The Three Impostors by Arthur Machen

This is an episodic novel, parts of which are regularly anthologised separately, and I actually read a few of the parts before, but even though they're easily removed from their context, they are more interesting and impactful together. Machen is usually grouped with Algernon Blackwood and H. P. Lovecraft, because they all wrote creepy fiction about dark cosmic forces at around the same time, and all use a similar, somewhat stilted and sensational style, but I consider Machen far better than Lovecraft. While I find his style overblown at times, and a good target for reading aloud dramatically, Machen has a very sophisticated rendering of the urban metropolis, and London in particular. I consider his fiction to be part of creation of an alternative, mythological of London that many writers were engaged with around the end of the 19th and early 20th century, along with works such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the Sherlock Holmes series. Reading all the separate parts of this novella together also makes it clear that Machen has a perhaps unexpected sense of humour. While all the dramatic and horrific events are unfolding, Dyson, the character who accidentally frames the stories, keeps producing bad scholarly works that no one will read or publish, but which he himself hugely enjoys, and generally wanders around the dark, desperate labyrinths that the stories trace in his own haze of self-satisfaction. Overall, I really enjoyed this little novel, although I did find a lot of it quite overdramatic and exaggerated, it was quite fun and sometimes deliciously chilling.