A Welsh writer who spent much of his adult life in London, Machen devoted many of his supernaturalist works to an exploration of a mythic vein of the post-Gothic. His works have frequent recourse to the idea that some vestige of a primitive, malefic, pre-Christian "Little People" has survived into the present, and Machen explores the metaphysical implications of this possibility with gusto. Largely eschewing the mid- to late-Victorian interest in the psychological implications of the supernatural, Machen set the stage for the Cthulhu horrors of Lovecraft and others at the same time that his work testifies to the demise of Victorian complacency and self-assurance.
