Arthur Machen

by Mark Valentine

His writing revolutionized the music of composer John Ireland while other testifying admirers have included Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, Siegfried Sassoon, John Betejeman, film-maker Michael Powell, cellist Julian Lloyd Weber, and Barry (Dame Edith) Humphdes. Through his stories of the supernatural and his reworking of the Arthurian Grail legend and his Angel of Mons series he became a cult figure in America, while The Terror made him the precursor of recent quasi-scientific novels in which animals conspire to destroy Mankind.

Genres: Biography

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Mark Valentine is an English author, biographer and editor.

Valentine’s short stories have been published by a number of small presses and in anthologies since the 1980s, and the exploits of his series character, "The Connoisseur", an occult detective, were published as The Collected Connoisseur in 2010.

As a biographer, Valentine has published a life of Arthur Machen in 1985 (Seren Press), and a study of Sarban, Time, A Falconer (Tartarus Press), is published in 2010. He has also written numerous articles for the Book and Magazine Collector magazine, and introductions for various books, including editions of work by Walter de la Mare, Robert Louis Stevenson, Saki, J. Meade Falkner and others.

Valentine also edits Wormwood (Tartarus Press), a journal dedicated to fantastic, supernatural and decadent literature, and has also edited anthologies, including The Werewolf Pack (Wordsworth, 2008) and The Black Veil (Wordsworth, 2008).

Reviews

[Jay Rothermel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent introduction for the student or newcomer to Machen.

[Ben Lovegrove · Rating 5 out of 5]

very detailed biography

[Christopher Slaughter · Rating 3 out of 5]

More literary criticism than biography; I was looking for the opposite... still, a good read... a welcome addition to the home library...