Welcome to Litsy!

Not all of the stories were 5 ⭐, but those that were were *so* 5⭐ that I've no hesitation in giving a maximum rating to the collection as a whole.
Blackwood's ability to evoke a liminal sense of something other impinging on the ordinary is wonderful, and this overlay of one reality with another is probably most fully developed in the classic "Ancient Sorceries", but is evident throughout in degrees. ⬇️

"The Occupant of the Room" is one of the shorter stories in this collection, so Blackwood doesn't mince words on poetic descriptions of the Swiss Alps or the quaint mountain village hotel, he just gets on with making the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, and with sending shivers down the spine ?
Featuring an otherworldly wardrobe, but, "Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Narnia anymore!"
CWs in comment.

"Fear, once in, is difficult to dislodge."
- The Occupant of the Room

When will people in ghost stories realise that they should avoid the fortuitous turn of events that must surely end in terror?!
I'm at the start of the story, but I'd definitely advise Minturn, a tourist in the Swiss Alps, not to accept the hotel room of the woman who went missing in the mountains a couple of days previously, whose return is surely inevitable, alive or dead! ?

"Through the confusion upon his faculties, rose a certain hint of insecurity that betrayed itself by a slight hesitancy or miscalculation in one or two unimportant actions. There was a touch of melancholy, too, a sense of something lost. It lay, perhaps, in that tinge of sadness which accompanies twilight on an autumn day, when a gentler, mournful beauty veils a greater beauty that is past."

- The Tryst

It took me a while to get through "The Man Whom the Trees Loved". It's a slow paced novella that I found rewarded my patience with it. There's an initial section focusing on the eponymous man, a retired forester whose cottage on the edge of the New Forest allows him access to the trees he loves, and which come to love him in turn with an inhuman jealousy that threatens to possess and subsume him into themselves.
⬇️

"The forest held her with its giant fascination. In this secluded breathing-spot that the centuries had left untouched, she had stepped close against the hidden pulse of the whole collective mass of them. They were aware of her and had turned to gaze with their myriad sight upon the intruder... And their steady stare shocked her as though in some sense she knew that she was naked. They saw so much of her: she saw of them - so little."

I thought all the stories in this book were interesting and well written.

For the rest of my review, visit my Vlog at:

https://youtu.be/BaRDOI0T7Mo

Enjoy!

“She feared long words she did not understand. Beelzebub lay hid among too many syllables.”

- Algernon Blackwood, "The Man Whom the Trees Loved"

Sophie Bittacy learned her religion at her minister father's knee, accepted this heritage wholesale, without reflection or consideration, and her reaction to non-Biblical ideas put me in mind of Asimov's words on anti-intellectualism.