English author Algernon Blackwood first published "The Willows" in his 1907 book The Listener and Other Stories. It is one of Blackwood's best-known works and has impacted a lot of writers after him. It was regarded by horror writer H.P. Lovecraft is the best supernatural story ever written in English. "The Willows" is a work of early modern horror that belongs to the strange fiction literary tradition. In the middle of their canoe expedition down the Danube, two buddies. Blackwood gives the river, the sun, and the wind strong and eventually menacing personalities throughout the narrative. The most foreboding trees are the dense, sullen, terrifying willows because they "moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched, by some immeasurable means, my own piercing sense of the horrible," moving as though they were alive. The mysterious beings in "The Willows," whose exact nature is unknown, include a new order of experience that is truly unearthly, as well as a realm "where tremendous things go on without ceasing...vast purposes...that deal directly with the soul, and not indirectly with trivial representations of the soul." They occasionally appear malicious or treacherous, while other times they are just mystical and almost divine.
