Stephen King called Arthur Machen’s novella, The Great God Pan “maybe the best [horror story] in the English language.” In addition to being a horror writer, Machen was also an essayist, journalist, Shakespearean actor, and translator. An active member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn along with Blackwood, Yeats, Crowley, and A.E. Waite, Machen gained a cult-like following, and a plaque honoring Machen was unveiled on the house where he was born in Beaconsfield, England. Welsh Occultist. 
 

"And perhaps, Mrs. Morgan on Lanypwll Farm put all this much better in the speech of symbolism, when she murmured about the children of the pool. For if there is a landscape of sadness, there is certainly also a landscape of a horror of darkness and evil; and that black and oily depth, overshadowed with twisted woods, with its growth of foul weeds and its dead trees and leprous boughs, was assuredly potent in terror. To Roberts, it was a strong drug, a drug of evocation; the black deep without calling to the black deep within, and summoning the inhabitant thereof to come forth."

— Arthur Machen, The Terror & Other Tales