Edgar Allan Poe, singer of the abyss

Unknown in life, Edgar Allan Poe saw his genius fully recognized only after his untimely death, as happened later also for HP Lovecraft, who followed in his footsteps: today, almost two centuries after his death, Poe is considered an author more unique than rare in narrating the unusual, in exploring the greatest and atavistic terrors of man, in recalling the lost beauties of ancestral times.

Terror and Ecstasy: Arthur Machen's "Hill of Dreams"

Arthur Machen was born on March 3, 1863, one of the greatest writers of Fantastic literature of his time and, together with WB Yeats, one of the most important standard bearers of the so-called ยซCeltic Revivalยป. After having already reviewed on our pages his work before him, "The Great God Pan", We now turn to his third novel," The Hill of Dreams "(1907), perhaps his greatest masterpiece by virtue of the indissoluble union, here as never before, between the two dichotomous aspects of the Sacred in the Gaelic tradition: the terrifying and the ecstatic one.

Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, adventurer of the unconscious

Villiers's universe is frozen and delusional, even more so than Sade's: it's a world haunted by gothic but modernized ghosts, crossed by lightning whims of style. Defined by Verlaine "un poรจte absolu", revered by Mallarmรฉ and placed by Baudelaire on the same level as Poe, Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam was one of the most iconic characters of French decadence and of the whole of the nineteenth century.