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The Best Weird Tales of Arthur Machen #3
The Terror and Other Stories
Arthur Machen produced some of the most evocative weird fiction in all literary history. Written with impeccably mellifluous prose, infused with a powerful mystical vision, and imbued with a wonder and terror that he felt with every fiber of his being, his novels and tales will survive when works of far greater technical accomplishment fall by the wayside. The Terror is a short novel that inspired a host of imitations of its basic plot—animals turning against human beings—ranging from Philip Macdonald’s brief tale “Our Feathered Friends” to Daphne du Maurier’s much better-known (but sadly mediocre) novelette, “The Birds.” The Terror reveals several features characteristic of Machen’s later fiction. The first, perhaps, is frank autobiography. The first-person narrative voice not only seems to be Machen himself, but he plays upon his own role as a journalist and reporter. There is no deliberate intent to deceive; but the circumstantiality of his account, and its generally reportorial tone, suggests that Machen is hoping to convey a deeper truth—the truth that the brief, fitful, and ultimately temporary “revolution” of the animals against humanity’s reign over the earth is a signal that human morals are collapsing as a result of the hideous and unprecedented warfare that had broken out two years earlier. The other feature that distinguishes The Terror is its mystery or even detective element. On the basis of several stories included here, one could easily imagine Machen writing an accomplished detective novel; but of course he would never have done so, for the notion of resolving all loose ends, and thereby emphasizing the rational intellect’s understanding of the world, was anathema to Machen, the religious mystic. For him, something of mystery must remain as a bulwark against the relentless march of science, which Machen felt was tearing away all the wonder and beauty of existence. And yet, in its way The Terror is nothing more than a logical working out of all possibilities, so that, by a process of elimination, a single explanation—even if it is supernatural—remains as the only viable solution to the case. Several other tales in this volume do indeed involve nothing supernatural—“The Islington Mystery” (1927), a murder tale pure and simple; “The Cosy Room” (1928), a conte cruel about the guilty conscience that plagues a murderer; “The Children of the Pool” (1936), a story that suggests the supernatural but proves to be one of psychological horror. Machen's witchery of words makes these works something more than mere crime stories; his vision, which always looks over the horizon of the known to the impenetrable mysteries beyond.
328 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2005
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318 people want to read
About the author
Arthur Machen
1,107 books999 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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March 7, 2021PLACEHOLDER REVIEW:
A photographer travels to Westpool during WWI to take pictures of the city in wartime, only to be awakened in the middle of the night in the extremely brief "Munitions of War". While more of a trifle than a story, it has Machen's usual strong and evocative location/atmosphere writing ("For through the very heart of the great town a narrow, deep river runs, full of tall ships, bordered by bustling quays; and so you can often look over your garden wall and see-a cluster of masts, and the shaking out of sails for a fair wind. And this bringing of deep-sea business into the middle of the dusty streets has always seemed to me an enchantment; there is something of Sindbad and Basra and Bagdad and the Nights in it") and serves as a passing rumination of the cyclical nature of war.
A photographer travels to Westpool during WWI to take pictures of the city in wartime, only to be awakened in the middle of the night in the extremely brief "Munitions of War". While more of a trifle than a story, it has Machen's usual strong and evocative location/atmosphere writing ("For through the very heart of the great town a narrow, deep river runs, full of tall ships, bordered by bustling quays; and so you can often look over your garden wall and see-a cluster of masts, and the shaking out of sails for a fair wind. And this bringing of deep-sea business into the middle of the dusty streets has always seemed to me an enchantment; there is something of Sindbad and Basra and Bagdad and the Nights in it") and serves as a passing rumination of the cyclical nature of war.
April 16, 2018
The third and final volume in Chaosium's series compiling most of Arthur Machen's shorter fiction, The Terror and Other Stories features work from two decades of the patchy late period of his career, of which much happened to fall into the interregnum period.
The titular novella (first published 1917, still during wartime) represents the intersection of Machen's mystical, nature-obsessed leanings with the immense impact of the first World War on the British psyche. As such, it's a work only he could have written.
The abridged version having already appeared in Chaosium's second volume in the set (called 'The Coming of the Terror'), I'm torn as to which is the superior. Certainly the longer one has substantially more 'room to breathe' as it were, and whilst its additional content doesn't make it feel bloated, neither does it alter the narrative in any meaningful way. Thus in the longer of the two versions one experiences more of Machen's style than of any diegetic substance, though that style is of such appeal as to render the exercise worthwhile.
We have also a number of stories from Machen's last two collections (The Cosy Room and The Children of the Pool) as well as some uncollected miscellanea. Whilst it's commonly felt that, on average, his later work declined in quality, if these represent the peaks of that output then I say they are still comparable to the best of his earlier material and admirable in themselves.
I shan't go into exhaustive detail save to say that they continue in the vein of his usual themes. There is the clash between modernity and nature, the almost didactic dismissal of science as ever being able to discern more than 'surfaces', the mystical and supernatural notions that there are greater and more fundamental truths which intellectual inquiry alone can never penetrate and so forth. Through much of it there is a spiritual rather than scientific sense of wonder and awe, plus a psychological horror streak that reads as the influence of Poe filtered through Machen's worldview.
It's almost forgotten now that Machen wrote extensively in non-fiction and was a professional journalist for a time, so it is fitting that the volume finishes with a brief essay on 'The Literature of Occultism'. This is altogether a different exercise to Lovecraft's famous essay on 'Supernatural Horror in Literature', with minimal overlap in works discussed.
Machen indeed is not chiefly concerned with prose fiction in this essay but more with the breeds of esoterica to which a Lovecraftian protagonist or Victor Frankenstein would devote themselves. Little if any of it would be familiar to even a seasoned reader of weird fiction, though it provides great insight into the kinds of influences which created his unique literary voice and uncommon perspective.
This book is obviously unlikely to be the starting point for anyone to read Machen save by dumb chance, but for anyone who wishes to familiarise themselves with his material then I recommend this three volume set in its entirety.
The titular novella (first published 1917, still during wartime) represents the intersection of Machen's mystical, nature-obsessed leanings with the immense impact of the first World War on the British psyche. As such, it's a work only he could have written.
The abridged version having already appeared in Chaosium's second volume in the set (called 'The Coming of the Terror'), I'm torn as to which is the superior. Certainly the longer one has substantially more 'room to breathe' as it were, and whilst its additional content doesn't make it feel bloated, neither does it alter the narrative in any meaningful way. Thus in the longer of the two versions one experiences more of Machen's style than of any diegetic substance, though that style is of such appeal as to render the exercise worthwhile.
We have also a number of stories from Machen's last two collections (The Cosy Room and The Children of the Pool) as well as some uncollected miscellanea. Whilst it's commonly felt that, on average, his later work declined in quality, if these represent the peaks of that output then I say they are still comparable to the best of his earlier material and admirable in themselves.
I shan't go into exhaustive detail save to say that they continue in the vein of his usual themes. There is the clash between modernity and nature, the almost didactic dismissal of science as ever being able to discern more than 'surfaces', the mystical and supernatural notions that there are greater and more fundamental truths which intellectual inquiry alone can never penetrate and so forth. Through much of it there is a spiritual rather than scientific sense of wonder and awe, plus a psychological horror streak that reads as the influence of Poe filtered through Machen's worldview.
It's almost forgotten now that Machen wrote extensively in non-fiction and was a professional journalist for a time, so it is fitting that the volume finishes with a brief essay on 'The Literature of Occultism'. This is altogether a different exercise to Lovecraft's famous essay on 'Supernatural Horror in Literature', with minimal overlap in works discussed.
Machen indeed is not chiefly concerned with prose fiction in this essay but more with the breeds of esoterica to which a Lovecraftian protagonist or Victor Frankenstein would devote themselves. Little if any of it would be familiar to even a seasoned reader of weird fiction, though it provides great insight into the kinds of influences which created his unique literary voice and uncommon perspective.
This book is obviously unlikely to be the starting point for anyone to read Machen save by dumb chance, but for anyone who wishes to familiarise themselves with his material then I recommend this three volume set in its entirety.
August 26, 2022
One suspects that Chaosium hadn't planned to put out a third volume in their Machen series, since this is a bit of an odds and sods collection picking tales from a wide span of time, and includes The Terror, a somewhat overlong novel already represented in the second Chaosium form in its abbreviated form (The Coming of the Terror).
Things perk up a little here and there, but it is clear that the cream of Machen's short fiction (and overtly horror-oriented novels) was already covered in the first two volumes of this series. If you are enough of a Machen completist to contemplate this one in the first place, you may as well abandon the Chaosium series altogether in favour of Hippocampus Press's three-volume collection of his complete fiction, which includes entire novels not found in the Chaosium collections. Full review: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/201...
Things perk up a little here and there, but it is clear that the cream of Machen's short fiction (and overtly horror-oriented novels) was already covered in the first two volumes of this series. If you are enough of a Machen completist to contemplate this one in the first place, you may as well abandon the Chaosium series altogether in favour of Hippocampus Press's three-volume collection of his complete fiction, which includes entire novels not found in the Chaosium collections. Full review: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/201...
April 10, 2021
The Terror is a sublime masterpiece of the weird and uncanny. Don't miss it.
June 26, 2011
Machen's influence is still felt today. He influenced an entire generation of horror, mystery and fiction writers and had profound influence on the great American writers of the pulp era. His use of first person narrative is masterful, and - as many writers after him - his absolute refusal to leave things tidy and resolved leaves the reader's brain spinning in circles at the end of so many tales.
His work still seems as fresh today as when i first read it in the mid 1990's... along with some of Howard and Lovecraft's work it has a tone and flavor that runs it through the mind and allows it to slip away, not forgotten, but pushed aside and ready for reading again.. as if you are solving some detective tale and can pick up yet one more clue if you empty your mind and go over the crime scene again.
Many of the these tales are creepy, but not creepy enough unless you put your mind to work thinking about how the character inside them would be thinking, the small bits of rising panic, the voices we use to tell ourselves to keep calm, and rationally explain everything away when we dont understand something... you have to hear those voices yourself to get a true sense of the subtle, underlying tension in a lot of these stories.
His work still seems as fresh today as when i first read it in the mid 1990's... along with some of Howard and Lovecraft's work it has a tone and flavor that runs it through the mind and allows it to slip away, not forgotten, but pushed aside and ready for reading again.. as if you are solving some detective tale and can pick up yet one more clue if you empty your mind and go over the crime scene again.
Many of the these tales are creepy, but not creepy enough unless you put your mind to work thinking about how the character inside them would be thinking, the small bits of rising panic, the voices we use to tell ourselves to keep calm, and rationally explain everything away when we dont understand something... you have to hear those voices yourself to get a true sense of the subtle, underlying tension in a lot of these stories.
April 25, 2012
First off this was the Chaosium edition printed as a part accompaniment, part reprint of lost material along side their award winning Call Of Cthulhu based on the world of H P Lovecraft's mythos. And this is the first issue I have with the book - after countless volumes, many of which have material or has work written by authors who have influenced the mythos, there are titles which are more gothic in style or at least atmosphere and certainly less Lovecraft than others. This title is a perfect example - there is plenty of style and atmosphere do not get me wrong but as for a deity, or nefarious cult there is no sign. So for that i was rather disappointed BUT the style and prose of the work was incredible, for that alone I really enjoyed the book. It is interesting to see that Arthur Machen's work has also appeared in the Wordsworth series Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural which I personally think is an excellent series. So a great read just not so sure of its link to CoC
August 14, 2014
In comparison with his other works, 'The Terror' sadly is repetitive and dated. 'The Great God Pan' had a subtle mythology and 'The Three Impostures' had an underlying mystery that captured the reader, 'The Terror' was just interesting enough to keep the reader interested for a while, and it wasn't the World War I references that dated the story but the ever present Z Ray that dated and cheapened the story. It was also repetitive to a fault. Machen was prolific, and this isn't the best selection.
February 25, 2008
One of the great inspirations of Lovecraft.
September 10, 2018
Good solid tales. The better ones are those which drift into occult territories.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews