The Willows 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 work 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." This is just the start of a terrifyingly satisfying listening experience!
