John SilenceAlgernon BlackwoodWEIRD TALESA man's experimentation with drugs opens his mind to an attack by a supernatural force. The tale is based on both Blackwood's own experiments with drugs and his occult learning whilst in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.Algernon Henry Blackwood, CBE (14 March 1869 - 10 December 1951) was an English short story writer and novelist, one of the most prolific writers of ghost stories in the history of the genre. He was also a journalist and a broadcasting narrator. S. T. Joshi has stated that "his work is more consistently meritorious than any weird writer's except Dunsany's" and that his short story collection Incredible Adventures (1914) "may be the premier weird collection of this or any other century."