“The Great God Pan” (1988)

M. John Harrison is an out-there horror writer worth reading but this story is unfortunately way too coy about any relationship it has to Arthur Machen’s original of the same title. The connection appears to be more metaphorical, but in both stories we find people are fooling around with forces of nature they don’t understand (and/or underestimate) and they get hurt. How exactly they are hurt, at least in this story, is less clear. I had my problems with the Machen the first time I read it, which of course has a reputation as one of the greatest horror stories ever written. That is less the case for Harrison and this story, though Harrison has an exemplary reputation of his own to sustain. Too much is hinted at here for my taste and not enough explained (I know I also complain about too much explanation in other stories). The primary special effect—a vision in the passageway near a kitchen—is not bad but it’s not enough. I’m filing this under the “restrained horror” label but that might not be the right term. Reading between the lines, extraordinary things are happening here. I just wish more of it was in the lines. What we know: it’s present-day (late ‘80s) and a group of four are still feeling the effects of an experiment they conducted 20 years earlier, in the late ‘60s. They’re all basically PTSD one way or another. Harrison quite likely might have talked about it more if PTSD had been more current then, or maybe it was and he was being subtle. My problem with this story is that it’s too subtle—all background setting, no foreground action. In horror, nibbling at the edges is often considered a way of implying enormity and vast unknowns. Machen’s original is where I coined the term “furniture-moving” for stories that position large and simple plot points consecutively. See also H.P. Lovecraft. Another feature of horror is that people often “go mad” from the things they’ve seen and experienced. Harrison is doing these things and trying to be artful about it. Instead it comes out too often as vague. Though Harrison has denied it as such, his story is critically dependent on familiarity with the Machen story and exists as a kind of homage. Take away that title—Pan is silent and invisible in this story, not even his name appearing—and work with what we have here and we’d have to call it something like “These Things That Happen” (from Harrison’s collection titled Things That Never Happen) or maybe “Ann’s Story,” after the character who loses her mind. I’m not trying very hard here, but the point is that the Machen story illuminates this one, which in turn, to be fair, illuminates the Machen, albeit feebly. E.F. Benson, M.R. James, and Saki have better Pan stories, something of a fad among horror publishers at the turn of the 20th century. They are vividly immediate, which may be the quality most lacking here. It gets to some nice details and images and suggestions of ideas, but it probably needed to work a little more closely with the furniture-moving model. I mean, I just wish Harrison had given us more information.

The Year's Best Horror Stories XVII, ed. Karl Edward Wagner (out of print)
Story not available online.