H.P. Lovecraft in "Supernatural Horror in Literature" said: "Of living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few if any can hope to equal the versatile Arthur Machen, author of some dozen tales long and short, in which the elements of hidden horror and brooding fright attain an almost incomparable substance and realistic acuteness."

The end of the nineteenth century was a period, as fin-de-siècle authority Mark Valentine explains, ‘when fairy folk were much in the air."

Thos. Kent Miller explores in depth how the myths of "fairy folk" came into being and shows how those myths influenced culture through the centuries, and how they influenced the horror fiction of Arthur Machen H.P. Lovecraft, and Robert E. Howard.

Many Victorian authors, naturally, took up their pens to put their spins on the fairy folk, some by revisiting the old folk claims that the legends of wee folk were in fact distorted stories of the pre-Celtic hangers-on or Neolithic survivors who were forced into hiding by waves of immigrants from the continent. For example, Grant Allen’s ‘Pallinghurst Barrow’ appeared in the Illustrated London News in 1892 and John Buchan’s ‘No-Man’s Land’ appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1899. The first, very much in the tradition of the Victorian ghost story, presents the malignant spirits of The Little People of Old Long Barrow on Pallihurst Common who annually become manifest for one night only, the autumnal equinox. Buchan’s creations live on, however, burrowed into Scottish mountains.

In that same decade, Welsh author Arthur Machen wrote three short stories of The Little People—’The Shining Pyramid,’ ‘The Novel of the Black Seal,’ and ‘The Red Hand’—that were destined to influence the literature of the supernatural in ways and to a degree he may not have fathomed.

When Machen was born in 1683 into the rural district of Gwent in the community of Caerleon-on-Usk in the south-eastern corner of Wales, The Little People, fairies, and the belief in fairies had not yet faded away. Indeed, fairy lore, passed down orally from generation to generation, was still coin-of-the-realm while Machen was a child.

Later, for some of his fiction, Machen drew heavily upon this special background, lending an air of antiquity and a subtle tactile, almost documentary, quality to his stories.