Weird : A Life of Arthur Machen in Six Unearthly Books

A new life of Arthur Machen: decadent, bohemian, mystic, journalist, Welsh wizard and author of The Great God Pan

A new life of Arthur Machen: decadent, bohemian, mystic, journalist, Welsh wizard and author of The Great God PanArthur Machen is an all but forgotten master of the weird tale, and his circle included mystics and occultists as well as Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. His work has profoundly influenced some of our most mysterious creative minds—including such masters of the modern gothic as H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro—but he never achieved commercial success. Today his work has found a new generation of readers, buoyed up on the resurgence of weird fiction and folk horror. Felix John Taylor’s bold new biography brings together Machen’s enigmatic life and shocking books for the first time. Inspired by occultism, decadence and Celtic folklore, Machen’s eerie tales encompassed ghostly apparitions, demonic possession, fairies, angels and the Holy Grail. By turns a jobbing actor, self-mythologiser, war correspondent and recluse, his life reveals a hidden weird Edwardian literary world, and the demands and compromises of creative life in London of the early twentieth century. This is a powerful reappraisal of a writer whose work haunted his contemporaries—and has enchanted us ever since.