6/2/2023 0 Comments Machen the white people![]() ![]() ![]() His 1917 story "The Terror" must have inspired "The Birds" "The Great Return" is the source, surely, of the belief that the holy grail finally came to rest in Wales I bet that if you ask Neil Gaiman whether he's familiar with Machen's work, he'll respond enthusiastically and "The Bowmen" (1914) directly and solely gave rise to the myth that an angelic consort of English archers from Agincourt rescued a battalion of British soldiers from an advancing German regiment at the battle of Mons. HP Lovecraft was influenced by him, and acknowledged the influence Stephen King has praised his stories to the skies. "Few people read Arthur Machen nowadays," said one commentator many years ago, "he is the preserve, zealously guarded, of lonely men who step into the gutter when the bowler hatted jostle them in the street." I think he gets a mention in Antal Szerb's wonderfully crazy The Pendragon Legend, which would make sense, as that book is saturated with Welshness and spookiness, and those are things that Machen possessed to his fingertips.īut his legacy has been extraordinary. ![]() ![]() Machen had existed on the fringes of the fringes of my literary knowledge: the kind of writer whose name one is unsure how to pronounce (it's "makken") someone more referred to than read. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |