Arthur Machen 38 min read

A short story about phantom bowmen coming to a hard-pressed British force became, to the author's astonishment, a legend believed as literal fact across a nation at war.

Arthur Machen's 1915 collection gathers 'The Bowmen' and related tales, with his wry account of how his fiction sparked the famous Angels of Mons legend. Eerie, subtle, fascinating. Read it for a master of the weird whose ghost-story slipped its moorings and became wartime myth, plus his droll reckoning with the whole strange affair.

In its time

Published in 1915, during the 1910s, lost worlds and interplanetary adventure.

Reading it

38 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).