Tales of Horror and the Supernatural

by Arthur Machen

Includes: The Terror. The Great God Pan. The White People. Fourteen Stories! Over 500 pages.

From the beginning of his literary career, Machen espoused a mystical belief that the humdrum ordinary world hid a more mysterious and strange world beyond. His gothic and decadent works of the 1890s concluded that the lifting of this veil could lead to madness, sex, or death, and usually a combination of all three. Machen's later works became somewhat less obviously full of gothic trappings, but for him investigations into mysteries invariably resulted in life-changing transformation and sacrifice. Machen loved the medieval world view because he felt it combined deep spirituality alongside a rambunctious earthiness.

Machen's strong opposition to a materialistic viewpoint is obvious in many of his works, marking him as part of neo-romanticism. He was deeply suspicious of science, materialism, commerce, and Puritanism, all of which were anathema to Machen's conservative, bohemian, mystical, and ritualistic temperament.

Contents:
N (1936)
Out of the Earth (1915)
The Bowmen (1914)
The Bright Boy (1936)
The Children of the Pool (1936)
The Great God Pan (1894)
The Great Return (1915)
The Happy Children (1920)
The Inmost Light (1894)
The Novel of the Black Seal (1895)
The Novel of the White Powder (1895)
The Shining Pyramid (1895)
The Terror (1916)
The White People (1904)

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Weird Fiction, Fiction, Fantasy, Gothic, 19th Century

408 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1948

About the author

Arthur Machen was a leading Welsh author of the 1890s. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. His long story The Great God Pan made him famous and controversial in his lifetime, but The Hill of Dreams is generally considered his masterpiece. He also is well known for his leading role in creating the legend of the Angels of Mons.

At the age of eleven, Machen boarded at Hereford Cathedral School, where he received an excellent classical education. Family poverty ruled out attendance at university, and Machen was sent to London, where he sat exams to attend medical school but failed to get in. Machen, however, showed literary promise, publishing in 1881 a long poem "Eleusinia" on the subject of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Returning to London, he lived in relative poverty, attempting to work as a journalist, as a publisher's clerk, and as a children's tutor while writing in the evening and going on long rambling walks across London.

In 1884 he published his second work, the pastiche The Anatomy of Tobacco, and secured work with the publisher and bookseller George Redway as a cataloguer and magazine editor. This led to further work as a translator from French, translating the Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre, Le Moyen de Parvenir (Fantastic Tales) of Béroalde de Verville, and the Memoirs of Casanova. Machen's translations in a spirited English style became standard ones for many years.

Around 1890 Machen began to publish in literary magazines, writing stories influenced by the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, some of which used gothic or fantastic themes. This led to his first major success, The Great God Pan. It was published in 1894 by John Lane in the noted Keynotes Series, which was part of the growing aesthetic movement of the time. Machen's story was widely denounced for its sexual and horrific content and subsequently sold well, going into a second edition.

Machen next produced The Three Impostors, a novel composed of a number of interwoven tales, in 1895. The novel and the stories within it were eventually to be regarded as among Machen's best works. However, following the scandal surrounding Oscar Wilde later that year, Machen's association with works of decadent horror made it difficult for him to find a publisher for new works. Thus, though he would write some of his greatest works over the next few years, some were published much later. These included The Hill of Dreams, Hieroglyphics, A Fragment of Life, the story The White People, and the stories which make up Ornaments in Jade.

Reviews

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic collection of stories by classic horror author Arthur Machen. Perhaps my favorite aspect of Machen's work is his ability to create an atmosphere of mysticism through his emphasis on nature, folklore, religion, and the occult. No where is this more apparent than in his masterpiece The White People. Through the diary of a young girl, you are thrown into a world of weird and strange things that you hardly understand, you struggle to guess their meaning, and you just can't shake the feeling that it is all wicked. It is a prime example of why I love Machen's work.

That said, most stories in this collection are gold: tales about experiments to see beyond reality gone wrong, encounters with the occult and the malignant "little people" of legend, visions and eyewitness accounts of holy miracles, etc. At his best Machen's work can make the mind wonder like no other. However, the last two stories in this collection (The Children of the Pool, The Terror) were rather disappointing in their payoff. It seems what Machen lead me to expect until the end was far more grand and terrible than what he could come up with. Still, the rest are absolute classics of horror and weird fiction.

[Jim Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This Tartarus hardback of Machen grotesqueries and faery stories outshines the more widely available Penguin paperback The White People and Other Weird Stories in its purpose as a Machen starter-kit for modern audiences new to his writing. Included in its first half are the core six of Arthur Machen's 1890s horror stories: Novel of the Black Seal, Novel of the White Powder, The Great God Pan (preposterously missing from the Penguin book), The White People, The Inmost Light and The Shining Pyramid (also missing from the Penguin book). Each is an elegant and visionary tale of terror and wonderment worthy of intense study. Along with the novel The Hill of Dreams (not included), these represent the core essentials of Machen's dark supernatural fiction from when he was at his creative peak. A slim, but exceptional output.

Machen generally moved away from horror after the 1890s, after which most of his best fiction in general was behind him, but here collected are his best short tales of wonder – The Great Return and N. These stories are also excellent visionary works of mysticism in their own right, even if they strive for an eerie sense of awe rather than terror. Horror rears its head again for the book's final piece The Terror, and whilst it is is guilty of a great degree of meandering and for much of its length not up to the standard of his 1890s work, the first person manuscript climax itself is a dark visionary moment worthy of Machen at his best. Stick with it. ZAIN!

Those thirsty for more would do well to check out his novels The Secret Glory and The Hill of Dreams (one of my favourite novels from any writer), his three delightful volumes of autobiographies and the exquisite prose poems found in Ornaments in Jade. I envy anybody coming to Machen for the first time. Ecstasy awaits!

[Ira (SF Words of Wonder) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Check out my full, spoiler free, video review HERE.

Any fan of older horror fiction should check out Machen. He was very influential to many authors such as Lovecraft, Harlan Ellison and Stephen King. These stories read more like Sir Arthur Conon Doyle than Lovecraft in my opinion, descriptive and clear writing with a bit of detective work to figure out what crazy things have gone wrong with reality. A lot of the characters are sort of innocent bystanders to some occult/mystic/pagan event or item. I think these stories were probably a bit too ahead of their time as Machen didn’t really achieve the notoriety of other authors of his time.

[Nicolai Alexander · Rating 3 out of 5]

Listen. I have a LOT of books on my bookshelves waiting patiently to be read. Some of them are more desperate to be read, it must be said, but the books I’m most eager to read are the ones trying to coax me with promised of dark arcane spells and forbidden knowledge of tentacle horrors or evil forces that wreak demonic havoc. And the ones tempting me with immortality or whisper only at night in alien tongue about cosmic fungus and necromantic powers. And the ones singing of glorious adventures into enchanted woods with dryads and tiny mushroom royalty.
As if my books are possessed by the ghost of their authors.

That’s why I’ve been exploring the most influential authors of fantasy, science fiction, horror and weird fiction. And now, thanks to the group “weird fiction”, I’ve had the opportunity to read the next such influential author on my list: Arthur Machen.

Lovecraft introduces Machen in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” as follows:

“Of living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few if any can hope to equal the versatile Arthur Machen; author of some dozen tales long and short, in which the elements of hidden horror and brooding fright attain an almost incomparable substance and realistic acuteness (…) His powerful horror-material of the ’nineties and earlier nineteen-hundreds stands alone in its class, and marks a distinct epoch in the history of this literary form.” (82)

Reading this paragraph again after reading my first eight Machen short stories made me squint for a little while and go:

Riiiiiiight.

I guess I started at the wrong end of Machen’s bibliography, because I just don’t see it.

My edition of this book, by the way, is not available in e-book format and is different than the original from 1948 and the 1970s printing, containing fewer stories. Here is a table of contents:

1 - The Shining Pyramid • (1895)
2- The Bowmen • (1914)
3 - The Great Return • (1915)
4 - The Happy Children • (1920)
5 - The Bright Boy • (1936)
6 - Out of the Earth • (1915)
7 - The Children of the Pool • (1936)
8 - The Terror • (1917)

Based on this collection, Machen’s characters often seem to be faced with some kind of mystery that they’re eager to solve. Strange evidence (or lack thereof) and wild, cryptic, assumptive, exaggerated or incoherent rumors etc. make their task harder and creates a growing sense of uneasiness in the reader as Machen lays all of the pieces out on the table like a supernatural puzzle to be solved and revealing some evidence here and divulging a little bit of the answer there, but uncovering in the end the origin of the mystery or eventually explaining whatever phenomenon has arisen.

That phenomenon or mystery is what I believe Lovecraft means by “hidden horror”, and because a lot of time is spent on thinking and reasoning and explaining before the supernatural encounter, there’s this growing “brooding fright”, which eventually creates that sense of “realistic acuteness” when things reveal themselves, either as answers in the character’s minds or as an observed physical thing. Sadly, I didn’t see or feel any horror, fright or acuteness.

Machen certainly pays strict attention to detail within a disciplined plot structure, and then there’s the psychological state of his characters, the atmosphere and tone in his writing, all of which is fluctuating between the reasonable or logical and the baffling or obscure. Between the precise, sober, journalistic and the profound, imaginative or resplendent. Between the natural and the supernatural, the down to earth and the otherworldly. Between the realistic and the fantastic. His characters are also fairly rigid, though smart, intrigued and highly inquisitive middle aged and male. Most of this certainly sounds brilliant in theory, but it’s all executed in a slightly too dispassionate and innocuous manner. Much like a theory, then. And even though there are flashes or brilliance and beauty, I’m left feeling underwhelmed – in large part because there are a lot of repeating elements.

I’d say his fiction is like a flower, which starts out as an unassuming bud, then it slowly grows into full bloom and then withers into some brown grime - all happening very predictably.

Furthermore, this collection is called “Tales of Horror and the Supernatural: Terrifying stories by a master of the ghostly and the macabre”, which is misleading. These stories are not horrifying, terrifying, ghostly or macabre. They’re just dealing with the supernatural in some way. Sometimes just barely.

The last story – “The Terror” – is an outlier, though. It stands out like a masterpiece compared to all the others and is mostly exempt from all the negative criticism I’ve shared so far. Keep that in mind, because I actually highly recommend that one.

Here's a review of each story with some memorable quotes:

The Shining Pyramid - ★★★

Two men are talking about a mysterious tragedy involving a young girl and about some strange flint signs. They try to uncover the meaning behind the flint signs, but it just doesn't make sense to them, which makes one of them particularly invested. He investigates the matter, and halfway through the story, things escalate pretty quickly. In the last part of the story, everything is basically explained away, unfortunately, and all the initial excitement and mystery is gone. The characters are kind of stone faced too and lack emotional depth. I think these things and there being an excess of minutiae along the way here, makes it all a bit dull for me. I think perhaps if Machen had ended the story after that supernatural traumatic experience, I'd probably give it at least four stars, so it ended up being slightly below average for me.

“In that instant Vaughan saw the myriads beneath; the things made in the form of men but stunted like children hideously deformed, the faces with the almond eyes burning with evil and unspeakable lusts; the ghastly yellow of the mass of naked flesh […] ” (24)

The Bowmen - ★★

I have no idea why this story is even included in this collection. It's very short, four pages, and it's basically just a report from a battlefield where Germans and Englishmen are fighting. War is horrifying, sure, but it's very out of place in here. Also, it’s boring.

“His heart grew hot as a burning coal, it grew cold as ice within him, as it seemed to him that a tumult of voices answered to his summons.” (33)

The Great Return - ★★★

There's something special about this one, but I have mixed feelings. It's divided into chapters, with the first one called "The rumour of the Marvellous", which is a big hint as to what it's about. Something strange has happened to the people of a place called Llanstrisant. It seems as if they've all had some collective auditory hallucination of some sort. Something else happens to them too of course, but I won't be revealing that here. I enjoyed the build-up, and there are some great moments in here. Some brilliant and beautiful ones as well. This is a positive kind of weird fiction, pertaining some glorious otherworldly phenomenon. Machen's writing was just right in those moments, amplifying the experience perfectly, but he could've ended the story in chapter 5 or 6. As it stands, it's just too long, slow and long-winded, and I lost interest in the second half. And there are too many characters, which makes it confusing as well. He just doesn't know when to stop, unfortunately.

“And the difficulty in recording this state is this, that it is so rare an experience that no set language to express it is in existence. A shadow of its raptures and ecstasies is found in the highest poetry; there are phrases in ancient books telling of the Celtic saints that dimly hint at it; some of the old Italian masters of painting had known it, for the light of it shines in their skies and about the battlements of their cities that are founded on magic hills. But these are but broken hints. ” (59-60)

The Happy Children - ★★

Fairly unexciting. A man investigates a rumor (again!), but this time it’s the Germans who are doing some shady business. The narrator later discovers something called the White order of Innocents. That's basically it. Nothing supernatural, nothing remotely creepy or scary or weird. Shallow characterizations yet again too.

So, you can move on. There’s nothing to see here.

“I saw the wonder of the town in the light of the afterglow that was red in the west. The clouds blossomed into rose-gardens; there were seas of fairy green that swam about isles of crimson light; there were clouds like spears of flame, like dragons of fire.” (71)

The Bright Boy - ★★

I’m afraid there’s very little to see here as well. This is a drawn-out account of how Joseph Last came to work as a tutor for a gifted boy. Machen wastes a lot of time writing about Last's life and some of the conversations had along the way. It's all very unassuming, irrelevant and pointless. What's funny is I think Machen comments on that observation too, because a character, miss Pilliner, says: "I'm so sorry (...) to trouble you with this long narrative, which I am sure, must be a sad trial of your patience" (84) and later, Last thinks: "Miss Pilliner's long and ceremonious approach was lulling him into a mild stupor; he wondered faintly when she would come to the point, and what the point would be like when she came to it, and chiefly, what on earth this rather dull family history could have to do with him" (85), and lastly, mirroring my own experience with this entire short story: "Last was resigned. The point of the long story seemed to recede into some far distance, into vanishing prospective" (86).

Good. Well said, Joseph Last. Well said.

And the only mystery seems to be that there’s a man who looks like a boy. What? Who cares!

“And then he went on to wonder whether curiosity, often regarded as a failing, almost a vice, is not, in fact, one of the greatest virtues of the spirit of man, the key to all knowledge and all the mysteries, the very sense of the secret that must be discovered.” (94)

"Out of the Earth" - ★★★

This one’s not too shabby, actually. I've kept several noteworthy quotes from it, so I liked the writing. The idea is neat, but things are starting to feel a bit too repetitive. The narrator has again heard some rumors/reports/gossip/speculations and sets out to investigate. At first there has been some "complaint during last August of the ill behavior of some children". Machen seems to dislike children an awful lot, for some reason, as his characters often do suspect children of doing something mean-spirited, as if he has an irrational fear of them. I think that’s called pedophobia.

Anyways, there seems to be that some horrible things are happening to people. A little girl (again!), for instance, has been subject to foul play, and the narrator must investigate (again!). While he investigates, "the story grew, and grew more monstrous and incredible", as speculations and myths are wont to do. Had this been the first story, I think I would've liked it a lot more. There are just one too many elements being repeated here in the same way from the other stories.

“An inventor of fantasies is a poor creature, heaven knows, when all the world is at war […]” (106)
“I began to wonder whether the pressure and anxiety and suspense of a terrible war had unhinged the public mind, so that it was ready to believe any fable, to debate the reasons for happenings which had never happened.” (109)

"Children of the Pool" - ★★★★★

Finally a five star story! Here is a man who is tired of city life one summer and visits some old friends on the Welsh border. He stays at their farm called Lanypwll, which means “by the pool”. He meets an old acquaintance there too, James Roberts, and together they decide to investigate (!) the mysterious nearby pool. It’s a strange, ugly-looking black water of marshland with “all manner of rank and strange growths that love to have their roots in slime” and “a tangle of undergrowth (…) with taller trees rising above the mass (…) white, and bare and ghastly, with leprous limbs” (117). Later, James Roberts seems to be haunted by some undefined presence from his past that frightens him a great deal, or at least he has a nervous breakdown of some sorts.

I really liked how this story can be interpreted in different ways, and that there are different layers to it. It’s a well-structured, well-balanced story - psychoanalysis, philosophy and the supernatural at its core - with some nice, descriptive paragraphs and themes and ideas that gave me food for thought. I found the narrator’s final arguments very convincing and well thought-out. You know, it actually expanded my way of thinking a little bit. There’s a new way of seeing the world and ourselves in here, and I think I’d like to read it again someday.

“In him, as in many men, there was a great gulf fixed between the hidden and the open consciousness; so that which could not come out into the light grew and swelled secretly, hugely, horribly in the darkness. If Roberts had been a poet or a painter or a musician; we might have had a masterpiece. As he was neither: we had a monster.” (130)

“[…] the "sadness" which we attribute to a particular landscape is really and efficiently in the landscape and not merely in ourselves; and consequently that the landscape can affect us and produce results in us, in precisely the same manner as drugs and meat and drink affect us in their several ways. Poe, who knew many secrets, knew this, and taught that landscape gardening was as truly a fine art as poetry or painting; since it availed to communicate the mysteries to the human spirit.” (131)

“The Terror” - ★★★★★

“They have risen once – they may rise again” (224)

My favorite story of the collection. It’s novel length, but I loved it. Like I said, this story is exempt of all my initial criticism, and here’s where I wholeheartedly agree with Lovecraft: it’s a story “in which the elements of hidden horror and brooding fright attain an almost incomparable substance and realistic acuteness”, and as such, it’s like it “stands alone in its class”. And dare I say the very epitome of speculative fiction, because it masterfully conveys the power of speculation - the effects of rumor, vague stories, gossip and lack of convincing first-hand evidence. And whenever you don’t have a trustworthy authority figure or source, speculation turns into conspiracy theories or suspicion of invasion as people start to become afraid, then panic, and that’s when we let our imagination run wild. That’s when it’s hard to separate the nonsense from the evidence, the reasonable from the maddening, or rather that “no one knew how to distinguish undoubted fact from wild and extravagant surmise” (141)

“A whole country, was visited by a series of extraordinary and terrible calamities, which where the more terrible inasmuch as they continued for some time to be inscrutable mysteries. (141)
Machen portrays a society which begin to unravel in the face of inexplicable deaths. These deaths can at first be explained as accidents, but when newspapers don’t report on the deaths, and when the military starts showing up, people suspect there’s more to it, yet they have no idea what to believe:

“’Nobody knows what is happening,’ Merritt repeated, and he went on to describe the bewilderment and terror that hung like a cloud over the great industrial city in the Midlands, how the feeling of concealment, of some intolerable secret danger that must not be named, was worst of all.” (167)

What comes next, is not only an investigation into these deaths, but into our way of thinking in the face of incomprehensible terror, into what people do when they attempt to grapple with things that are way beyond their understanding and scope of imagination. Machen maps these cognitive patterns on a bigger scale, and his main characters are the only ones capable of finding the answer, in large part thanks to outside-the-box thinking like this:

"My theory," said that ingenious person, "is that human progress is simply a long march from one inconceivable to another. Look at that airship of ours that came over Porth yesterday: ten years ago that would have been an inconceivable sight. Take the steam engine, take printing, take the theory of gravitation: they were all inconceivable till somebody thought of them. So it is, no doubt, with this infernal dodgery that we're talking about: the Huns have found it out, and we haven't; and there you are. We can't conceive how these poor people have been murdered, because the method's inconceivable to us." (154)

And this:

“Dr. Lewis maintained that we should never begin to understand the real significance of life until we began to study just those aspects of it which we now dismiss and overlook as utterly inexplicable, and therefore, unimportant.” (211)

And this:

“You can't believe what you don't see: rather, you can't see what you don't believe. […] mere facts, without the correlating idea, are nothing and lead to no conclusion.” (212)

How do you expand your way of thinking about the world? How do you project yourself into a state of “ahead of my time” to contend with things you’re currently not equipped to deal with? What are the basis of facts? There comes a point where you simply can’t dismiss evidence, people’s shared experience and observations, but you don’t want to be paranoid or crazy either. So you must connect the dots in a reasonable, careful and intelligent manner.

“Dr. Lewis made no answer. He was watching the growth of a new, unknown tree in his garden.” (161)

There’s some real craftmanship that went into this story, which made quite the impression on me. For every horrible event, every unexplainable death, there’s an accumulation of tension and dread, and along the way you’re taking the time to digest and reflect upon our collective state of mind. There’s a high degree of suspense built into the plot, and it kept me engaged all the way. The ending came as a surprise to me as well.

Awesome! This is the work of a great writer! Too bad most of the others were subpar. He's either grown a lot as a writer here or he's more adept at writing longer stories. Small sample size, though, I know, but somewhere in my mind I have the inclination that “The Terror” has inspired more than one author and screenwriter. I have no idea how the rest of his fiction is, but even though I really liked the last two, six of these stories disappointed me a great deal based on all the “hype” and acclaim. I'd very much like to read more of his work in the future, just in case, because I’m convinced that I’ll discover all the reasons he’s such an influential writer in his field.

[denudatio_pulpae · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Cóż, w końcowym rozrachunku, co my w ogóle tak właściwie wiemy?"
Wiemy, że nic nie wiemy, ale dzięki panu Arthurowi możemy trochę poszperać w nieznanym. Jednak nie każdy eksperyment okazuje się być bezpieczny... Uważajcie!

Niesamowite historie tworzył pan Machen, a ja uwielbiam takie opowieści. Najbardziej spodobały mi się "Wielki Bóg Pan" i "Jaśniejąca Piramida", ale pozostałe też były całkiem niezłe. Czytanie tych opowiadań sprawiło mi bardzo dużą przyjemność, klimat tych staroci jest nie do podrobienia. I te oczy na murze... Można poczuć się nieco nieswojo.

[T.A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the great grandfathers of the written horror story. Still gives me the creeps! Particularily interested in the terror hidden by nature's beauty.

[Karol Rudziński · Rating 4 out of 5]

Początkowo chciałem dać trzy gwiazdki za nieco dłużące się opowiadanie w środku tego zbioru, ale takie perełki jak „The Inmost Light”, „The Great God Pan” czy „The Tree of Life” wynoszą ocenę o jedną w górę. U Machena bardzo cenię jego ogromną wiedzę na temat okultyzmu (sam należał do Hermetycznego Zakonu Złotego Brzasku). Widać jednak również w takich opowiadaniach jak „Wielki Powrót” nawiązanie do jego anglikańskiej wiary i późniejszego powrotu do niej (SPOILER! przepiękna końcówka o małym miasteczku, w którym dzieją się cuda za sprawą Świętego Graala, naprawdę mnie urzekła).
Polecam ten zbiór każdemu miłośnikowi weird fiction.

[Ted · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this because I kept hearing his name mentioned along with M.R. James and Algernon Blackwood (both of whose work I like) and because Stephen King gushed all over "The Great God Pan." I liked the latter. It was one of the better one's in this collection. The rest are lame. I gave up on several stories (The Return, the White People) because they bored me to tears. And, no, it wasn't just the language. It was the pacing, which differs so dramatically from James's and Blackwood's stories. He takes so LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG to get to the mysterious events and when they are made known, they often disappoint. I love horror about pagan myths and ancient rites and all that hokum, but these were sort of dull.

[Maggie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I decided to give up on this. I got the book mainly for the story "The Great God Pan" that was referenced in Stephen King's "Just After Sunset." I read that story plus 2 others, and am calling it good.

Don't know if I'd recommend this, because it's a very specific kind of book, and it takes a LOT of patience to weed through the rather opaque prose. I'd definitely recommend the Pan story, though. That one was pretty good.

[Paula · Rating 3 out of 5]

Would have given this one four stars, but the later (chronologically speaking) stories just weren't as good as the earlier ones.

[Michael Ritchie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good creepy stories from the 1890s-1920s. He was undoubtedly an influence on Lovecraft, and some of the stories put me in mind of the Bram Stoker non-Dracula horror stories.

[Jay Rothermel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tales of Horror and the Supernatural by Arthur Machen
http://jayrothermel.blogspot.com/2017...

[Dan Barnett · Rating 2 out of 5]

Struggled with this one a bit and didn't actually finish.

I think most, of not all short story collections are a bit hit and miss but I for me, more of these missed.

I I'd already read 'The Great God Pan', which I think is probably his best known work and that one is pretty good.

I found that a lot of them were a bit samey though.

I wanted to read this because I really like HP Lovecraft's work and I know that Machen was a big influence on him.

It that respect, I'm glad I read the stories I did read because you can see how and why Machen's work would have impacted Lovecraft.

Beyond that though, I could take him or leave him.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Introduction by Roger Dobson ✔
The Novel of the Black Seal 5⭐
The Novel of the White Powder 5⭐
The Great God Pan 5⭐
The White People 3.5⭐
The Inmost Light 3.75⭐
The Shining Pyramid 3.5⭐
The Bowmen 3⭐
The Great Return 4⭐
The Happy Children 4⭐
The Bright Boy 3⭐
Out of the Earth 3.5⭐
N 3.5⭐
Children of the Pool 4.25⭐
The Terror 3.5⭐

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seriously creepy stories; loved them (but reading before bed produced some.very strange dreams)

[kRis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Klasyka weird i supernatural. Świetny klimat nie do podrobienia.

[Bill Borre]

The Shining Pyramid is also printed in the Big Book of the Masters of Horror
The White People is also printed in the Big Book of the Masters of Horror

[Bax · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another Lovecraft predecessor penning highly enjoyable tales of unspoken dread & terrors from beyond man's knowing.

[Berenice · Rating 4 out of 5]

superb reading, not gore but authentic supernatural, sort of old-fashioned tales, great ambiance on the writing, Arthur Machen is a genius, I highly recommend this book

[Jonathan Pierce · Rating 5 out of 5]

File Under: shaking and drooling when looking into the void