Fiction Reviews
Arthur Machen Horror Stories
(2024) Arthur Machen, Flame Tree Press, £20 / Can$40 / US$30, hrdbk, 430pp, ISBN 978-1-804-17795-2
Alongside M. R. James, H. P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood and Bram Stoker, Arthur Machen wrote powerful, chilling and thought-provoking stories. His supernatural tales draw their power from the long nights and dark lanes of the Welsh countryside that raised him surrounded as he was by the remains of Roman forts and Iron Age archaeology.
First of all, I have to say that this is a fine-looking tome from Flame Tree Publishing in their Gothic Fantasy imprint. If you haven’t latched on to that fact then the words GOTHIC and FANTASY on the black embossed cover make it hard to miss. Just in case you were expecting some gothic fantasy the middle section of the front cover tells you that this is a collection of horror stories by Arthur Machen. Inside, we get a foreword by Steven Prizeman giving us a brief history about Machen’s professional and personal life from his birth in 1863, to his death in 1947 a few months after the death of his second wife. There is also a brief publisher’s note explaining why Flame Tree just had to bring out this collection, namely because of his appearance in several of their other anthologies and also that some of his stories – “The Great God Pan”, and “The White People” – loom large over the genres of horror and weird fiction. What follows is Machen’s stories divided into four categories – Supernatural Mysteries, Short Experiments, Wartime Tales, and Folk Horror and Mysticism.
But, ye, gods! If anyone reads my reviews they will notice that I often mention being a reluctant reader, particularly of long novels containing long chapters, or – shudder – no chapters at all. Arthur Machen could be my worst nightmare when it comes to short stories because some of these tales contain pages which are made up of solid, unbroken text – with no dialogue and no paragraph breaks – double shudder!
You can bracket Machen into a number of categories – horror, weird, eerie, folk horror, and the first section of stories collected under the heading “Supernatural Tales” contains many of Machen’s greatest hits, starting with his all-time number one, “The Great God Pan” which made Machen’s name and was not without controversy. Seemingly, he used to enjoy remembering that someone said it should never have been written. The story? Well, a young woman is subjected to brain surgery by her guardian to allow her to see beyond the veil of our reality and gaze upon the Great God Pan in the hidden realm.
This is followed by “The Inmost Light” which introduces the reader to Dyson and Phillips, who are sort of occult investigators, this time encountering a mysterious death and some demonology in a well-told story with a nicely horrific ending, if there can be such a thing. One of Machen’s strengths is on show here, namely his sense of place, be it in Wales or in London, and it is the dark side of London that is on display here.
“The Three Impostors” is almost 90 pages long, and - shudder – here come those pages of full-page text again, in a long story that is really a collection of cracking shorter stories with an overarching framing story as Dyson and Phillips investigate an evil cult, but not without some humour in the telling.
I won’t go through the collection story by story, but there have been a few recent collections of Machen’s work, some of them with unbelievable omissions, so it is to Flame Tree’s credit that they have brought together this collection spanning stories from Machen’s early career from the 1890s right up until the 1930s, and including his shorter experiments and tales that were influenced by the events of the First World War. If you are a reader who doesn’t read a book cover to cover, from beginning to end, Flame Tree have helpfully given some advice and guidance after each story with the words “If you enjoyed this, you might also like”…followed by the title of a story you might read next, followed by the page where you can find it. Stories to look out for include “The White People”, “The Children of the Pool” and “The Terror”. Machen was a great writer and giant of the horror/weird field influencing Lovecraft and others that followed him, both in print and on screen. He can a spin a yarn, draw the reader in, and treat them to some great descriptions mixed with a strong dose of horror and, sometimes with humour, and often with eroticism. He is very good at skewing the normal, giving it a more sinister, threatening sheen.
In the old Hunter Towers there used to be two collections of Machen’s short stories in one of the book cases. Sadly, having moved to a new Hunter Towers these books are in storage, but hopefully they will join this collection on a bookshelf soon. In the meantime, for those unfamiliar with Machen’s work this is a good place to start. Recommended.
Ian Hunter
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