The Terror (1917)

[spoilers] This short novel is one of Arthur Machen’s more effective tales, at least until it gets to the end and starts offering up the explanations, which unfortunately are lame. But until then it made me nervous more than once. “The terror” is a series of murders and fatal accidents no one can explain. It is set in 1915 and very much mindful there’s a terrible war going on. A fair amount of the speculation on who’s doing it focuses on the suspicion that German agents are somehow embedded in the Welsh countryside, wreaking havoc. But there’s very little evidence of their presence, and the circumstances of some of the deaths rule that out entirely. A serial killer (our modern term) is the most popular theory but there is also evidence pointing away from that. Plus the victims are killed by different methods, which is unusual for such a fiend. Two deaths occur in a similar timeframe but separated by too much distance for one person to do both, so eventually that is ruled out too. Law enforcement types arrive and impose curfews and limit people’s movements—no one allowed near the cliffs where people have fallen, for example. But that also has limited effect on the ongoing terror. Among other things you can really feel Machen’s anxieties about the war. This is not Machen’s only story from that time with the element. See particularly “The Bowmen,” which single-handedly established a sense of divine intervention assisting Britain and the Western allies. For most of The Terror Machen keeps piling on and, as I said, piling on effectively and skillfully. It’s often scary. This may be in part because we know Machen was a spiritualist whose stories often indulge the ineffable and the powerful, against which we poor pitiful humans have little defense. As the tension flies high so do our expectations, until it’s a perfect mystery and hard to imagine what it could be. I stuck with it knowing Machen can deliver on this kind of stuff. Alas, not this time. It turns out to be antiwar animals in allegiance, all kinds of animals—birds, bees, beasts of the fields, etc. They are alarmed and indignant about all these years of the Great War, later known as World War I (because humans just had to do it one more time). I mean, I don’t blame the critters. I’m outraged and indignant myself, even born many years later. But still, The Terror is ultimately a little too lame.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

The Hill of Dreams (1907)

I’m probably way out of line to compare Arthur Machen’s short, semiautobiographical novel to James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Both come from outer precincts of Britain. Machen was about 20 years older. I have no idea where Joyce was on genre writing. Certainly his Portrait is more naturalistic than Machen’s Hill of Dreams. Machen is trying to ground the events he recounts here even though, as a mystic, he can’t seem to help some indulgence of the weird. His young man / artist, Lucian Taylor, is in his early to mid-20s here, raised in rural Wales and eventually moving to London as he begins more seriously to write. In Wales, he is always distracted by the deep woods and by the Roman architecture. He’s drawn to an old Roman fort, in a clearing in the woods, and something happens there. Machen supplies few specific details. It involves Lucian taking off all his clothes and falling into a deep sleep with strange dreams. I have an idea what happened here—masturbation, possibly for the first time. That’s likely more crude and bound to this plane than Machen intends, but there is plainly something sexual about it. Machen wrote this in the 1890s but it was not published until 1907. Surely the rules of the time regarding sexual propriety applied—in short, don’t ever talk about it. So Machen may have felt he had to be coy. Full disclosure, I’m not sure what happens in much of this novel, although it is usually interesting to see Lucian grow and change. In Wales, he writes a first novel. When he submits it for publication it is stolen by another author and published as by him. Incredibly, Lucian doesn’t seem to mind that much. He’s already at work on another. He moves to London to work on it. The woods and nature of his homeland worried and discomposed him but he misses them keenly in the big city. The Hill of Dreams, according to Wikipedia, is “Generally considered Machen’s masterpiece.” That’s news to me—I hear a lot more about “The Great God Pan” (or “The White People,” which is actually his masterpiece). I would not suggest starting on Machen with The Hill of Dreams. But it’s one to get to sooner rather than later if you’re into him.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

The Three Impostors; or, The Transmutations (1895)

Arthur Machen’s early short novel displays his fascination with the occult and also, perhaps, his difficulties in organizing longer pieces. His long story or novella, “The Great God Pan,” published the year before, is another example. The images are striking, the situations unsettling, the language resonantly weird, but the narrative lumbers along like trawling a boggy swamp at night. The Three Impostors is so episodic, in fact, that two of its chapters (“The Novel of the Black Seal” and “The Novel of the White Powder”) (no, not that white powder) have been broken out verbatim and anthologized as short stories, which in turn exercised influence on H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and others. But the overall arc of the novel is much darker than either story. The “three impostors” are two men and one woman who belong to an occult society. They are hunting for “a young man with spectacles.” Two more main characters, Mr. Dyson and Mr. Charles Phillips, are middle-aged friends who see one another frequently for cigars and brandy and such. Dyson is something of a spiritual adventurer, or occult detective, while Phillips is a hardheaded proponent of the scientific way of thinking. They enjoy kicking it around. There’s a lot going on in the background of these scenes. The impostors have decided Dyson can help them find the young man with spectacles. They work to meet Dyson as if by accident, win his confidence, and accept his invitation to tell their stories, which include “Black Seal” and “White Powder.” The three plant clues in their stories to manipulate or lead Dyson to the conclusions they want him to reach. I think that’s what is going on here anyway. Machen can be so indirect and allusive about these themes it’s not always easy for me to make out. It’s possible I was missing things. There’s a lot compacted into this. We have no idea how horrifying the opening scene is, for example, until we have finished the novel. Then the opening becomes shocking. What I love most about Machen at his best is the powerful sense that more things are going on in heaven and earth beyond what we can detect or know with our senses. We only get glimpses of these realities, whatever they are, which are almost too awful to let ourselves contemplate. There are levels beyond levels beyond levels in the best of his stuff, which includes this novel. It may be awkwardly constructed, the dense language may hover near maddeningly opaque, but it is still a novel, not an accidental collection of breakaway stories. In a way, The Three Impostors is more like the opposite of a fix-up novel.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

“The Great God Pan” (1894)

Arthur Machen’s long story involves more or less, or maybe not really, the mythical Greek half-goat “god of the wild, shepherds and flocks, rustic music and impromptus, and companion of the nymphs” (Wikipedia). Among other things it set off a trend in horror stories that lasted 20 or 30 years and still recurs today, the gods among us, and nasty. It is thoroughly rooted in a 19th-century literary style I think of as “furniture-moving,” also seen in numerous H.P. Lovecraft stories, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and arguably even William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. In the furniture-moving narrative, most of the themes occur at the edges of the action, with large blocks of narrative devoted to developing them indirectly (“showing”), one at a time. The narrative hangs back a little too much for me here, nibbling at the edges instead of going to the heart. It starts in the first of eight sections with an experiment that drives a woman named Mary mad and results in her pregnancy by the randy ancient god. Mary—a bold choice of name. Each section details some further aspect of the presence of this god on Earth with a cast of rotating peripheral characters and various mysteries and bizarre events associated with them. They tend to be worried men of science and/or authorities attempting to piece together the clues of some enormous and unspeakable horror™. It’s a little confusing, we don’t learn key details until late and are left to surmise a lot of the direct action from the wreckage left behind. At one point, for example, various pleasure-loving aristocrats begin committing suicide in a notably gruesome way. For all of Machen’s pains to keep it subtle the reveal at the end finally spells out the horror specifically. The ever-intriguing mystic and Welsh writer Arthur Machen was attacked as vulgar, verging on blasphemous, to put sex with a god so blatantly into this story. In many ways it’s not that different from vampire stories as the specific miscreant here—known variously (and confusingly) as Helen Vaughan, Mrs. Herbert, and Mrs. Beaumont—basically rampages British society terrifying people and killing them by fear. The objection, in late Victorian terms, was that Pan, even with his Greek origins predating Christianity, is somehow a pagan functionary of the biblical Satan, who has his own goat connections in European medievalism. I associate Pan more with libertines and healthy lustful sexuality, but apparently (and not at all surprisingly) healthy lustful sexuality was considered sinful and evil in 1894. So, for the most part, I’m a little indifferent to the lengthy verbose horror exercises in Machen’s tale. He would get much better by my lights—see “The White People” from 10 years later. But he may be best known for “Pan.” H.P. Lovecraft notably loved this story and in some ways it can produce the same mysterious effect on me as Lovecraft’s stories—often boring as I read, requiring patience I don’t always have, but then penetrating this apathy somehow to produce a sense of unease, sometimes long after reading. I might not be as willing to call “The Great God Pan” essential, as some others do, but yeah, maybe you should get to it—and Machen—sooner rather than later.

Foundations of Fear, ed. David G. Hartwell
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"Opening the Door" (1931)

In the anthology My Favorite Horror Story, “Opening the Door” is the pick of Peter Atkins, another writer I don’t know well. As Atkins points out in his lengthy introduction, the story is subtle but deeply mysterious and a little unsettling. As it happens, it involves one of the true-crime types of stories that most intrigue me: disappearances. In “Opening the Door,” a clergyman disappears for six weeks and then reappears again with no sense he’s been away. The flower he picked the day he went missing is still fresh when he’s back. The story is told by a newspaper reporter remembering strange stories he has covered. The clergyman had won some notoriety at the turn of the 20th century for newspaper pieces he wrote. They warned of the inadequacy of roadways in the transition away from horse-drawn vehicles. Strangely banal insight but there it is. Then the disappearance and reappearance happen and the newspaper reporter drops by to speak with him. They become friendly and meet again, trying to sort out what happened or what it might mean. The clergyman knows it happened when he exited the garden door at the back of his lot, which is generally unused (and which, early in the story, he cautions the reporter against using). He doesn’t know how six weeks passed. They kick around a few more things, some of them in Latin. It’s not a long story. In the end the clergyman disappears again and is never heard from after that. This is the detail that hits hardest for me, right at the end. He didn’t use the garden door this time as he was elsewhere. Wikipedia describes the story as involving “some outer faery realm,” which sounds right for the Welshman Machen and for the British Isles more generally. The versatile comedian Patton Oswalt likes this story a lot too, including it in a fancy anthology he edited, The Ghost Box, and focusing on some of the details in the story on either side of the garden door (which I’m glad he brought to my attention). “Opening the Door” is very good at being both low-key and disquieting and that’s what I like about it. Like Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, and Sherdian Le Fanu, Machen balances the rational world with the potentiality for a world or worlds beyond that can’t be explained. His characters are sober and worried by their experiences. Not much happens here—mostly a matter of assembling the facts. We’re the ones left to make sense of them. In many cases, as here, the characters admit they can’t. So this is a bit like depth-charge horror. It hits later, harder. I may not like it as much as “The White People” but that’s a high bar to clear.

My Favorite Horror Story, ed. Mike Baker & Martin H. Greenberg (out of print)

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"The White People" (1904)

The Welsh mystic Arthur Machen has a fair amount of stature in horror and fantasy circles, perhaps best known for his long story, "The Great God Pan," published in 1894, which set off a goat-god theme around the turn of the century that many contemporaries worked with in the same way they did vampires and werewolves (that is, probably for commercial reasons). Stephen King apparently has "Pan" on his short list of the very best. I admit I struggled with it, but this story is something else. Because we need to make the point in a realm dominated by H.P. Lovecraft, the story has nothing to do with race. These white people are more like silver and glowing when they are seen at all, which is rarely, and they are mysterious to the bottom (note the Penguin cover interpretation above). There's a critique to make about sexism, misogyny, and fear of women here, yes, but in many ways I think this strangely stirring story might get past that in certain ways. It comes in two parts—a frame, at beginning and briefly at end, featuring a colloquy between two intellectual men on the nature of sin, and a long middle section, a diary of an adolescent girl, a document one of the men passes to the other to read. The frame is necessary as it articulates the themes and sets expectations for the main narrative, notably the idea that sin is not transgression of moral laws but of physical ones. People who flout laws and norms must be dealt with, of course, but the argument is they are not truly sinners. The second man is intrigued and would like to subscribe to the first man's newsletter. He gets the diary to read.

This is a basic of "weird" fiction, a subset of fantasy and/or horror, distinct by its treatment of the unknown. We may have a fear of the unknown but weird fiction, if I'm understanding, wants to focus more on the unknown than the fear. If you're scared you're on your own, because that's how it is in the irrational world. Weird fiction merely continues to catalog the details. And so to the girl's diary. The critic S.T. Joshi has my favorite observation on "The White People," calling it "a masterpiece of indirection, a Lovecraft plot told by James Joyce." The diary is the longest part of the story but it doesn't have many paragraphs. It's not run-on but lucid and artful, with numerous digressions and embedded stories. It's easy to get lost but not hard to find oneself again, much like the action in the story, a kind of Alice in Wonderland journey through a copse. It's studded with made-up words and terms (Lord Dunsany for one had to be a fan), used so naturally they effectively suggest enormous worlds just beyond. I will say I'm glad I read this with an inline dictionary because that helped separate the made-up from the historical. Historical verity might be in the minority here, but it is here. This girl's adventures with magic and the irrational are practically hypnotic by the rhythms of the language and narrative, with stories within stories within stories, churning well known strokes out of the Bible thrown up like debris, across an unknowable landscape that becomes second nature. In the end her story has nowhere to go and in the end it gets there, abruptly cut off when the diary ends. But the world it details does linger on. My favorite character is the girl's nurse, who the girl remembers but who has disappeared at the time she writes her diary. Nurse taught the girl a good deal when she was younger, even as an infant. The suggestion of these White People, living in their White Lands, is deceptively simple, and penetrating. It somehow turns everything upside down.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
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