Customer Reviews

The Garden of Survival

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This book has absolutely nothing to do with gardening, survival or otherwise. Instead, it's the author's long, boring and rambling "personal story" written to someone who's presumably dead, about his love and loss of someone named Marion, about his interactions with Higher Powers, and about instruction from Mysterious Tribes. More than that I can't tell you because I couldn't stand to read it any longer. Might come in useful for those times at 2 AM when sleep eludes me and I need something to put me to sleep; otherwise totally useless.

I found this book to be fascinating -- not as a novel, not as a spooky thriller, or anything along those lines -- but rather as a detailed description of Blackwood's mystical experiences. Basically the book is a detailed description of how Blackwood's senses became heightened and he became tuned in to his environment through meditation. He was deeply into theosophy, and it's apparent that he also experimented with hashish and whatever other drugs may have been available back then. Read it as a case study of meditation experiences and skip all the silly marketing blather about how his stories are "spooky," which publishers and advertisers usually emphasize to sell copies. If you read his works expecting to be "thrilled," you'll be disappointed. I find Blackwood's stories to be sensitive portraits of his inner states of consciousness.

Don't trust any electrical device when you need it most because you probably won't be able to use it. Brown out, EMP, Solar Flare, off grid, etc.