Edward Bulwer-Lytton was an English novelist, poet, playwright, and
politician. He was immensely popular with the reading public and wrote a
stream of bestselling novels. He coined the phrases "the great
unwashed," "pursuit of the almighty dollar," "the pen is mightier than
the sword," and "it was a dark and stormy night."
The Haunters and the Haunted is both a wonderful ghost story and a
well-crafted example of Bulwer-Lytton's theory of the supernatural. It
represents nearly twenty years' study of paranormal phenomena. On the
one hand, it is a chilling tale of ghosts and terror, but on the other,
it illustrates the author's theory "that the Supernatural is Impossible,
and that what is called supernatural is only a something in the laws of
nature of which we have been hitherto ignorant." For him, though, the
laws of nature include "the power that in the old days was called Magic,
a power of the human will that can affect mental and physical reality
and produce the apparently supernatural."