Two men in a canoe run the Danube in flood below Vienna and camp on a sandy island in a wilderness of willow scrub. The river is eating the island under them. The willows move when there’s no wind. Things happen that are almost nothing — a shape in the sky, a humming, a hollow pressed in the sand, gear that goes missing — and Blackwood never explains any of it. His idea is that the pair have blundered across a boundary into a region where something enormous and entirely indifferent is aware of them. Lovecraft called it the finest supernatural story in English and built half his career on it. I was creeped out, legit creeped out, which I wasn’t expecting from a century-old tome.
The Willows