The Willows is an account of two men canoeing down the Danube from Bratislava (or Pressburg as it was at the time) towards Budapest. Things start to go wrong for them as they get further from civilisation, the water gets rougher and the forest starts to close in around them. Maybe it's just their imagination, but the willow trees that line the banks seem to come to life, and display possibly threatening - although not necessarily towards the two men directly - intentions. Trapped on a rapidly shrinking island of sand, their equipment and supplies diminshing, our protagonists come ever closer to losing their grip on reality and the willows become increasingly sinister.
All in all, it's not a bad story, and well written at that. I can see why Lovecraft was such a fan; it was clearly a huge influence on his cornerstones of weird fiction that came shortly after. But it does suffer from a lot of the flaws that, for me, make his writing something of a struggle: the stoic, po-faced tone, the firmly turn-of-the-century turn of phrase and the attempts to eff the ineffable that generally don't quite work. What it gets right, though, are the biggest scares of all: the unknown, the idea that there may be forces out there so great that humanity pales into insignificance, and the way in which we are never so helpless as when we are at the mercy of the elements.
A short review for a short book - The Willows deserves its place in the horror fiction canon, but it won't go much further than that. Blackwood's other famous work, The Wendigo, is now on my radar.
3.5/5
I've actually been on a boat down that part of the Danube. Seemed pretty chill to me.
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