Tales of Horror and the Supernatural

By Arthur Machen

Book Overview

Beyond the surface of the world lies an ancient, terrifying reality. Arthur Machen invites you to look closely.

Welsh author and renowned mystic Arthur Machen was a master of supernatural horror who believed the veil between the known world and an older, pagan reality was frighteningly thin. This essential collection gathers his most chilling and enduring works, tales that delve into forbidden rituals, cosmic horror, and the unsettling idea that humanity is merely a thin layer over something infinitely ancient and malevolent.

Machen's genius lies in his ability to blend the mundane with the mystical, unsettling the reader with dark secrets lurking beneath the surface of civilised life.

This volume includes:

The Great God Pan: Hailed by Stephen King as one of the best horror stories ever written, this seminal novella explores a shocking experiment that tears the mind of a woman and unleashes a horror of cosmic, primal dimensions upon London society.

The Black and White Seals: Including The Novel of the Black Seal and The Novel of the White Powder, these stories investigate artifacts of terrifying power, hinting at a non-human race;a "Little People" that still dwells in the Welsh hills.

The Elemental Terror: Tales like The White People, The Terror, and Children of the Pool show Machen at his most unnerving, chronicling sudden, unexplained descents into madness and widespread panic caused by forces that defy all human logic.

A profound influence on H. P. Lovecraft and a favorite of W. B. Yeats and Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Machen's fiction is an indispensable journey into the darkest regions of human lore and cosmic dread.

This modern edition includes a specially-commissioned new biography of the author, providing context on the real-life mystic who channeled his own preternatural experiences into these terrifying stories.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1528704193
• ISBN13: 9781528704199
• Release Date: March 2018
• Publisher: Fantasy and Horror Classics
• Length: 462 Pages
• Weight: 1.28 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

The Best Machen Anthology Available

This book is no longer in print--at least not in an inexpensive paperback edition--but it's worth searching for a used copy. All of Machen's best supernatural short stories and novellas are brought together in this volume. For those who have never read Machen, you are in for a treat. Machen was an accomplished writer of supernatural tales with an unusually powerful and original imagination. The premise on which he based many of his most chilling tales--that of the survival of an aboriginal European population worshipping chthonic fertility deities--was later made famous as a historical thesis by Margaret Murray in "The God of the Witches". I don't know how much value this idea has as a scholarly premise, but Machen thought of it decades before Murray, and used it as the understated background in some his best stories, such as "The White People". However, Machen was much more than a purveyor of scary stories; he was a well rounded, sociable man with a strong mystical streak. These personal qualities manifest themselves in his writing through a quiet humor and muted, but powerful, sense of the numinous. Unlike many of the writers of supernatural and fantasy fiction who followed and were indebted to him, (Dunsany, Cabell, Lovecraft are but a few) Machen seems to have thought that the horrors he wrote about were only the shadow side of some more powerful and greater goodness. This strong but undogmatic faith gives Machen's work a unique feeling of wonder and mystery. Even George MacDonald's Christian fantasies lack the freshness and sense of possibility found in Machen's best work. This book, along with most of Machen's other writings, is a satisfying and complex read.