These twilight tales were conceived largely before Marjorie Bowen had encountered any of the standard works of supernatural horror. As Miss Bowen recalls: "Most of these stories derive from the author's own experience in the sense that they are the result of the impression made by some scrap of tradition or folklore, even by the glimpse of some house or scene, observed for a few moments only. Kecksies, the Celtic name for the hollow-stalked hemlock or humlok, was provoked by the sinisterly alluring combination of sound, association with the powerful poisonous qualities of this gloomy plant, and the visual aspect of the dark and heavy leaves; while a chance visit to an old country mansion of the more undesirable kind, with a fish pond containing carp whose age was claimed as a hundred years, and a woman's name on one of the window panes was the material for Florence Flannery."

In the domain of the macabre Marjorie Bowen belongs with such figures as Montague Rhodes James and Ralph Adams Cram, whose primary endeavors lay in other fields, but whose occasional tales of supernatural horror nevertheless have attained a surpassing level of excellence.