Selected and introduced by Stephen Carver
''Of living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few if any can hope to equal the versatile Arthur Machen.’ – H.P. Lovecraft.
There upon the floor was a dark and putrid mass, seething with corruption and hideous rottenness, neither liquid nor solid, but melting and changing before our eyes, and bubbling with unctuous oily bubbles like boiling pitch. And out of the midst of it shone two burning points like eyes…
A mysterious beauty leaves a trail of suicides in her wake; an innocent child is indoctrinated into witchcraft and depravity; the bowmen of Agincourt come to the aid of the British Expeditionary Force; animals inexplicably start killing people; and a fragment of Paradise randomly manifests in a London suburb… Welcome to the weird world of Arthur Machen, a writer that H.P. Lovecraft hailed as a ‘Master of Horror.’ Machen fervently believed in a mystical and eternal reality hidden beyond the veil of ordinary existence, that could be glimpsed by those who knew how to look. Sometimes the revelation would be beautiful, sometimes terrible. Using the mediums of horror and weird fantasy, Machen set out to unlock these visions of ‘Sorcery and sanctity.’
This collection comprises the majority of Machen’s short horror fiction, including his Decadent masterpiece The Great God Pan, his tales of the malevolent ‘Little People’ still living beneath the mountains and valleys of his native Wales, and the chilling novella The Terror.
Full contents:
Strange Story of a Red Jar
The Autophone
A Double Return
The Lost Club
The Great God Pan
The Inmost Light
The Shining Pyramid
Novel of the Black Seal
Novel of the Iron Maid
Novel of the White Powder
The Red Hand
The White People
The Bowmen
The Soldiers’ Rest
The Monstrance
The Great Return
Out of the Earth
The Terror
The Happy Children
Ornaments in Jade:
-The Rose Garden
-The Turanians
-The Idealist
-Witchcraft
-The Ceremony
-Psychology
-Torture
-Midsummer
-Nature
-The Holy Things
Opening the Door
The Bright Boy
The Children of the Pool
The Exalted Omega
Out of the Picture
Change
The Cosy Room
N
The Dover Road
Ritual
Appendix: Introduction to The Bowmen
