About the book: 2007 / “Somewhere there is a completely different world, and its language is called poetry,” wrote Arthur Machen (1863–1947) in one of last essays, as if formulating his creative credo, for all the works of this English writer are imbued with an inescapable nostalgia for another reality, fundamentally incompatible with modern materialistic civilization. Clearly testifying to the polar opposite of these two worlds, this volume, which includes stories and novels never before published in Russian (with the exception of “The Three Impostors”), is a logical continuation of the collection of selected works of the writer previously published in the “Grimoire” collection "Garden of Avalon". Let’s make a reservation right away that the editors’ goal was to present A. Machen primarily as a writer-adept, since 1889 initiated into the Temple of Isis-Urania of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; this circumstance dictated the features of this composition, which is not based on a chronological principle. Always drawing inspiration from traditional Celtic cults, Welsh apocryphal legends and medieval Christian mysticism, A. Machen in his work so consistently embodied the hermetic order symbolism of the Golden Dawn that many of his contemporaries were bewildered by this, and the “wide readership”, shocked by the strange works, in which echoes of gloomy Druidic rituals and doctrines imbued with the Gnostic spirit are too clearly heard, she considered their author “obscenely rebellious.” However, A. Machen, whose work was, in essence, a secret rebellion against the modern world, did not hide the fact that “the eternal search for the unknown, the passion inherent in man that leads to infinity” makes him feel like an outcast in the society of “prudent” ordinary people, a lonely wanderer who “raises his eyes to the sky, strains his eyes and peers across the oceans in search of the happy legendary islands, in search of Avalon where the sun never sets».