"One of the best horror stories ever written. Maybe the best in the English language." -Stephen King
"Of creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few can hope to equal Arthur Machen. No one could begin to describe the cumulative suspense and ultimate horror with which every paragraph abounds." -H.P. Lovecraft
"One of the greatest supernatural tales ever written." -Elizabeth Hand, The Washington Post
"The archetypal Decadent horror story. Highly original." - Brian Stableford
" . . . too morbid to be the production of a healthy mind." -Richard Henry Stoddard
"Told with exquisite reticence and grace, and with a plausibility that is as extraordinary as it is immoral. More than Hawthorne or Tolstoy, Machen is a novelist of the soul. His sentences move to sonorous, half-submerged rhythms, swooning with pagan color and redolent of sacerdotal incense." -Vincent Starrett, Arthur Machen: A Novelist of Ecstasy and Sin
"A fascinating, troubling story, and, for all its influence, not like much else than I can think of. It's not simple, and yet it's effective, more so than can easily be explained." -Matthew David Surridge, Black Gate
"What can I say about a writer whose influence has been acknowledged by H.P. Lovecraft, Peter Straub, T.E.D. Klein, M. John Harrison, and Clive Barker? Perhaps that he managed to communicate a sense of the inexpressibly and awesomely supernatural with more power than he ever knew." -Ramsey Campbell
