Welsh Anglo-Catholic occultist. Member (briefly) of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Avowed anti-materialist. Inspirer of everyone's favourite pathologically racist horror grandmaster: H.P. Lovecraft. Sometime scandaliser of (an easily scandalised) Victorian society. Fearer/Lover of fauns who gambolled oftentimes in the dingly dell. These are but a few pieces of the puzzle that is/was Arthur Llewelyn Jones – a.k.a Arthur Machen (1863-1947).

This week we focus our dreadful magnifying glasses on his 1894 tale, "The Inmost Light". A story of (among other things) urban & sub-urban London – a city that became for Machen (one source suggest) "as numinous…as the Gwent of his boyhood". Oh and then there are the small matters of (what may or may not be) a human soul, its absence, and (shriek!) what rushes in to fill the void.

So pop open the nearest rotund bottle of Benedictine, repeat (endlessly) the jingle "Once around the grass, and twice around the lass, and thrice around the maple-tree", and get typing some lovely and interesting words.