This collection assembles four of Blackwood's greatest stories: "The Insanity of Jones," "The Man Who Found Out," "The Glamour of the Snow," and "Sand."

The son of a preacher, Blackwood had a life-long interest in the supernatural, the occult, and spiritualism, and firmly believed that humans possess latent psychic powers. The autobiography Episodes Before Thirty (1923) tells of his lean years as a journalist in New York. In the late 1940s, Blackwood had a television program on the BBC on which he read . . . ghost stories!