Book Review: The Willows

The Willows by Algernon Blackwood

This is technically more of a short story than a novel, but someone had mentioned it was the inspiration for The Hollow Places, which is a book I adored, so I thought I’d check it out. Actually, the critique of The Hollow Places asserted that T. Kingfisher hadn’t just used The Willows as an inspiration but had basically ripped it off entirely. That’s true, and not true. The Willows is about two men who go on a canoe trip down the Danube and run into mishaps when they camp overnight on some sandy mini-islands in a marshy riverbank held together by willow bushes. The Hollow Places is about a recent divorcee who goes to take care of her uncle’s tourist trap while he’s having knee surgery. Both stories have willows, an otter, depressions dug into sand, and a figure that may or may not be a man paddling a stand-up boat.

The writing has a late 19th century/early 20th century style. Descriptions are florid, conflict is largely internal, and the author never uses four words when four paragraphs will suffice. If the main character was named, I didn’t catch it, and his companion is only described as “the Swede.” The narrator says several times that he and his travelling companion had been on lots of trips like the canoe trip down the Danube, but they don’t really seem like friends. Sometimes the author is very pleased with the Swede’s stalwart disposition. But, in keeping with novels of this era, he’s got this undercurrent of xenophobia that manifesting as contempt for anything foreign that comes out when the Swede starts noticing the supernatural aspect of the place. One thing I did love is that there’s a point in which the Swede starts saying random sentences, like you do when you’re deep in thought and start saying stuff out loud, and it was a really good technique to heighten the tension.

The thing that astounded me was how this inspirational short story was both very very similar to and very different from the T. Kingfisher novel. Mostly, I think that’s because of when they were written. Back in 1907, writers were just sort of dabbling their toes into horror. Having seemingly ordinary situations devolve into something supernatural mostly relied on the internal monologues of the main character. He sees or hears something, and then his mind spirals out of control, poetically, and extrapolates an unfamiliar sound into the manifestation of creeping dread. In modern writing, authors are more likely to put the tension externally, probably because modern readers are usually movie-watchers and are used to seeing the action rather than thinking it. In this, there’s no real discovery. I’m used to reading fantasy novels, where people discover what magic is and the rules it operates by. In this one, they just kind of somehow know “oh, when we do X, it does Y” and then operate as if that fact were a given. It saves time on exposition, I guess, but it seems a little lazy. It’s a good story that wears well despite the 120 or so years since it was written.



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