The haunted, hallucinogenic mix of spell workings, witchcraft and disguised sex magic in "The White People" was hailed by HP Lovecraft as the second greatest horror story ever written (after Blackwood's "The Willows"), and it bears the imprint of one who believed in the "wild improbability" of what he wrote. His great stories, and the key works in this collection, date from the Decadent 1890s.
TS Eliot was among those who secured him a Civil List pension against the poverty of his later years.
Alas, Machen had sold the rights decades before. It wasn't until the 1920s that his books began selling in large quantities. But Wilde's 1895 imprisonment turned the moral tide against Machen's tales of supernatural horror. Aubrey Beardsley and, later, Austin Osman Spare illustrated his works. Machen had already lived in London more than a decade, as he plied a trade as a freelance writer, translating Casanova and writing an essay on tobacco, before an inheritance allowed him to write what he fancied.
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