The Dark Descent

"One of the reasons why I chose this is because it contains a couple of masterpieces of the field—for instance, Algernon Blackwood’s story “The Willows”, which I would judge to be one of the single finest tales of supernatural dread. It’s about two friends on a boating holiday on the upper Danube, who spend a night on an island which is covered with willow trees. It becomes apparent that in some sense the island is the focus of a wholly alien source. It’s not a ghost, it’s not an elemental, it’s something even more indescribable than that. Various manifestations take place during the night, and at the end they find a victim of whatever is living there. It’s extraordinarily uncanny. It’s pure horror, but there’s absolutely no physical or graphic horror in it. Ray Bradbury was identified as a science fiction and fantasy writer once he came to prominence, but he started off writing horror. He wrote for Weird Tales magazine in the 40s, and his first collection published in the mid 40s, Dark Carnival , was almost entirely horror. Bradbury and Richard Matheson, both of whom belonged to the Californian school of horror, were instrumental in bringing the horror story up to date and dealing with more human spheres. At the core of most of Bradbury’s horror fiction are things like loss and loneliness."