The Hill of Dreams

Complete and unabridged, with 59 full-page plates by John Atkinson Grimshaw, Thomas Gainsborough and Odilon Redon. A Welsh boy who cannot live in the world builds a Roman city in his head above his father's parish, moves to London, and writes a book nobody will read while the walls close in. Machen called it his one attempt at a Robinson Crusoe of the soul and could not place it with a publisher for years. It is the least supernatural of his books and by far the most frightening. Fifty-nine plates of mist, fog and moonlit lanes by painters from Friedrich to Grimshaw run alongside Machen's dream-city, matching its haunted inward weather.