SOURCE: "Arthur Machen: The House of Souls" in Horror: 100 Best Books, edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman, Carroll & Graf, 1988, pp. 64-7.

Klein is considered one of the leading American authors of supernatural fiction. In the following tribute to House of Souls, he assesses the influence of Machen's "The White People" on his own work.

One of my longest-held ambitions—not a particularly lofty one, but the sort that all too easily gets put off, decade after decade, until one suddenly discovers it's too late—is to spend a year or so motoring around the British Isles, from Penzance to John o' Groats, stopping wherever I please. The back seat of my car would of course be filled with books: with the dozens of travel guides, highway atlases, and gazetteers of haunted houses, prehistoric sites, battlefields, and castles that I've been collecting all my life.

But in addition...