This led to his first major success, The Great God Pan. Machen's translations in a spirited English style became standard ones for many years.Īround 1890 Machen began to publish in literary magazines, writing stories influenced by the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, some of which used gothic or fantastic themes. This led to further work as a translator from French, translating the Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre, Le Moyen de Parvenir (Fantastic Tales) of Béroalde de Verville, and the Memoirs of Casanova. In 1884 he published his second work, the pastiche The Anatomy of Tobacco, and secured work with the publisher and bookseller George Redway as a cataloguer and magazine editor. Returning to London, he lived in relative poverty, attempting to work as a journalist, as a publisher's clerk, and as a children's tutor while writing in the evening and going on long rambling walks across London. Machen, however, showed literary promise, publishing in 1881 a long poem 'Eleusinia' on the subject of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Family poverty ruled out attendance at university, and Machen was sent to London, where he sat exams to attend medical school but failed to get in. He also is well known for his leading role in creating the legend of the Angels of Mons.Īt the age of eleven, Machen boarded at Hereford Cathedral School, where he received an excellent classical education. His long story The Great God Pan made him famous and controversial in his lifetime, but The Hill of Dreams is generally considered his masterpiece. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. Lovecraft's best-known stories: 'The Call of Cthulhu,' 'The Dunwich Horror,' and 'The Whisperer in Darkness.' Another, 'The Novel of the White Powder,' which Lovecraft said 'approaches the absolute culmination of loathsome fright', may have been an inspiration for Lovecraft's stories of bodily disintegration, such as 'Cool Air' and 'The Colour Out of Space.'Īrthur Machen was a leading Welsh author of the 1890s. One of the included stories, 'The Novel of the Black Seal' has been cited as a model for some of H.P. These stories are considered by many to be Machen's best and had a profound impact on many authors including H.

The story then goes back in time before the opening scene where the three impostors assume various personas and roles, weaving stories about their prey in an effort to attract attention to him and gain the aid of unsuspecting people.

The Three Impostors is a series of convoluted horror tales about three individuals who are searching for a 'young man with spectacles' who has inadvertently stolen something of great importance to a secret society of which they are members.

Arthur machen the three imposters