The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction pictures Albert Camus smoking a cigarette on the cover, and struggles to define its terms. A cult writer should have died, ideally in mysterious circumstances, leaving behind one seminal work and a whiff of wasted potential. The obscure Welsh mystic Arthur Machen, (1863-1947) almost qualifies as a cult, but soon the man his American publisher described as ‘the flower-tunicked priest of nightmare’ may be too well known to maintain the epithet. Just look around you.

The director Guillermo del Toro cited Machen’s The Great God Pan as an inspiration for his anti-fascist fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth, which swept the board at this year’s Academy Awards. For a moment, Machen’s hellishly degenerate 1890 novel was tenuously linked to the Oscars’ host Ellen Degeneres. Machen’s supernatural first world war fiction The Bowmen is the real story behind the forthcoming film, The Angel Of Mons. And Machen is a quiet influence on a new album of retro-electronica out today, We Are All Pan’s People, by The Focus Group.

Meanwhile, Machen’s band of devoted followers continues to spread the word. Last month Mark E Smith of The Fall told The Independent, “MR James is good, but Machen’s fucking brilliant”. Barry Humphries remains a professed devotee, as does the Archbishop of Canterbury. And the comic book writer Alan Moore, author of Watchmen and From Hell, has allowed Machen minor roles in many of his works, and sees him as a template for contemporary approaches to the literature of landscape. But who was Arthur Machen, and why is he suddenly leaking into your life?

A vicar’s son from Caerleon, Machen arrived in London in 1881 at the age of eighteen, bent on becoming ‘a man of letters’ by sheer force of will, denied a University education by lack of funds. His first novel, The Great God Pan, was eventually ignored in the wake of the scandal surrounding Oscar Wilde’s homosexuality, as the public turned away from the decadent themes it expressed. The Guardian described it as “the most acutely and intentionally disagreeable book we have yet seen in English”, while The Observer declared, “one shakes with laughter rather than dread.” 1907’s The Secret Glory explored Christian symbolism and was dismissed by The Morning Post as ‘too formless to be brought with in any literary mode’. Machen’s genre-resistant qualities continue to fascinate admirers. His next major work, the semi-autobiographical study of mental collapse, The Hill Of Dreams, is regarded his best, but Machen was most famous for the short story, The Bowmen.

This morale-boosting tale of First World War soldiers receiving supernatural assistance gave rise to the popular folk-myth of The Angel of Mons. In an ironic twist of fate, Machen eventually found himself pilloried by the credulous public for claiming he was the source of the story. Even today, the press release for Chocolate Chilli Films’ forthcoming Angels Of Mons movie ignores Machen’s role in the yarn. Between 1922 and 1926 Machen enjoyed an upsurge in popularity that saw his previously dismissed work published in Jonathan Cape’s Travellers’ Library alongside DH Lawrence, HG Wells and James Joyce, all of whom survived the decade rather better remembered.

But by the 1930’s, Machen’s fortunes were in decline. 1933’s The Green Round was knocked out for a quick cash fix as part a series of ninepenny thrillers, but it captures the strange ordinariness of city streets, its narrator haunted by a miniature man in the environs of The British library, anticipating existential literature and prefiguring the rise of ‘psychogeography’. In the end, it was only an appeal sponsored by TS Eliot and John Masefield that ensured Machen some financial support for the last five years of his life. Today, you won’t find Machen in Waterstones, but he echoes around the edges of mass culture.

Jim Jupp and Julian House run the record label Ghost Box, home to primitive electronica and a faux-folk music derived from The Wicker Man and weird 70’s children’s television. “Machen is a constant background influence on the Ghost Box label,” explains Jim Jupp, “Julian and I grew up near Caerleon, where Machen was born, and used to spend a lot of time drinking there. Cosmic horror from the likes of Machen, Algernon Blackwood and HP Lovecraft is a big part of Julian’s design work for the label and we like to refer to gateways, thresholds and “thin places” in track titles for our various projects.”

House’s Focus Group release We Are All Pan’s People today, nodding knowingly towards 70’s cultural ephemera and Machenalian mysticism simultaneously. Jupp’s own band, Belbury Poly, have just issued The Owl’s Map. The cd’s accompanying booklet details the fictional border town of Belbury, with photo inserts of pagan Sheela Na Gig sculptures alongside 70’s civic architecture. It’s an approach to landscape and environment that Machen would recognise, with different eras overlapping as the sacred slots in amidst the secular. Is it this aspect of Machen’s work that explains his increased near-visibility?

“Over last ten years there’s been a rise in people writing about place,” explains Alan Moore, “Iain Sinclair, for example, was influenced by Andre Breton and the surrealists’ jaunts around Paris, but also by Arthur Machen. Machen was travelling around London making observations of his surroundings, and making fictions from those impressions. When artists focus on a city they are also constructing it, building their vision into it. There is still a Machenesque imprint on London.”

The literary appreciation society, The Friends Of Arthur Machen, don’t need excuses to pursue their stated aims of “encouraging a wider recognition for Machen’s work, providing a focus for critical debate, and enhancing the social lives of members.” It was the latter that was most evident on the first weekend of this month, when a diverse group of two dozen Friends met for their annual dinner at the Three Salmons Hotel in Usk, Monmouthsire. Gwilym, the goth librarian, issues the journal Machenalia twice a year. Ray’s Tartarus imprint specialises in luxurious editions of Machen’s books. Nicolas’ London Adventure organises literary guided walks around the city. Erik co-manages The Fantasy Centre bookshop on the Holloway Road, and remembers the Roundhouse and Arthur Lee’s Love. And, unusually for such an event, there are even four women present.

The Friends are, thankfully, friendly. Their dinner is refreshingly free of the internecine squabbling that often divides such special interest groups. Wine was paid for by the proceeds of an auction of Machenalian texts, donated by members, that took place earlier that day. And at ten o’clock the lights went down, significant figures were toasted, and extracts of Machen’s work were read by flickering candlelight. Then the party staggered into the streets of Usk to watch a fortuitously timed eclipse, which almost, but not quite, turned the moon blood red.

But would Machen have approved of the evening’s events? For the society’s secretary Mark Samuels, the social side of the Friends is essential; “Machen held that the average tavern was often a more sacred place than the average church,” he maintains, “since he despised the notion that the purpose of the Christian faith was to promote a series of prescriptive moral codes rather than revealing itself, without preconditions, as a profound source of mystical tradition and symbolism. To Machen, a pint of foaming ale was a sacrament as deserving of awe and wonder as the Latin Rite.”

While Machen’s interest in place seems like the most obvious contemporary resonance for his work, each member of The Friends Of Arthur Machen finds something different to love. Theologians admire Machen’s spirituality, secularists his rationalism. There’s enough skill in his writing to make a case for it as literature, and it’s shocking enough to consume as first rate pulp. “My theory, for what its worth, is that Machen specifically appeals to those who suffer from the nagging sense that they’re outlanders in a strange world,” explains Mark Samuels. “I don’t think this necessarily indicates any spiritual or religious predisposition, just the sense that our essential nature is to seek after mysteries.” Alan Moore makes a more dramatic claim for Machen’s resurgent popularity. “Machen was like Blake in that he used the irrational world of romantic visions to find something meaningful at the heart of human existence. The public’s belief in The Bowmen shows that after World War I people yearned for something spiritual. It’s the same today. Machen is ripe for revival.”