Why does Felix Taylor call Arthur Machen a pioneer of weird fiction?

Felix Taylor, author of the biography Weird: A Life of Arthur Machen in Six Unearthly Books, says the Welsh writer, born in 1863, was one of the earliest authors of weird fiction, horror that unsettles our sense of our place in the world. Machen drew on the mysterious landscape of his South Wales childhood, wrote his best-known work The Great God Pan in the 1890s, and was rediscovered by American book collectors in the 1920s.

• Machen's writing has inspired Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro.
• Taylor says writing was agonising for Machen, who once spent two years on a Holy Grail romance he knew publishers would not want.

▸In their words

“He looked backwards and forwards at the same time.” Felix Taylor · at 27:21 — open in the transcript →

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on Global News Podcast (2026-10-31). Read the whole episode summary →

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