The Willows

By: Algernon Blackwood

Narrated by: David McCord

The Willows is a novella by English author Algernon Blackwood, originally published as part of his 1907 collection The Listener and Other Stories. It is one of Blackwood's best known works and has been influential on a number of later writers. Horror author H.P. Lovecraft considered it to be the finest supernatural tale in English literature. The Willows is an example of early modern horror and is connected within the literary tradition of weird fiction.

Two friends are midway on a canoe trip down the Danube River. Throughout the story Blackwood personifies the surrounding environment—river, sun, wind—and imbues them with a powerful and ultimately threatening character. Most ominous are the masses of dense, desultory, menacing willows, which "moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen sense of the horrible."

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An Odd Story

To me this was a very odd, confusing story. I chose this book to fill a prompt in the 52 Book Club Challenge 2025.