*Spoilers ahead*

I'm sure it's due to some obscure perverseness that I can't consciously pinpoint, but I've never quite warmed up to "The Willows." Despite its esteemed reputation, despite the fact that I've reread it many times during the past thirty-five years in hopes that I would appreciate some nuance which previously had eluded me, I'm left essentially unmoved by the story. With just two characters in a single setting, and action that remains almost entirely ambiguous to the end, it's too spare to justify its length (a little over fifty pages). Not much happens: two outdoorsmen, one of them the story's narrator, are paddling a canoe up the Danube; they make camp on one of the river's numerous small islands, where the willow bushes seem to take on a threatening aspect. Are the willows really occupied/manipulated by some intelligent lifeform from another plane of existence, or are the men so overwhelmed by the loneliness and remoteness of the island that they (one of them, in particular) suffer a psychotic break? It's never made clear. The missing oar, the damage to the canoe and the loss of provisions arguably can be blamed on the narrator's eccentric traveling companion. Even the ghastly corpse that turns up at the end may have been a victim of the Swede.

Here emerges an inescapable parallel with the age-old critical debate over Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw" (which Blackwood greatly admired): is it really a ghost story, or isn't it? But "The Willows" is even less plainly a tale of the supernatural. Read it carefully and you'll realize how consistent the psychological interpretation is. With a single exception (a visual phenomenon which the narrator witnesses alone, and is easily attributable to imagination), all the strange events of the story could have been wrought by human hands. What "The Willows" is actually about, in my view, is the narrator's dawning realization that his traveling companion is not the stable, unimaginative, trustworthy type he had appeared to be.

I understand the effect that Blackwood was aiming for, but the execution is labored. Again and again, the narrator describes the uncanny atmosphere of the island, the rustling of the willows, the anxiety that overtakes him as escape begins to look impossible...and the more he describes it, the less I'm able to feel it. Blackwood is too insistent, and because the story is so long yet so lacking in substance, he has no choice but to go on insisting. All that the narrator can do is sit around and wait for something bad to happen. It just doesn't work for me. I'm not sure how "The Willows" came to be regarded as the greatest horror story in the English language; I'll take Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan" (which is, unambiguously and unapologetically, a horror story) any day of the week. And this, I assure you, is coming from someone who admires much of Algernon Blackwood's work. He conveyed an atmosphere of supernatural wonder far more effectively in "Ancient Sorceries," and of creeping dread and horror in "The Occupant of the Room." ( )

That’s how I feel when I have to go downstairs in the middle of the night ( )

Published in the early 1900s as part of a collection of stories, H.P. Lovecraft felt that Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows was simply the greatest tale of the supernatural in English literature. It is a novella, and has a bare minimum of dialog between the narrator and his good friend, the Swede. It lacks the blood and gore and violence so endemic of horror today, and yet despite what some would consider handicaps, The Willows is one of the most atmospheric books in the genre you will ever read. I had heard of this author but never read him, now I can’t imagine not reading some of his other work, and very soon.

The tale begins with two men on a canoe trip down the Danube. Their destination barely comes into play in this most elegantly written masterpiece of sustained atmosphere. The farther they get along the rising river as a storm approaches, they each begin to realize something is wrong. In these remote wilds, an eerie foreboding sets in that the protagonist conveys to the reader in elegant prose. The willows along the river manifest strange movements, independent of the fierce winds assaulting the small island where he and the Swede have camped for the night. The howls are sounds outside of humanity, and the protagonist fights the feeling that they have somehow stumbled into a border between the known world, and one which is unaware of them — as yet.

This is so fabulous it is difficult to give readers a sense of how good it is. Nor do I want to give away some of the surprises or the ending. While the Swede is painted as practical and perhaps not as bright as his companion at first, eventually their roles become reversed. The narrator discovers the Swede has accepted the supernatural circumstances they’ve found themselves in, and knows they must not be discovered, lest they become a sacrifice. Truly a tale of the supernatural, and the boundary between this world and another, you’ll probably never read anything else like The Willows. I would not say that The Willows is scary, nor does it contain any shocking moments, rather it is a quiet and meticulously crafted tale of being alone and isolated, cut off from the rest of the world, and finding something in the darkness, in the surroundings, that is alive.

I can’t recommend this highly enough. I suspect many modern readers might not enjoy it as much as I did, its horror unseen and merely suggested. But those who love elegant writing and a memorable, atmospheric tale certainly will. A masterpiece. ( )

How boring! I felt like I was missing something. This was so wordy. The sentences had awful structure and were entire paragraphs in themselves. That's common for the time this was written, but ugh. At least it was short. ( )

The Willows is a tale in the cosmic horror tradition, but could just as easily fall into folk horror (as many older cosmic horror stories could) for its bucolic European setting and use of natural landscapes to create a sense of dread.

And there is dread here, in the graduation dissolution of the very ground, not to mention the sanity of the two protagonists. But in the end, I felt much of the buildup dragged on, while the resolution was over in an instant. Worth reading, but not exactly satisfying. ( )