Tonight, as part of our annual Spooky Sleep Stories series, we’ll read the opening to the novella “The Willows”. It was written by Algernon Blackwood, and first published in 1907.

Two friends drift down the Danube by canoe, threading a maze of shifting channels, sandbanks, and low islands crowded with willow scrub. The river’s moods—eddies, gusts, glittering sun—seem to lean in and watch them, and the thickets along the banks gather like a listening crowd. As night closes, the landscape feels less like scenery and more like a presence with its own designs—most vividly in the willows, which “moved of their own will as though alive.”

Blackwood was a devoted outdoorsman and a writer fascinated by the numinous in nature; he often suggested that the wilderness is not merely backdrop but a more-than-human realm. “The Willows” helped define early modern weird fiction by trading blood and monsters for unease and awe, its influence echoed by later authors across the genre. H.P. Lovecraft praised it as the finest supernatural tale in English, and readers still come to it for that distinctive sensation of the world turning subtly, inexorably, strange.