Previously released on BBC Radio 4, and with a different reader, The Willows is a 100 year old supernatural Horror story is endorsed by none other than H.P. Lovecraft! Old H.P. described it as: ‘The finest supernatural tale in English literature.’ Blackwood, is well regarded as one of the 20th century’s foremost writers of supernatural fiction and as Lovecraft, said of him: ‘he is the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere …[he] can evoke what amounts almost to a story from a simple fragment of psychological description. Above all others he understands how fully some sensitive minds dwell for ever on the borderland of dream, and how relatively slight is the distinction betwixt those images formed from actual objects and those excited by the play of the imagination.’
The Willows
By Algernon Blackwood; Read by Lawrence Jackson
4 X 30 Minute Episodes – Approx. 2 Hours [UNABRIDGED?]
BROADCASTER: BBC7’s The 7th Dimension
BROADCAST: Monday 25th to Thursday 28th, 2007 at 6:30pm (repeats 12:30am) UK Time*
Two friends on a canoeing trip down the Danube decide to spend the night on a small island in a remote stretch of the river between Austria and Hungary. Little by little, they realize that malevolent supernatural forces, embodied by the island’s ubiquitous rustling willow trees, are at work against them, and what at first promises to be a straightforward camping expedition escalates into an ordeal of survival against a powerful agency from another dimension.
All four parts will be made available via the Listen Again service shortly after they air.