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The Great God Pan: collection of tales
Perhaps no figure better embodies the transition from the Gothic tradition to modern horror than Arthur Machen. In the final decade of the nineteenth century, the Welsh writer produced a seminal body of tales of occult horror, spiritual and physical corruption, and malignant survivals from the primeval past which horrified and scandalized late Victorian readers. Machen's "weird fiction" has influenced generations of storytellers, from H. P. Lovecraft to Guillermo Del Toro and it remains no less unsettling today.
Contents:
- The Great God Pan
- Novel of the White Powder
- The Right Hand
- The White People
Contents:
- The Great God Pan
- Novel of the White Powder
- The Right Hand
- The White People
176 pages, Paperback
Published June 7, 2018
15 people are currently reading
458 people want to read
About the author
Arthur Machen
1,121 books1,011 followersArthur 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 73 reviews
May 17, 2022
Helen Vaughan did nothing wrong. She was literally just vibing hard.
November 26, 2021
The first novel, The great God Pan, was okay. It's the kind of story that is fun to think about afterwards, not so much actually reading. But it could have been a great read if it was longer and a bit more in-depth.
The other stories where... fillers. I couldn't have given a sssh less about those. They were just words. No story. No passion. No nothing.
It felt, overall, like there's too much text, with unnecessary explanations and descriptions.
I'm almost getting flashbacks to "The hunchback of Notre Dame" by Victor Hugo with the endless description of the streets in Paris. But at least i enjoyed that and could "see" the streets in my head. These stories bring nothing, i see pretty much nothing, and the characters feel unnatural and staged.
The other stories where... fillers. I couldn't have given a sssh less about those. They were just words. No story. No passion. No nothing.
It felt, overall, like there's too much text, with unnecessary explanations and descriptions.
I'm almost getting flashbacks to "The hunchback of Notre Dame" by Victor Hugo with the endless description of the streets in Paris. But at least i enjoyed that and could "see" the streets in my head. These stories bring nothing, i see pretty much nothing, and the characters feel unnatural and staged.
July 20, 2022
my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined
December 23, 2019
Reading Machen, you feel he must have been a kind of David Lynch for the Victorians, peeling back obfuscation to reveal only more intricate, yet somehow more meaningful obfuscation: “...wonder is of the soul.”
November 13, 2021
I'm adding a star, because if I set aside the (at times) cheesy, pulpy prose (inevitably judged so in the amassed hindsight of a 21st century reader), the story is truly transgressive, engrossing and deliciously gothic. You can sense the seismic waves Machen made by writing it.
February 6, 2026
If you need to feel unsettled, love T. Kingfisher horror books this is a good classic to read the only thing is that I found the stories to short. I'm just not a big fan of very short stories
May 31, 2021
Very quick to read, and unsettling, but not a new favourite.
January 14, 2022
it was...... ick.
February 21, 2023
helen slays so hard everyone’s obsessed with her
April 18, 2023
Heavy on the gothic devices. Marvelous.
Read
June 13, 2024HELEN I WOULD’VE DONE TONS OF COCAINE WITH YOU AND KEPT YOU ALIVE FOREVER
October 12, 2024
I was assigned “The Great God Pan” and “The White People” for a literature course. They were both dire.
Why does everyone say these are the best Victorian gothic stories ever? Machen’s no Sheridan Le Fanu!
For about the first two thirds, I was enjoying Great God Pan. I didn’t love the slightly disorientating time-jumping style, but I was still following it. But the ending made no sense whatsoever. Before we know it, the main villain is dead, even though we don’t actually witness it. So many narrators and subnarrators and epistolary moments…was it deliberately disorientating?
It’s a shame because I really wanted to love it. The concept is great. A doctor does a wacky experiment on a young woman’s brain. The woman sees “Pan” - the Sublime, terrifying, Nature-interwoven version of God, not the nice and sweet kind - and becomes pregnant by him. She gives birth to a half-demonic and vampiric yet beautiful woman who grows up bewitching men into killing themselves. I imagine this was a precursor to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Lucy Westenra, similar monstering of sexually transgressive women, etc.)
At one point, the central villain as a child is seen in the woods with a naked man. I wondered then if the whole thing was a metaphor for paedophilia? But unlikely.
“The White People” was just terrible. It would have been an instant DNF after the first page were I reading it for pleasure. It’s boring and episodic with zero narrative momentum. It ends on this ludicrous cliffhanger with a rushed, trumped-up restoration of order. Again, I like the premise - a young girl is seduced by her nurse’s bedtime stories into the pagan, sexualised cult of the “white people” in the forest. It used that trope that appears in virtually every gothic story - a mysterious, tantalising seduction that turns out to be very violent.
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, J Sheridan Le Fanu’s In A Glass Darkly, Wilkie Collins’s The Haunted House and The Woman in White, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret are all examples of this done better.
Why does everyone say these are the best Victorian gothic stories ever? Machen’s no Sheridan Le Fanu!
For about the first two thirds, I was enjoying Great God Pan. I didn’t love the slightly disorientating time-jumping style, but I was still following it. But the ending made no sense whatsoever. Before we know it, the main villain is dead, even though we don’t actually witness it. So many narrators and subnarrators and epistolary moments…was it deliberately disorientating?
It’s a shame because I really wanted to love it. The concept is great. A doctor does a wacky experiment on a young woman’s brain. The woman sees “Pan” - the Sublime, terrifying, Nature-interwoven version of God, not the nice and sweet kind - and becomes pregnant by him. She gives birth to a half-demonic and vampiric yet beautiful woman who grows up bewitching men into killing themselves. I imagine this was a precursor to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Lucy Westenra, similar monstering of sexually transgressive women, etc.)
At one point, the central villain as a child is seen in the woods with a naked man. I wondered then if the whole thing was a metaphor for paedophilia? But unlikely.
“The White People” was just terrible. It would have been an instant DNF after the first page were I reading it for pleasure. It’s boring and episodic with zero narrative momentum. It ends on this ludicrous cliffhanger with a rushed, trumped-up restoration of order. Again, I like the premise - a young girl is seduced by her nurse’s bedtime stories into the pagan, sexualised cult of the “white people” in the forest. It used that trope that appears in virtually every gothic story - a mysterious, tantalising seduction that turns out to be very violent.
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, J Sheridan Le Fanu’s In A Glass Darkly, Wilkie Collins’s The Haunted House and The Woman in White, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret are all examples of this done better.
January 16, 2026
"I stood here, and saw before me the unutterable, the unthinkable gulf that yawns profound between two worlds, the world of matter and the world of spirit; I saw the great empty deep stretch dim before me, and in that instant a bridge of light leapt from the earth to the unknown shore, and the abyss was spanned."
April 12, 2025
The universe is still full of ancient, indifferent, and incomprehensible forces that mock our need for meaning, unravel our illusions of control, and remind us that consciousness is a flickering light in an ocean of darkness.
February 21, 2022
“When the house of life is thus thrown open, there may enter in that for which we have no name, and human flesh may become the veil of a horror one dare not express.”
Often hailed as the urtext of weird fiction, I’ve had a couple false starts with this novelette, but I’m glad I read it through this time around. Incredible how fully formed a “horror” story this is, well before the solidification of that genre. The influence on Lovecraft and the weird tales crowd is abundantly obvious, but I also kinda got 90s J-horror vibes with the whole rash of suicides caused by the mere encounter with something unimaginably horrible idea.
A fun read if you can stomach the prose, and some genuinely creepy moments!
Often hailed as the urtext of weird fiction, I’ve had a couple false starts with this novelette, but I’m glad I read it through this time around. Incredible how fully formed a “horror” story this is, well before the solidification of that genre. The influence on Lovecraft and the weird tales crowd is abundantly obvious, but I also kinda got 90s J-horror vibes with the whole rash of suicides caused by the mere encounter with something unimaginably horrible idea.
A fun read if you can stomach the prose, and some genuinely creepy moments!
April 28, 2020
Quite simply one of the best horror stories ever written. I almost have no words to describe it, but here's my attempt: it's Lovecraft meets Oscar Wilde meets Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde, with maybe a hint of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and some other big names of gothic horror sprinkled in between. I usually don't like calling a book a "must-read", but if you're a fan of gothic fiction, (early) weird fiction, or just horror fiction in general, then this is absolutely something you should read!
September 8, 2021
i really enjoyed two of the stories in this collection: novel of the white powder and the red hand. was a lil confused by the great god pan. and dnf’ed the white people cos i got a lil bored lol. an average one!
June 27, 2025
The Great God Pan itself is a work where I can see the appeal and its importance but where I also can't connect to it.
Its approach to horror is refreshing in one sense, clear but indirect, taking the reader along as the puzzle is solved. Unfortunately the horror is also quite dependent on a Victorian worldview to connect, it seems rather tame and flat to modern sensibilities and many of its tropes have fallen into cliché. Your mileage may vary, I suspect, mostly on how capable you are of reading the text through the lens of Machen's contemporaries.
However there are other short stories in this collection and one, The White People, comes across as a much more gracefully aged work. Certainly it still has a little Victorian stodge about it but it also has an engrossing surreal atmosphere about itself - feeling like a cross between a folk horror and a piece of occult esoterica, like being taken somewhere perpendicular to reality.
Whereas The Great God Pan, and to a lesser extent the two other stories in the collection, feel very much like products of their time - for better in some ways, for worse in more - The White People feels like something both much older and much newer, and is well worth the price of admission if you're interested in this corner of genre fiction, or in any of the aesthetics it dabbles with.
Its approach to horror is refreshing in one sense, clear but indirect, taking the reader along as the puzzle is solved. Unfortunately the horror is also quite dependent on a Victorian worldview to connect, it seems rather tame and flat to modern sensibilities and many of its tropes have fallen into cliché. Your mileage may vary, I suspect, mostly on how capable you are of reading the text through the lens of Machen's contemporaries.
However there are other short stories in this collection and one, The White People, comes across as a much more gracefully aged work. Certainly it still has a little Victorian stodge about it but it also has an engrossing surreal atmosphere about itself - feeling like a cross between a folk horror and a piece of occult esoterica, like being taken somewhere perpendicular to reality.
Whereas The Great God Pan, and to a lesser extent the two other stories in the collection, feel very much like products of their time - for better in some ways, for worse in more - The White People feels like something both much older and much newer, and is well worth the price of admission if you're interested in this corner of genre fiction, or in any of the aesthetics it dabbles with.
January 28, 2026
Not a scary, or even chilling, moment in any of the four stories. The Great God Pan, The Novel of White Powder and The Red Hand all had good set-ups which ultimately went nowhere interesting. The White People might well be the most boring thing I have ever read.
Every one of the four stories unfortunately uses the trope of "There were such horrors as are indescribable." Ok, but could you try and describe them? The Great God Pan explicitly says that what Helen Vaughan was doing was so unimaginably terrible that it cannot be described to us for our own good. Maybe this was scary to people in the Victorian times idk.
Every one of the four stories unfortunately uses the trope of "There were such horrors as are indescribable." Ok, but could you try and describe them? The Great God Pan explicitly says that what Helen Vaughan was doing was so unimaginably terrible that it cannot be described to us for our own good. Maybe this was scary to people in the Victorian times idk.
December 22, 2024
An interesting and entertaining collection of pioneering, early horror stories. I wanted to read “The Great God Pan,” because Stephen King has praised it as one of the best horror stories ever written. The other short stories included seem to be more of the weird fantasy/mystery genre than horror. Quite entertaining if you like reading period genre fiction.
August 31, 2024
The grandfather of horror, Machen wrote stories that inspired people like Bram Stoker, Lovecraft up to Stephen King and after reading this book you’ll understand why. It is a quintessential book if you’re looking to understand the roots of the (gothic) horror genre.
January 31, 2026
This book feels unbelievably contemporary despite it having been published in 1894. Favourite story - “Novel of the White Powder”. Wow.
Can’t wait to start Machen’s “The White People and other Weird Stories”.
Can’t wait to start Machen’s “The White People and other Weird Stories”.
July 28, 2024
It just got worse and worse with each story
October 17, 2024
underwhelming
January 16, 2025
ok! 6/10
September 1, 2025
Bitches be crazy
September 14, 2025
Felt like being waterboarded with beige paint.
December 19, 2019
A short horror book review for Halloween! And what better way to start it then with a not well known Halloween classic! I mean, it’s called the scariest horror story written by Stephen King himself. And it sure is that, I just wished it was written in modern prose instead of old Victorian english.
This book was a little hard for me to read, and a little fun at times. Since its a short story (a little over 60 pages long) the characters were sprouting more exposition than character and though there was a small paragraph to set the mood, it felt too small for me to completely enjoy it. The old time language of using the word gay for a purpose it isn’t used anymore did give me a small giggle because it was used so frequently.
The story of a mad scientists and the occult is a stable of Gothic Horror. But it has also this larger than imagined monster in Pan, the ancient greek god of forests, nature and the wilderness and how he is meshed with the freaking Devil simply because he has horns. The way his power is shown is maddening from the first part of the story and then later on how it manifests. There’s also a lot of phallic and sexual descriptions that seem tame to our eyes now, because its done in a somewhat discreet language, but for the Victorian’s this was too scandalous and the book only received a new take on it in the 1920s.
The Welsh author Arthur Marchen has great scenarios and characters, but I suppose for me the hinderance came from the long expositions without any character descriptions between them like we use now. It became quite boring after a while and made me loose interest for a bit until it once again picked up with the story.
All in all a short Halloween Gothic Horror treat with a hint if H. P. Lovecraft in it with a lot of exposition, so I recommend reading a small non-spoiler synopsis before going in just to be sure you have all the information you need. Because without it you will have to look it up anyway if you don’t after reading it. Even if the book’s ending explanation is good, its written in a way that you aren’t sure what you’re reading, because your mind has juggled so many characters and scenes and murders in your head all the while that you need to read from some other source what happened.
This book was a little hard for me to read, and a little fun at times. Since its a short story (a little over 60 pages long) the characters were sprouting more exposition than character and though there was a small paragraph to set the mood, it felt too small for me to completely enjoy it. The old time language of using the word gay for a purpose it isn’t used anymore did give me a small giggle because it was used so frequently.
The story of a mad scientists and the occult is a stable of Gothic Horror. But it has also this larger than imagined monster in Pan, the ancient greek god of forests, nature and the wilderness and how he is meshed with the freaking Devil simply because he has horns. The way his power is shown is maddening from the first part of the story and then later on how it manifests. There’s also a lot of phallic and sexual descriptions that seem tame to our eyes now, because its done in a somewhat discreet language, but for the Victorian’s this was too scandalous and the book only received a new take on it in the 1920s.
The Welsh author Arthur Marchen has great scenarios and characters, but I suppose for me the hinderance came from the long expositions without any character descriptions between them like we use now. It became quite boring after a while and made me loose interest for a bit until it once again picked up with the story.
All in all a short Halloween Gothic Horror treat with a hint if H. P. Lovecraft in it with a lot of exposition, so I recommend reading a small non-spoiler synopsis before going in just to be sure you have all the information you need. Because without it you will have to look it up anyway if you don’t after reading it. Even if the book’s ending explanation is good, its written in a way that you aren’t sure what you’re reading, because your mind has juggled so many characters and scenes and murders in your head all the while that you need to read from some other source what happened.
January 7, 2024
This is a really interesting short novel from Machen, in that as typical it is of him, as entertaining to read, the plot is confused and doesn’t really make much sense. If it’s read as a series of vignettes, it may be appreciated better. I could take such a vignette out from the last third of the book, and another from the first third, swap them round, and I don’t think it would make much difference to the overall storyline.
Set in the hills of north Wales, Machen’s home turf, this concerns one Mr. Clarke, who visits a Dr. Raymond, an acclaimed surgeon who believes that humans are surrounded by a supernatural world, but aren't aware of it. Dr. Raymond believes he can surgically alter the human brain to enable the barrier between the worlds to be lifted, in his words, ‘to see the Great God Pan’. He demonstrates with a test subject, but it goes horribly wrong.
As a result, Clarke distances himself from Raymond, but years later, living in London, is still obsessed by seeing the ‘unseen’. He decides to write a book, and researches a girl called Helen V, who has encountered strange goings-on near her village. This takes him back to north Wales, where Helen lives, and another encounter with Raymond.
First published in 1890, it is possible to see the book’s influence on what was to follow frequently in the text. With his body of work, of which this is a good example, Machen demonstrated how restraint can be more effective than the brash in-your-face approach used to get a scare from many horror writers; provide the reader the tools to enable them to terrify themselves, rather than drowning them in a gazpacho of blood and guts.
Panned on its publication for being depraved and immoral, it is one of Machen’s most popular books, and best viewed these days as a keystone to the hundred and twenty years of weird and horror that would follow; a classic indeed.
Set in the hills of north Wales, Machen’s home turf, this concerns one Mr. Clarke, who visits a Dr. Raymond, an acclaimed surgeon who believes that humans are surrounded by a supernatural world, but aren't aware of it. Dr. Raymond believes he can surgically alter the human brain to enable the barrier between the worlds to be lifted, in his words, ‘to see the Great God Pan’. He demonstrates with a test subject, but it goes horribly wrong.
As a result, Clarke distances himself from Raymond, but years later, living in London, is still obsessed by seeing the ‘unseen’. He decides to write a book, and researches a girl called Helen V, who has encountered strange goings-on near her village. This takes him back to north Wales, where Helen lives, and another encounter with Raymond.
First published in 1890, it is possible to see the book’s influence on what was to follow frequently in the text. With his body of work, of which this is a good example, Machen demonstrated how restraint can be more effective than the brash in-your-face approach used to get a scare from many horror writers; provide the reader the tools to enable them to terrify themselves, rather than drowning them in a gazpacho of blood and guts.
Panned on its publication for being depraved and immoral, it is one of Machen’s most popular books, and best viewed these days as a keystone to the hundred and twenty years of weird and horror that would follow; a classic indeed.
February 28, 2024
4.5
I started this ages ago cuz I found out about The Great God Pan.
After reading that story (which is 5/5), I did some research on Machen and discovered we would not have gottten along. Funny how a man from the late 1800’s who hated women managed to write a piece of Good For Her, feminist horror. However although I loved it, I did have to sit with it for a while to gain any meaning from it (not that meaning is essential, it can just be a fun journey).
Novel of the White Powder 5/5
This is a much shorter story which reads like a drug trip and could be a metaphor for our capitalist society. what started with corruption ends with corruption. The meaning of this one jumps right out at you.
The Red Hand (dnf)
Here is where Machen’s prose begins to take a toll. It was all too much and I couldn’t finish it. This resulted in me putting the book for months.
The White People 4/5
I picked this book back up again for the final story as I am currently reading The Twisted Ones by T Kingfisher and I wanted to read the original before I continued their version. This one doesn’t hit as hard as Pan but Machen’s never ending sentences add to the overall experience of the unknown magic(??)(it could just be how nature truely is honestly) and I loved the depiction of good/evil and saints/sinners.
I started this ages ago cuz I found out about The Great God Pan.
After reading that story (which is 5/5), I did some research on Machen and discovered we would not have gottten along. Funny how a man from the late 1800’s who hated women managed to write a piece of Good For Her, feminist horror. However although I loved it, I did have to sit with it for a while to gain any meaning from it (not that meaning is essential, it can just be a fun journey).
Novel of the White Powder 5/5
This is a much shorter story which reads like a drug trip and could be a metaphor for our capitalist society. what started with corruption ends with corruption. The meaning of this one jumps right out at you.
The Red Hand (dnf)
Here is where Machen’s prose begins to take a toll. It was all too much and I couldn’t finish it. This resulted in me putting the book for months.
The White People 4/5
I picked this book back up again for the final story as I am currently reading The Twisted Ones by T Kingfisher and I wanted to read the original before I continued their version. This one doesn’t hit as hard as Pan but Machen’s never ending sentences add to the overall experience of the unknown magic(??)(it could just be how nature truely is honestly) and I loved the depiction of good/evil and saints/sinners.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 73 reviews