The best liars don’t tell you what isn’t true. They tell you something true, wrapped around the one thing that isn’t.

Two idle young men in London spend an evening being told extraordinary stories by three strangers who each want something from them — though it takes the length of the book to work out what, and by then it’s rather too late to matter. Machen builds his horror out of hospitality: every tale good enough that nobody thinks to ask why a stranger would tell it for free.

Full introduction, two critical essays, and an author biography — with House Writer’s closing thoughts on the story that made Arthur Machen briefly, unwillingly, more famous than his own life’s work — now live as a StoriesTyped Annotated Edition on Kindle. Read the introduction, watch the opening pages typed out on YouTube, or go straight to the book.

— G. H. Schreiber

05/07/2026