His “sacrifice,” to use the story’s term, has apparently sated the entities’ hunger for victims. When the protagonists find the man, he’s already dead, having drowned in the river. The men are saved when an unnamed third character enters the area and is seized by the alien entities. As one character puts it, he and his companion face a “radical alteration, a complete change, a horrible loss of oneself by substitution - far worse than death, and not even annihilation.” The threat these otherworldly beings pose is not merely physical, but metaphysical. Through a series of bizarre occurrences and sightings, the travelers come to realize that they’ve inadvertently “‘strayed’.into some region.where the frontiers of some unknown world lay close about.” In this place, “the dwellers in some outer space.spy upon the earth.” The two set up camp in this isolated region, only to discover that they are not alone. The River takes the men past the cities of Vienna and Budapest to “a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low willow-bushes.” “The Willows” tells the story of two men’s ill-fated canoe trip along the Danube River. To make up for that oversight, I’d like to discuss what is perhaps Blackwood’s most famous work, “ The Willows.” Somehow I neglected to include Algernon Blackwood in that listing, despite Blackwood’s being one of the luminaries of the genre. Three weeks ago, I suggested some authors that anyone new to weird fiction may want to check out.

The willows blackwood