John Silence, Physician Extraordinary

Dr. John Silence takes no fee from patients he judges to be genuinely afflicted, which is just as well, since his cases involve possession, haunted rooms, and things that arrive with the fog. Algernon Blackwood published these stories in 1908 and gave the occult detective his most influential early shape, an investigator who diagnoses the supernatural rather than merely surviving it. The best of them still hold: a French town whose polite residents turn out to be something other than human, an island camp stalked by a shape that walks on four legs and then on two. Blackwood took mysticism seriously, having studied it himself, and that conviction is what keeps the stories from feeling like parlour tricks. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available to download.