East of Vienna, a canoe trip down the length of the Danube River turns strange and horrifying. The two men traveling find it bad enough when they are forced to camp on an isolated island in the middle of nowhere while gale-force winds howl and waters rise. But soon, the threats take on a supernatural tinge. Wild sounds and visions in the night convince the men that they’re being hunted by beings from another dimension, who are not so much malicious as vastly, cosmically indifferent to their welfare–and hungry.
Algernon Blackwood has influenced weird fiction and horror writers down to the present day, with H.P. Lovecraft naming him among the modern masters of the genre. The Willows, which first appeared in The Listener and Other Stories (1907), is one of his best-known tales. Noted weird fiction writer Ruthanna Emrys enlivens the text with sprightly commentary and traces the streams of story to their headwaters in a poetic and penetrating introduction.
Über den Autor Algernon Blackwood
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Aaron Worth is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at Boston University, and author of Imperial Media (2014) as well as numerous articles on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British literature and culture. He has previously edited The Great God and Other Horror Stories by Arthur Machen (2018), Green Tea and Other Weird Stories by Sheridan Le Fanu (2020), and The Virgin of the Seven Daggers and Other Stories by Vernon Lee (2022) for Oxford World's Classics.
