Nature Unbound: Cosmic Horror in Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’

In this article, I explore the cosmic ramifications of Algernon Blackwood’s famous outdoor horror story ‘The Willows’ (1907). I show how the extraterrestrial teratology of the story’s titular creatures and the weird dimensional phenomena recounted in the tale challenge conventional definitions and conceptions of nature, in particular the concept of ‘natural supernaturalism’. Against such readings that synthesize nature into an orderly and unbroken whole, I use recent Continental philosophy to show how Blackwood’s story theorizes nature as a dynamic process driven by the horrifying un-grounding operations of an absolute cosmic outside.