Short Fiction

Arthur Machen

Short Fiction — Arthur Machen was a Welsh man of letters who wrote his most famous work in the 1890s and early 1900s. While his body of work is wide, he’s perhaps best known for his supernaturally-flavored proto-horror short stories. The Great God Pan—perhaps his most famous work—along with “The Inmost Light” and The White People deeply influenced later writers like H. P. Lovecraft. Stephen King has gone so far as to call The Great God Pan “maybe the best [horror story] in the English language.” Machen also wrote supernatural stories during the First World War. One of them, ‘The Bowmen’, appeared in The Evening News on 29 September 1914. Some readers mistook this fictional tale for a factual account, helping to give rise to the legend of the ‘Angels of Mons’. This collection includes several other stories about the war.