Lendle

This is the prequel/introduction to Miller's new exciting "Be Reminded: The Absurdities Depended on the Papers for Wide Dissemination"!

H.P. Lovecraft in "Supernatural Horror in Literature" said: "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."

This article was written in response to S.T. Joshi's comment published in THE WEIRD TALE: "[W]e would be closer to the truth if we suspected that these tales—knowingly designed for newspaper publication, where the very context would augment their credibility as fact, not fiction—were consciously planned hoaxes."

Thos. Kent Miller discusses Arthur Machen's classic "The Bowman" and his other controversial fictions that read so much like factual journalism that there has been confusion since the First World War.

When critics comment on Arthur Machen’s body of work and focus on his pseudo-journalistic contributions to the weird story genre, it is seldom mentioned that the principal dozen or so such stories were the fruit of a very short and delineated 16-month period during 1915-16. Neither is there much attempt to differentiate between the first-person war stories of that period and the handful of much later stories written in a like manner. In fact, sometimes all these stories are lumped together along with his other more traditional (some say ‘slight’) war stories and marginalized as part of his ‘later work’ as distinct from the generally accepted superior stories of the 1890s. This is a pity, as I tend to agree for the most part with horror-fiction writer Peter Atkins when he comments on some of the stories of Machen’s so-called later period, ‘Machen’s prose, always breathtakingly good, actually got better.’ In particular, with regard to ‘Opening the Door,’ which is an evocative and especially excellent example of Machen’s principal theme over the years, I would further agree with Atkins: ‘It will…leave the careful reader with a lingering sense of something beyond this world, a feeling that, however briefly, the veil that separates the natural from the supernatural…has been lifted, that a door has indeed been opened.’