
In the volume titled Incredible Adventures occur some of the finest tales which the author has yet produced, leading the fancy to wild rites on nocturnal hills, to secret and terrible aspects lurking behind stolid scenes, and to unimaginable vaults of mystery below the sands and pyramids of Egypt; all with a serious finesse and delicacy that convince where a cruder or lighter treatment would merely amuse. Some of these accounts are hardly stories at all, but rather studies in elusive impressions and half-remembered snatches of dream. Plot is everywhere negligible, and atmosphere reigns untrammelled.” (Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”, Collected Essays)
If Blackwood’s story “A Descent into Egypt” interests you, but you find the plot “negligible”, then there’s a more jut-jawed Egyptian audio adventure from Dark Adventure Radio Theatre. They’re currently taking pre-orders for their new The Temple of Jupiter Ammon recording…
an original tale of two-fisted archaeology and adventure … expected to be released around December.
