Library of Wales: Hill of Dreams

Arthur Machen a contemporary of Arthur Conan Doyle. Oscar Wilde and William Butler Yeats all of whom admired his work tremendously. His legacy is as interesting as his work. His great literary significance was recognized by H. P. Lovecraft who named Machen as one of the four "modern masters" of supernatural horror. His immediate influence in the US is recognisable in the development of the pulp horror found in magazines like Weird Tales and on such notable fantasy writers as Robert E. Howard. He is clearly influential in the work of Peter Straub, Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell and T. E. D. Klein among others. The Shining Pyramid was filmed for television in 1980 and films with Machen influences or references include John Carpenter's 1980 film The Fog (which features a character named "Mr. Machen").

Almost undoubtedly Machen's most important and moving work. Lucian Taylor, the hero, is damned either through contact with an erotically pagan 'other' world or through something degenerate in his own nature, which he thinks of as a 'faun'. He becomes a writer, and when he moves to London he becomes trapped by the increasing reality of the dark imaginings of this creature within him, which become increasingly real. Machen drew copiously on his own early years in Wales and London, and the book as a whole is an exploration through imagination of a potential fate which he personally avoided. One of the first explorations in fiction of the figure of the doomed artist, who is biographically so much a part of the decadent 1890s.