Arthur Machen

The Great God Pan — (1894) Publisher: Arthur Machen's classic tale, The Great God Pan. This is the book that launched one of the most influential writers of fantasy and horror, a story echoed in the works of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell, and T.E.D. Klein, among many others.

The Great God Pan

Written in 1894, Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan is a short novel which was highly influential to H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King. King, in fact, said The Great God Pan is “…one of the best horror stories ever written. Maybe the best in the English language. Mine isn’t anywhere near that good…” The Great God Pan used to be hard to find, but is now available free on the Kindle (and at other public domain e-book outlets) and is easily read in one dark and rainy evening.

The first few pages of The Great God Pan describe Mr. Clarke’s visit to his friend Dr. Raymond. After many years of study, Dr. Raymond has theorized that the spirit world is all around us, but that humans are unable to perceive it because of the particular set-up of our sensory systems. Thus, he hypothesizes that a small lesion in the cortex of the brain — a slight adjustment of our normal functioning — will “lift the veil” so that we can perceive the supernatural. The Greeks called this “seeing the Great God Pan.” Dr. Raymond invites Mr. Clarke into his laboratory where he is ready to perform this operation on Mary, a beautiful teenage girl who he saved from the streets years before and who, in his thinking, owes him her life. The operation appears to be unsuccessful… or at least Mary turns out to be incapable of describing her perceptions, because she has become “an idiot.”

The rest of the story is Mr. Clarke’s collection of accounts of unexplained suicides and strange deaths (apparently from shock and terror) in London society and his gradual suspicion that there is some connection between these deaths and Dr. Raymond’s failed experiment. The horrible things he hears about happen in private (many appear to be sexual in nature), so he can’t report the specifics for any of them. Eerie tension and a creeping horror arise as the reader fills in the unknown with fears from his or her own imagination.

It’s disappointing that the writing style of The Great God Pan isn’t as exquisite as the terror is, but it’s pleasant enough and completely readable over 100 years later. The Great God Pan is a must-read for any fan of horror fiction — not the bloody gruesome type of horror, but the brain-bending, soul-scaring type.
—Kat Hooper

The Inmost Light — (1894) A scientist imprisons his wife's soul in a shining jewel, letting something else into her untenanted body, but the jewel is stolen before he can reverse this.

The Hill of Dreams — (1907) Publisher: But already about the town the darkness was forming; fast, fast the shadows crept upon it from the forest, and from all sides banks and wreaths of curling mist were gathering, as if a ghostly leaguer were being built up against the city, and the strange race who lived in its streets. Suddenly there burst out fro the stillness the clear an piercing music of the réveillé, calling, recalling, iterated, reiterated, and ending with one long high fierce shrill note.

The Great Return — (1915) Publisher: They were purged as if they had passed through the Furnace of the Sages governed with Wisdom that the alchemists know. They spoke without much difficulty of what they had seen, or had seemed to see, with their eyes, but hardly at all of what their hearts had known when for a moment the glory of the fiery rose had been about them.

The Green Round — (1932) Publisher: Why is studious, bookish, quiet Lawrence Hillyer suddenly reviled and shunned by his fellow holiday-makers at a genteel Pembrokeshire coastal resort? Why is staunch and respectable Mrs Jolly, a landlady of many years seniority, all at once the source of police interest and knowing looks from her neighbours? What weird projectile smashed suburban Mr Horncastle’s domed glasshouse from such an improbable distance? What is the inner secret of the Reverend Thomas Hampole’s modest little book recounting his rambles in lesser-known London? What draws an eminent nerve specialist to study all this with such deep interest? Arthur Machen includes within the pages of The Green Round all of the many interests and preoccupations of his writing career. His hero, Hillyer, takes a holiday in West Wales and visits the “Green Round”, a mysterious natural hollow. He soon finds that he has acquired an unwanted shadow, and the novel becomes a study in disclocated parallel realities. With a perceptive new introduction by Machen’s most recent biographer, Mark Valentine.