G. K. Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was a prodigious essayist, critic and creator of the priest-detective Father Brown, but for the fantastic his key work is The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), a phantasmagoric ‘nightmare’ of anarchists and disguises that reads as allegory, thriller and metaphysical fantasy at once. The Napoleon of Notting Hill imagines a whimsical future London. His love of paradox and wonder influenced writers from Borges to Gaiman.