Let us all begin our pagan winter with sublime and somewhat decadent Victorian fiction!

"Some Words with a Mummy" is a satirical short story by Edgar Allan Poe. It was first published in The American Review: A Whig Journal of Politics, Literature, Art and Science in April 1845.

The story is regarded as featuring the earliest known image of a revived Egyptian mummy. In an 1852 anthology of Poe's works published in the UK, an illustration depicted a revived mummy. Poe and the illustrator challenged accepted racial stereotypes and European imperialism.

"The Vampyre" was written by William Polidori was an English writer and physician. He is known for his associations with the Romantic movement and credited by some as the creator of the vampire genre of fantasy fiction. This is his most successful work, the first published modern vampire story. Although originally and erroneously accredited to Lord Byron, both Byron and Polidori affirmed that the story is Polidori's

Arthur Machen was the pen-name of Arthur Llewellyn Jones, a Welsh author and mystic of the 1890s and early 20th century. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction.

His novella The Great God Pan (1890; 1894) has garnered a reputation as a classic of horror, with Stephen King describing it as "Maybe the best [horror story] in the English language." He is also well known for "The Bowmen", a short story that was widely read as fact, creating the legend of the Angels of Mons.