WRITER EXCLUSIVE
River’s Edge
Stef Penney talks about adapting Algernon Blackwood’s The Willowsfor radio
WHILE MANY SFX readers will be familiar with MR James, his contemporary Algernon Blackwood is a more obscure figure. But perhaps a new radio dramatisation of the author’s 1907 novella “The Willows” can change that a little.
The story follows two adventurers canoeing down the Danube, who make camp on a remote island in a swampy stretch of the river, surrounded by rustling willow bushes. There, the narrator gradually comes to feel like an unwelcome trespasser in a zone where the “veil between worlds” has worn thin…