As we get nearer to Hallowe’en, another classic Horror collection, as recommended by Randy.
TALES OF HORROR AND THE SUPERNATURAL by Arthur Machen (Alfred A. Knopf, 1948; Pinnacle Books, 1973, in 2 vols.)
”Look about you, Clarke. You see the mountains, and hill following after hill, as wave on wave, you see the woods and orchards, the fields of ripe corn, and the meadows reaching to the reed beds by the river. You see me standing here beside you, and hear my voice; but I tell you that all these things – yes, from that star that has just shone out in the sky to the solid ground beneath our feet – I say that all these are but dreams and shadows: the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes. There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision, beyond these ‘chases in Arras, dreams in a career,’ beyond them all as beyond a veil. I do not know whether any human being has ever lifted that veil; but I do know, Clarke, that you and I shall see it lifted this very night from before another’s eyes. You may think all this strange nonsense; it may be strange, but it is true, and the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan.”— from “The Great God Pan”
A landmark for weird fiction as well as for horror and fantasy, this volume collects the best stories from Arthur Machen’s long career. Machen wrote more than fantasy and horror, including translations of Casanova and a three-volume autobiography, but his lasting influence looks to be on supernatural fiction; H. P. Lovecraft, for one, hailed him as a master and used his work as a model for his own stories.
The early stories in the collection, among the earliest he published, are the most intense:
Told by a witness to events – a nanny and cohort in research – to an interested acquaintance several years after the events, “The Novel of the Black Seal” relates the story of a Professor and antiquarian tracing the origins of a peculiar black seal that had come into his possession. Exploring the area in which the object was found, he disappears, leaving behind only a few items from his pockets. The framing of this story as a reminiscence, a tale told, is so prevalent in supernatural fiction from the late 19th and early 20th century that I think current writers avoid it unless looking to capture a certain flavor. This is a good example of the form, lending the story the appearance of objectivity while the nanny’s memories humanize the Professor. The first story in the volume it introduces Machen’s focus on the past, in particular those who populated pre-historic England.
In line of publication “The Novel of the White Powder” came between publication of Poe’s “The Case of Monsieur Valdemar” and Lovecraft’s “Cool Air,” is possibly influenced by the former and probably an influence on the latter, and conveys a cautionary tale of drinking wine of a certain vintage injudiciously. Despite that somewhat flippant summary, the story still packs some power in the telling, not just because of the effects on the drinker, but also in the portrayal of the effects on those around the drinker: You do not glimpse the mysteries of life, even at a remove, without a price being exacted.
I haven’t reread “The White People” since I first read it when in my teens, and while the sense of otherness, of a strange, distant foreign land comes through, the story is told in the form of extracts from a young girl’s diary and Machen, probably not intentionally, makes her rather long-winded. That aside, this is a core story for understanding Machen’s work: There are worlds we don’t see, realms beyond our senses that we cannot access without something altering our senses or without some guide into the other realm (a mentor, say, or a book, both of which guide the young girl in this story). And such knowledge is invariably knowledge of evil.
“The Inmost Light” and “The Shining Pyramid” take the form of detective stories, each featuring an epicure of the occult, Dyson, trying to fathom a mystery set before him. Again we see aspects of a world Machen posits as hidden from us, a world that is sinister and dangerous. Maybe not as powerful as the earlier stories, these are still enjoyable reading and good introductions to this kind of dark fantasy/horror.
By far the strongest of the stories in the book and arguably the greatest of weird tales, “The Great God Pan” unfolds by hinting through the observations of various viewpoint characters at the nature of an evil loose in the world. An experimental surgery opens a young woman’s senses to the existence of a reality veiled from out normal senses, but once she is aware of that reality that reality is also aware of her. She dies, insane.
Over the course of the story several epicures of the outré come across clues to the nature of something wicked that causes death and destruction where ever it goes, but only after many years do a few of them exchange enough information to determine what it is. And only one of them has the nerve to face the evil, an evil with its source in that young woman’s death.
I cannot adequately describe “The Great God Pan” without giving too much away – although, honestly much of the mystery will be easily guessed by contemporary readers. I also can’t do justice to its place in the history of weird fiction. This story, along with Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” and “The Wendigo” were key texts in the development of weird fantasy and horror fiction in the early 20th century, enough so for a contemporary reviewer/critic like Michael Dirda to refer to the Blackwood/Machen strain of fantasy in English literature. “The Great God Pan” is not only a horror story, it springs from mythology and expands on that mythology, placing the licentiousness and fear that adhere to the figure of Pan into a then modern world.
Starting with “The Bowmen,” written during World War I, the stories in this collection become somewhat mellower. Not that Machen lost his ability to create literary chills – “The Happy Children,” “The Children of the Pool” for instance – but in the telling Machen seems more interested in creating the weird moment, and sometimes offers a wry humor absent from or muted in the earlier stories as when, in “The Terror,” a corporal says to his men, “’The captain says to me,’ muttered the corporal, ’Don’t hesitate to shoot if there’s any trouble.’ ‘Shoot what, sir,’ I says. ‘The trouble,’ says he, and that’s all I could get out of him.”
“The Terror,” a short novel, concludes the collection and should be acknowledged: As with the other stories, Machen carefully builds piece by piece the background behind terrible events – in the countryside around Meirion people are found dead after falling into abandoned quarries and off cliff sides by the sea; rumors from a nearby town indicate people have been attacked by a swarm of bees; a family is found dead outside their house, horribly beaten and lying in the road shortly after travelers along the road saw them. Using a journalist as his viewpoint character, perhaps working from his own experience in journalism, Machen brings the bits of information to a conclusion. S. T. Joshi cites the story as a precursor of stories like Daphne Du Maurier’s “The Birds” but I think in it’s very British calm, level-headed telling it also prefigures what came to be called the cozy catastrophe, which includes novels like John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids.
For all my enthusiasm about these stories, I should admit that to enjoy Machen the reader needs patience. Machen takes his time and he rarely states anything too directly. His prose is fluid and often evocative and though his leisurely descriptions of landscape may not be to contemporary tastes still they have a bearing on his stories. As Philip Van Doren Stern wrote in his introduction to this volume, “Machen was a pictorial writer whose works are filled with magnificently rendered landscapes, but in them there is always some sinister note that betrays their origins. Look closely at his forest scene, and you will see that the green shadows mask a lurking figure whose goatish hoofs deny his human semblance; examine the flaming sunset sky burning above the rooftops of a great city, and you will find that the swirling clouds are not merely smoke and mist; pay careful attention to the details of a wild mountain landscape where the ruins of a Roman villa appear to be the only sign that man has ever been there, and you will note that the lonely hills are not as deserted as they may at first have seemed.”
Machen was not just a writer of supernatural horror but an artist of the fantastic. In his stories set in and around London – “The Great God Pan”; “N” – Machen prepared the way for novels as disparate as Finishing Touches by Thomas Tessier, Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison, The Somnambulist by Julian Barnes and Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch.
Next: BEST GHOST STORIES by Algernon Blackwood
