Tales of horror and the supernatural, making Christianity sexy one story at a time. Machen’s tales find fertile ground in the persistence of pagan energy and ideas in the British/European countryside. Has to be some horror in this list and I remember these from when I was a kid. Machen’s influence on writers like Lovecraft, M John Harrison, Stewart Lee, Alan Moore and Robert Holdstock and undoes the received view of what it means to be English, British or whatever, revealing, hinting at, a seething otherness below.
First published in Horlick’s Magazine, 1904. Collected in The House of Souls, Grant Richards, 1906 and, most recently, The White People and Other Weird Stories, Penguin Classics, 2012
