The United Kingdom, for all its pomp and phlegm, is permeated with a sense of spiritual doom. No matter how many churches were built in its fields and villages, no matter how many saints walked its newly paved streets, pagan powers had long before claimed the blood-soaked land. Thus, every year, the River Thames’s muddy banks at low tide yield ancient figurines, human bones, and Roman coins. Here is a raw reminder that we share this world with impish beings with unbridled hunger and desire who watch us and our silly concerns with bemusement.
— Guillermo Del Toro, from The Ecstasy of Saint Arthur - forward to the Penguin Classics edition of Arthur Machen’s The White People and Other Weird Stories
