Holy Terrors

by Arthur Machen

CONTENTS:

Part 1 - The Bright Boy
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part 2 - The Tree of Life
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part 3 - Opening the Door
Part 4 - The Mariage of Panurge
Part 5 - The Holy Things
Part 6 - Psychology
Part 7 - The Turanians
Part 8 - The Rose Garden
Part 9 - The Ceremony
Part 10 - The Soldiers' Rest
Part 11 - The Happy Children
Part 12 - The Cosy Room
Part 13 - Munitions of War
Part 14 - The Great Return
1. The Rumour of the Marvellous
2. Odours of Paradise
3. A Secret in a Secret Place
4. The Ringing of the Bell
5. The Rose of Fire
6. Olwen's Dream
7. The Mass of The Sangraal

A SELECTION FROM:

Part 1: The Bright Boy

Young Joseph Last, having finally gone down from Oxford, wondered a good deal what he was to do next and for the years following next. He was an orphan from early boyhood, both his parents having died of typhoid within a few days of each other when Joseph was ten years old, and he remembered very little of Dunham, where his father ended a long line of solicitors, practising in the place since 1707. The Lasts had once been very comfortably off. They had intermarried now and again with the gentry of the neighbourhood and did a good deal of the county business, managing estates, collecting rents, officiating as stewards for several manors, living generally in a world of quiet but snug prosperity, rising to their greatest height, perhaps, during the Napoleonic Wars and afterwards. And then they began to decline, not violently at all, but very gently, so that it was many years before they were aware of the process that was going on, slowly, surely. Economists, no doubt, understand very well how the country and the country town gradually became less important soon after the Battle of Waterloo; and the causes of the decay and change which vexed Cobbett so sadly, as he saw, or thought he saw, the life and strength of the land being sucked up to nourish the monstrous excrescence of London. Anyhow, even before the railways came, the assembly rooms of the country towns grew dusty and desolate, the county families ceased to come to their "town houses" for the winter season, and the little theatres, where Mrs. Siddons and Grimaldi had appeared in their divers parts, rarely opened their doors, and the skilled craftsmen, the clock-makers and the furniture makers and the like began to drift away to the big towns and to the capital city. So it was with Dunham. Naturally the fortunes of the Lasts sank with the fortunes of the town; and there had been speculations which had not turned out well, and people spoke of a heavy loss in foreign bonds. When Joseph's father died, it was found that there was enough to educate the boy and keep him in strictly modest comfort and not much more.

He had his home with an uncle who lived at Blackheath, and after a few years at Mr. Jones's well-known preparatory school, he went to Merchant Taylors and thence to Oxford. He took a decent degree (2nd in Greats) and then began that wondering process as to what he was to do with himself. His income would keep him in chops and steaks, with an occasional roast fowl, and three or four weeks on the Continent once a year. If he liked, he could do nothing, but the prospect seemed tame and boring. He was a very decent Classical scholar, with something more than the average schoolmaster's purely technical knowledge of Latin and Greek and professional interest in them: still, schoolmastering seemed his only clear and obvious way of employing himself....

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Fiction, Weird Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery, Anthologies

140 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1946

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

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

As with many of these short story collections, randomly collecting stories from different volumes and publications doesn't always make for a satisfying read. Many of these stories are far from Machen's best prose work, some mere sketches. There are a few enjoyable moments though, notably The Happy Children, The Bright Boy and The Ceremony.

I have rated the stories individually as per usual due to having read some previously in different collections.

[Alex Sarll]

These are not the early stories, from around the end of the 19th century and the birth of the 20th, which would fire up Lovecraft and give birth to horror as we know it; rather, this is a selection of material from the Great War and the interbellum period, published for the mass audience Penguins had found just after the Second World War, and a year before Machen's death. One could almost credit that with being the origin of his abiding theme - that behind the drab and habitual veil of everyday life, there lurks a world both great and terrible, of which we can sometimes gain brief glimpses, and into which some are transfigured forever. Except, of course, that this would be to miss his point entirely, for those moments of grandeur can intrude on any period in human life with the same alien splendour.
Many of the stories here are very short, including several three-page vignettes, and not all of them are wholly successful; in particular, a few times the needle screeches off the record as a wartime moral plonks itself on the page*. But even in those tales, there are passages of great power, and some of the little fragments are almost spells in their own right. The volume concludes with another longer story, 'The Great Return', in which a small Welsh village encounters supernatural forces - but where in Machen's more famous stories, or those of his heirs, that would be a thing of terror, here it's an exercise in christian mysticism. And while I don't have a lot of time for christianity, Machen is - like Chesterton - one of the few who can write it in a way whose spell still catches me (to the extent that I almost capitalised it there).

*It's not that I'm against wartime propaganda; my favourite film is A Matter of Life and Death, and even in the short story form and as regards the Great War, Dunsany wrote a marvellous volume of sabre-rattling, Tales of War. I just don't think Machen was terribly good at it, although the way one of his war stories (not one included here) was accepted as truth and survives still as legend suggests he must have had a certain gift...

[David Levell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Arthur Machen’s knack was revealing the mystic in the everyday humdrum. His subtly supernatural tales lift a veil on reality every time, and the best of his stories in this collection absolutely buzz with a sense of transformation.

Machen’s early triumphs (eg The Novel Of The White Powder) were heavily influenced by Robert Louis Stevenson, though he soon found his own voice, epitomised by the morbid and mystical short novel Hill Of Dreams. Machen’s best and best-known short stories – The Great God Pan, The Novel of The Black Seal etc – are frequently anthologised and appear in his two-volume Tales of Horror & The Supernatural.

The Holy Terrors set is not Machen at his very best but is still nevertheless excellent and highly recommended to anyone enchanted by his world and words.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This a short book contain several short stories by Machen of around 10 pages or so each (with two slightly longer ones of around 30).

As per what you would expect of Machen, each story is full of wonder and mystery which grips the reader and ends them into a magical realm where nothing is quite what it seems. Unusually for Machen, he keeps the names of places and people in Wales are they are in real life (Llantrisant, and the Morgan family of Tredegar House) instead of making up places such as changing 'Caerleon' to Caemaen'.

The only minor criticism is two or three stories in the middle are a little difficult to understand, but this could be due to poor aging than anything to do with Machen's writing.

Some of the stories are just amazing, and 'The Return' feels like an antidote to H.P. Lovecrafts 'Color Out of Space'.

All in all this is a good little collection and a treat of a short read.

[Deity World · Rating 4 out of 5]

Never heard of this author before and I know caerleon quite well. Some spooky stories which I enjoyed

[Lynsey Walker · Rating 3 out of 5]

A low three.

And it pains me to say this, as Machen is up there with the all time great authors, but this collection must have purposely set out to include only his most below average short stories. Again here I have another book that started strong and ended poorly and I persevered only due to the fact that this is a beautiful first edition from 1946 and I didn't want to give up on it.

The first story The Bright Boy is pure Machen; it is creepy, a tad otherworldly, gives you shivers, and makes you wonder what his thing is with girls being taken in woods. Even though I guessed the twist, it was beautifully executed in the Machen style of the terrible hiding behind the mundane. Even the second story hinted at this, although not to the same degree. The third story was pleasantly odd and then, then, it went right off the deep end in terms of any credibility at all.

The following stories where mediocre at best and awful at worst, things looked up with lots of dead children in the Happy Children and then ended on what could have been a good story but was just a garbled mess.

I'm sure Mr Machen was just having a bad week when he wrote these, perhaps just doing it for the cash? I understand, we all have to keep ourselves in gin.

Glad to have such a old and pretty book in my collection, but I shall NOT be reaching for it again.

The Bright Boy 🖤🖤🖤🖤
The Tree of Life 🖤🖤🖤
Opening the Door 🖤🖤🖤
The Marriage of Panurge 🖤
The Holy Things 🖤
Psychology 🖤
The Turanians 🖤🖤
The Rose Garden 🖤
The Ceremony 🖤🖤
The Soldiers Rest 🖤🖤
The Happy Children 🖤🖤🖤
The Cosy Room 🖤🖤🖤
Munitions of War 🖤
The Great Return 🖤🖤

[Cynthia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is in the public domain, available online, so readers don't have to _buy_ the Kindle edition. Grrrrrrr.