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.
Algernon Blackwood, one of the most prolific ghost story authors in the genre's history, was an English broadcasting narrator, journalist, novelist, and short story writer (14 March 1869 – 10 December 1951). According to the literary critic S. T. Joshi, Incredible Adventures (1914), a collection of short stories, "may be the finest weird book of this or any other century," and "His work is more consistently meritorious than any weird writer's except Dunsany's." A few weeks after his passing, his nephew carried his ashes to the Swiss Alps' Saanenmöser Pass and spread them among the peaks he had cherished for more than 40 years. Shooter's Hill is where Blackwood was born (now part of south-east London, then part of north-west Kent). He attended Wellington College and resided at Crayford Manor House in Crayford from 1871 and 1880. His mother, Harriet Dobbs, was the widow of the 6th Duke of Manchester; his father, Sir Stevenson Arthur Blackwood, was a Post Office official. Following many strokes, Blackwood passed away. Officially, cerebral thrombosis was the cause of his death on December 10, 1951; arteriosclerosis was a contributory factor. At the Golders Green Crematorium, he was cremated.
