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This episode is brought to you by A Curious Feeling of Disquietude.

Tonight, as part of our annual spooky sleep stories series, we'll read the opening

to the novella The Willows. It was written by Algernon Blackwood and first published in 1907.

Two friends drift down the Danube by canoe, threading a maze of shifting channels,

sandbanks, and low islands, crowded with willow scrub. The river's moods, eddies,

gusts, glittering sun, seemed to lean in in and watch them and the thickets along the banks gather like a listening crowd

as night closes the landscape feels less like scenery and more like a presence with its own designs most vivid vividly in the willows, which moved of their own

will as though alive. Blackwood was a devoted outdoorsman and a writer fascinated by the

numinous in nature. He often suggested that the wilderness is not merely backdrop, but a more

than human realm. The Willows helped define early, modern, weird fiction by trading blood and

monsters for unease and awe. Its influence echoed by later authors across the genre.

H.P. Lovecraft praised it as the finest supernatural tale in English,

and readers still come to it for that distinctive sensation

of the world turning subtly, inexorably strange.

Let's get cozy.

Close your eyes.

Relax your body into the softness of your bed.

Now, take a few deep breaths. After leaving Vienna and long before you come to Budapest, the Danube enters 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.

On the big maps, this deserted area is painted in a fluffy blue, growing fainter in color as it leaves the banks, and across it may be seen in large, straggling letters,

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