"Arthur Machen, 1863-1947, was a writer of fiction, and much more. He is most widely remembered today as the author of the 1914 story: The Bowmen, which gave rise to the legend of the Angels of Mons, of supernatural beings who fought alongside British soldiers in their hour of greatest need. His other fiction, novels and short stories written between the late 1880s and the 1930s, frequently sound notes of the fantastic and the surreal, playing most often around the edge where the familiar world may suddenly fall into abeyance. Machen's fiction reveals a man who was at war with the stifling scientific materialism which was the dominant world-view of his time, and this is echoed in his non-fiction works, which include literary criticism, cultural history, and spiritual polemic, all of which justify his memory as 'the apostle of wonder'."
An article from The Paris Review on Arthur Machen's history: The Horror of Geologic Time
"Of living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few if any can hope to equal the versatile Arthur Machen; author of some dozen tales long and short, in which the elements of hidden horror and brooding fright attain an almost incomparable substance and realistic acuteness … His powerful horror-material of the ’nineties and earlier nineteen-hundreds stands alone in its class, and marks a distinct epoch in the history of this literary form." - H. P. Lovecraft
