Thomas Roche on Arthur Machen's "The Bowmen"

All good weird writers often produce something in their career so convincing that multitudes see more than mere fiction. This continues to be the case with H.P. Lovecraft's Necronomicon--a book the Providence writer conjured by inserting it into numerous stories as well as an influential essay about the blasphemous tome that maximized Lovecraft's powers as an amateur historian. Despite many seasoned attempts to discount the notorious Necronomicon as reality after his death, its faux reality crawls onward in the minds and markets of many young would-be occultists and paperback shysters.

Many in America may not realize a similar thing happened with Arthur Machen's tale, "The Bowmen." Penning a ghost story in wartime about spectral archers from the Middle Ages coming to the aid of modern British troops resulted in a rumor mill just as active, if not more so, than Lovecraft's Necronomicon. Contemporary writer Thomas Roche gives a fairly good account of Machen's own attempts to grapple with a legend he unwittingly spun, and which was never successfully put back into the realm of fiction before his death. It seems that even some patriotic Britons and ghost hunters today continue to perpetuate the Machen legend of Mons. Roche's article nicely traces the strange evolution of weird literature into a self-contained reality capable of withstanding multiple debunkings across time.

-Grim Blogger