Phillips Oppenheim and William Le Queux, in romances which have
sometimes a background of international politics, maintain our
interest by means of mystifications, which screw up our
imagination to the utmost pitch, and then let us down gently with
a natural but not too obvious explanation. A certain amount of
terror is almost essential to heighten the interest of a novel of
costume and adventure, like _The Prisoner of Zenda_ or _Rupert of
Hentzau_, or of the fantastic, exciting romances of Jules Verne.
Rider Haggard's African romances, _She_ and _King Solomon's
Mines_, belong to a large group of supernatural tales with a
foreign setting. They combine strangeness, wonder, mystery and
horror. The ancient theme of bartering souls is given a new twist
in Robert Hichens' novel, _The Flames_. E.F. Benson, in _The
Image in the Sand_, experiments with Oriental magic. The
investigations of the Society for Psychical Research gave a new
impulse to stories of the occult and the uncanny. Algernon
Blackwood is one of the most ingenious exponents of this type of
story. By means of psychical explanations, he succeeds in
revivifying many ancient superstitions. In _Dr. John Silence_,
even the werewolf, whom we believed extinct, manifests himself in
modern days among a party of cheerful campers on a lonely island,
and brings unspeakable terror in his trail.
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