Arthur Machen Books

Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron is a collection of seventy amusing stories which constitute a revealing "window" on the literate minority of the 16th century. Their principal focus is how men and women treat each other, not only then but perhaps always. The stories also provide other kinds of insights: e.g., the idea of predestined salvation or damnation was "in the air" intellectually before John Calvin's "Institutes." So it was formulated most effectively, but not originated, by Calvin. This fits a pattern of Western history: attributing developments to individuals, sort of a Most Valuable Player, individualistic version of history. For example, Gutenberg is said to have single-handedly "invented" moveable type, and Darwin to have discovered evolution, when these developments were hardly unique to them. As for Marguerite - or the storytellers for whom she is given credit of authorship - the stories are mainly fun.

Anyone interested in gender studies, especially wishing to understand the sexual relationships between spouses and lovers, the perceptions of what is acceptable, what is "masculine" or "feminine," would not only enjoy the reading, but gain some insight on Renaissance French culture. Along with the Decameron, Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's plays, and Orlando Furioso, this text is a necessary one for understanding the society at court during the Renaissance in Europe.

This is an amusing "companion" to the Decameron - though shorter. While I have read both, if you only read one, I would recommend the Decameron. It has more depth and is better written. If you like it and want more that's in a similar vein, then read this. Neither are heavy reads and both have an interesting group of participants (they aren't really characters) who tell stories for their own daily amusement. This is another book I read in installments while reading other more plot driven books.

Arthur Machen, master of the macabre, created something a little bit different in this book. Coming from a childhood background that left him lonely and prone to living in imaginative worlds himself, the main character here is exactly the same. Lucien Taylor, unable to attend Oxford because of a lack of money, "lives" in his father's library. He is particularly attracted to ancient history and magic and hopes to become a writer. This hope is crushed, however, and, with the help of Annie Morgan, a woman who loves him, he escapes into an imaginary world of ancient times. There he remains, totally self-absorbed (to the chagrin of Annie), until he is jolted back to reality after receiving a small legacy. He then becomes an opium addict, which causes his death. Machen captures the moods of his characters perfectly, and this is the best of his books.

Arthur Machen is better known for his "horror" tales such as "The Great God Pan". However, there is more to Machen that that. Machen believed in a quality of literature (and life) that cannot be pinned down - a sort of magic.

When he first came to London from rural Wales in the late 1800s, he was involved in fin-de-siecle "magic" circles - such as The Order of the Golden Dawn. He translated "fantastic" tales and in works like "The Great God Pan" created his own vision of them. However, like Harold Bloom today, he was perhaps at his best when he wrote about literature, and he did this is three forms: directly, in "Hieroglyphics", autobiographically in "Far Off Things" and "Things Near and Far", and in a fictionalized manner in "The Hill of Dreams".

The Hill of Dreams is about a young writer from the country who goes to London and wanders its streets looking for inspiration, but finds himself caught up in the city's past and becomes alienated from those around him. It is like a Peter Ackroyd novel set from 100 years ago. There is also a magic there that is all Machen's own.

Machen is a writer worth getting to know, particularly in the books mentioned above. In the end, though, "The Hill of Dreams" is his masterpiece.

"The Hill of Dreams" is arguably Machen's finest work, and that is saying something. While there is definitely a story and most especially interesting characterization, the star feature of this jewel of a novel is Machen's rich descriptive prose, virtually prose poetry. It possesses exactly the dreamlike quality the story demands, and becomes a dream itself, a vision of rural beauty, into which the reader may enter. The lush prose, which seems to be supporting the story as a river supports and carries a boat, is eventually seen to have been a necessary tool, and all the elements of story-telling come together at the finale to round off a work of terrible beauty.

In David McCullough's fine "John Adams" he mentions this was one of Adams' favorite books and, upon reading it, McCullough enjoyed it so much he read it twice. On that recommendation I bought it sight unseen. When it arrived I thought I'd made a mistake. A novel made up entirely of letters (correspondence) written in less than easy to penetrate 18th century English. But after slogging through the first dozen pages or so I admit I got hooked. The characters are wonderful and the story line can get very funny. A wonderful window on the 1760s in Great Britain. Using letters to tell the story is clever, although the plot line is constantly told in past tense and there is some redundancy. At any rate, it was worth the effort.

I was so disappointed in this Penguin edition. The Penguin Classics usually do a wonderful job with notes at the back, explaining terms and references that are obscure to modern readers. This is a delightful story but the 18th C vocabulary can be tough going, even for those of us accustomed to reading such books. Penguin has left far too many terms unexplained. Unless you've got a Latin reference book, an OED, and historical slang reference books at hand, you're probably going to get frustrated with the language--and you'll miss a great deal of the humor. This edition does Smollett a great disservice. I highly recommend HUMPRHY CLINKER, but I'd advise anyone who isn't an 18th C scholar to buy the Norton Critical Edition instead.

I challenge anyone to read this picaresque travelogue and not be overcome with laughter in at least three places. I don't care how jaded and well-read you may (or may not) be. If you have even a pittance of sense for the absurdities of the human situation, this book will catch you unawares in its jabbing yet light-hearted apercus to which every mortal can relate---Unless you are one particular reviewer who seems to have stepped out of Victorian spinsterhood to berate Smollett for a Swiftean obsession with dirt, which is twaddle and tripe. This aspect forms only a small part of the novel as a whole. But I digress; this review shall not become an assault on Victorian spinsterhood.

If this book reminds me of anything (besides earlier Smollett works), it is the lighter plays of Shakespeare such as Much Ado About Nothing and All's Well That Ends Well, particularly the former, full of coincidences bordering on farce, and ending, well, like Much Ado about Nothing ends, if you'll recall the last scene.

I'm not equating Smollett with Shakespeare. But I AM saying that Humphrey Clinker is just as funny, warm hearted and insightful regarding the human condition as these plays, just perhaps a bit less profound and virtuosic.

Enough said, these long-winded reviews drive one batty. Read this book and have some fun, and come away reflecting on the foibles of us all.

Smollett could dream up some amazing characters! The interactions among them runs from hilarious to ridiculous but always enjoyable. If you have not read any of his books, just pick one and start in - you will have found yourself a new author to collect.

Humphrey Clinker is a 17th century epistolary novel which tells the tale of the Bramble family and its travels through England and Scotland. The letters are written by Matthew Bramble, the family head; Tabitha Bramble, his increasingly desperate unmarried sister; Winifred Jenkins, Tabitha Bramble's servant; Jery Melford, Matthew's Oxford educated nephew; and Lydia Melford, the lovestruck niece who most unfortunately fell for an actor.

The novel is rich and has many layers. The travels afford Smollet a fine device for social satire and observation. Smollet is best-known for his satiric writing, and he does have a serious bite. The way that he skewers the spas at Bath or (more gently) teases the English for their prejudices about Scotland are classic moments and very funny.

I think that in all the focus on the satire, however, something gets forgotten about the genuine warmth for the characters. I had been a little bit hesitant about reading Smollett in the past because of his legendary satiric harshness in books like Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle. I only picked this up after reading an article on Smollet which opined that Humphrey Clinker was a much more mature novel than the early works-- not so much a picaresque satire and more of a full novel which functions on many levels. For all that Smollet does not gloss over the faults of his characters, there is still the feeling that he treats them with affection. It is difficult not to read Smollet into the character of Matthew Bramble. The grumpy gout-ridden old man who takes issue with nearly everything is eventually capable of some very genuine acts of kindness.

I also thought that it was worth mentioning that the book is very readable. It is easy to be frightened off by the 18th century-ness of it all. I read an unedited edition without notes, and had no trouble following the prose. I had to look a few words up and spend a little more time on some of the sections, but it still was relatively easy to read. I found that I did not mind spending more time with the book-- each letter was a rich source of observation, double entendres, warmth and humor.

I would recommend this book to all readers, not just the student of the 18th century novel. Particularly if you are a fan of writers like Dickens you may enjoy stretching your time period a little bit and picking up The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker.

Arthur Machen, the Welsh author of such wierd tales as 'The White People' and 'The Great God Pan' worked as a propagandist for Britain in World War I and this is a collection of his work. His premiere effort, 'The Angels of Mons', is still occasionally unknowingly quoted by believers in the supernatural!

In the Fall of 1914 the German Army swept through Belgium, and frustrated by French resistance outside Paris attempted to flank the French Army at Mons. There the British Expeditionary Force had dug in, and they held off the Germans. Machen wrote a tale celebrating the victory in which the ghosts of the English archers of Agincourt appeared to aid the British!

I had been wanting to check out Arthur Machen's 1906 collection of short stories, entitled "The House of Souls," for quite some time; even since I had read two highly laudatory pieces written about this work and its author. The first was H.P. Lovecraft's comments in his widely referred to essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature," in which he claims "Of living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few if any can hope to equal the versatile Arthur Machen." And, in Jones & Newman's excellent overview volume "Horror: 100 Best Books," T.E.D. Klein, in his essay on "The House of Souls," refers to Machen as "fantasy's pre-eminent stylist." Well, after years of looking, I finally managed to lay hands on a somewhat beaten-up copy of the 1928 Borzoi edition of this collection, and can now see what all the fuss has been about. My edition only contains four of the book's original stories; "The Novel of the Black Seal," "The Novel of the White Powder" and "The Red Hand" have been omitted. (Apparently, the book has had a complicated publishing history.) What remains, however, has served as a very fine introduction to Machen ("rhymes with 'blacken,'" Klein reveals) in my own case.

The Borzoi edition kicks off with the novella-length piece "A Fragment of Life," which tells of a newlywed couple, the Darnells, living in a London suburb. Machen piles on an enormous amount of fine detail to illustrate the Darnells' life; thus, we learn of their plans to redecorate a bedroom, how much they pay for groceries, the social life of their maid, the problems that Mrs. Darnell's aunt is having, and on and on. It only gradually dawns on the reader, and on Mr. Darnell, that this is, literally, just a fragment of life, indeed; that all this mundane nonsense is just a masklike covering that hides a greater reality. Like many of the characters of Algernon Blackwood and, much later, P.K. Dick, Mr. Darnell seeks to pierce the illusion of our so-called reality, and this initially prosaic story winds up being quite an eerie and mystical ride as a result. The next tale in this collection, "The White People," was Lovecraft's second-favorite horror story of all time, after Blackwood's "The Willows." In this one, a man is given the diary of a young girl by another man who wishes to demonstrate what the real nature of evil is all about. The bulk of the story consists of the girl's seemingly naive and rambling notes in her journal, and we learn that she is a sorceress of sorts, being trained by her nurse is some kind of dark arts. Nothing is really spelled out for the reader in this piece; rather, through the use of narrated fairy tales, strange incidents and almost hallucinatory journeys, a very unsettling aura is engendered. It is all very allusive and suggestive, demanding of the reader a great exercise of the imagination. I suppose that Lovecraft had a greater imagination than mine (no great surprise there, though!), because I was left wanting a bit more from this tale. Still, some pretty eerie stuff. The oft-anthologized "The Great God Pan" is up next, to my mind the strongest story of the bunch. In this one, a scientist performs a brain operation on a young woman to (again) pierce the veil that obscures an ultimate reality. Seventeen years later, a mysterious, debauched woman causes a rash of suicides in London high society, as a small group of men tries to figure out just what is going on. Reading like a late 19th century detective story crossed with the supernatural, this is one bravura piece of work from Mr. Machen, and concludes in a suitably gruesome and gooey manner. The story is a bit too dependent on coincidence in its telling, but remains most impressive. Finally, in my Borzoi edition, is "The Inmost Light," still another tale of a scientist trying to peer behind the curtain to behold a truer reality. Here, another woman is the subject of an experiment that produces horrifying results. The described image of Mrs. Black's hideous face in an upstairs window, as seen by our narrator from some distance away, is one that lingers in the memory. As in "The White People" and "The Great God Pan," most of the horrors are suggested rather than spelled out in this tale, which may be a disappointment to a modern reader steeped in the current tradition of gore and grue, but there is no denying the chilling mood that these stories can evoke.

I should perhaps mention here that "The House of Souls" was NOT that easy a read for me. There are dozens of references to English life of a century or more ago that may mean little to the 21st century reader (just what IS an "A.B.C. girl," anyway?), not to mention much British slang, Latin expressions and so on. A detailed street map of London proved invaluable to me as I read this book. Still, a little effort in these matters always results in a deeper appreciation, and there surely is much to appreciate in "The House of Souls." It is certainly well worth any reader's time. Thanks, T.E.D., and thanks, H.P.!

Dyson looks into the strange case of a doctor and his experiments into the afterlife and sources. The effects that he leaves behind him horrify Dyson when he reads what has happened.

I have to admit at the start that I am not a huge Machen fan; I only read him beacause he has influenced the greats, such as Lovecraft. That being said, this is a good book because it contains 2 of his big "classics": "The White People" and "The Great God Pan". These should be familiar to any reader of weird tales. I find The White People to be a little tedious but still should be read by all. The other 2 novellas here are The Inmost Light and A Fragment of Life. I thoroughly enjoyed The Inmost Light because I am a great fan of "The Occult Detective" and this story surely fits that genra. It has a good plot that drives toward a satisfying conclusion. Alas, I cannot say the same for the opening piece "A Fragment of Life". This is a meandering monstrosity that goes nowhere very slowly. I will admit that I never finished it. After slogging through the main couple a)worrying over furnishing a room b)worrying over buying a stove and c)worrying over their mad aunt moving in with them I had had quite enough! Perhaps the end is interesting but I haven't enough time in this lifetime to wade through all the preliminary stuff. The trouble with Machen is that he tends to babble on and this story is an example of him at his worst. But 3/4 of the stories are good. I remain more of a Blackwood fan.

All of Machen's work is worth reading, but of the four novellas in this collection "A Fragment of Life" is itself entirely worth the price of admission. In this tale, Machen excels himself in creating a moving, human tale, full of wonder and joy (and so unlike his more common "Buckets o' Grue" material). A fine tale, plus three more that are effectively a bonus read.

Machen (1863-1947) stands as one of the great figures in "weird", or supernatural, literature. This plain but functional reprint of the 1922 U.S. edition of "The House of Souls" contains two of his finest works in the genre - "The White People" and "The Great God Pan".

The book opens with an introduction, penned by Machen, which provides insight into the writing of the pieces within and into Machen himself.

The first of the four novellas, "A Fragment of Life", concerns the awakening of an "ordinary" man to his mystic and real self. This piece, rather subtle and slow moving, may require rereading for full appreciation.

"The White People" takes us into the pages of a journal written by a young girl who has been privy since early childhood, via her nursemaid, to ancient and arcane secrets. The journal is the gist of this story and is quite a gripping mix of fantasy and myth (yes, there is a difference). The narrative framework around the journal introduces us, via the discussion of two protagonists, to Machen's fascinating theories about good and evil.

"The Great God Pan" concerns the appearance of the title entity into the everyday world of men through the agency of a more or less typical "mad doctor"; or, as Machen describes the character, a practitioner of "transcendental medicine".

The fourth and final story, "The Inmost Light", is not among my favorites in the Machen cannon. Nonetheless, the narrative about another doctor dabbling in occult realms is an effective mystery and an enjoyable read.

All in all, an excellent collection from an excellent writer and requisite reading for any serious student of supernatural fiction.

When I first read THE TERROR & OTHER TALES, I was under the impression from ST Joshi's introduction that he thought Arthur Machen's remaining works (the ones printed in this volume) were of poor quality. I spent the rest of the book determined to prove him wrong. Although I like Joshi as an editor (much better than Robert Price and his higher-criticism hangups), I think that academics sometimes become too focused on purity of form and lose sight of otherwise good writing. I personally like all of Arthur Machen's writing, both the cosmic horror and the everyday gone wrong. I was pleased to see, however, than when I reread the introduction I found that Joshi now agreed with me :)

Chaosium has previously produced 2 novels of Arthur Machen's fiction: THE THREE IMPOSTERS AND OTHER STORIES (which primarily contains "The Great God Pan" and the title story "The Three Imposters", which is actually a series of short stories) and THE WHITE PEOPLE AND OTHER STORIES (which contains "The White People" which heavily influenced HPL, "Ornaments in Jade", and "A Fragment of Life"). THE TERROR is the third (and presumably last) of the Arthur Machen line; I would call it a grab bag of anything remaining of Machen's work that is fit to print.

Machen's story "The Terror" is the title piece for this collection, and oddly it was the story I liked the least. It's about the animal kingdom turning on humanity during WW I, but the government is doing a coverup. Frankly it is somewhat slow and dry, and Machen seemed to be making a point rather than telling a story. Interestingly, at the end of "The Terror", the investigators find a farmhouse where some people took refuge from the "Terror" and read their diary - I was struck by the similarity to zombie movies (!) of all things, and I now wonder if George Romero had this story in mind when scripting "Night of the Living Dead"? Stranger things have happened...

The rest of the collected stories seem to me to be quieter, more prosaic stories where something has gone weird and it may be beyond the power of anyone to fix. Sometimes Machen will insert himself into the story as an ordinary journalist, a man interested in the story but with little power to affect the outcome. In style and substance, the remainder reminds me of MR James, which is high praise indeed.

Some of the better stories here are "The Lost Club" (which is distinctly eerie in finding the secret group of wealthy and famous, where at each gathering one member disappears), "The Dover Road" (which is sort of a ghost story but involves something more like spiritualism), and "Change" (where the children encounter something like "the White People" of Machen's earlier work). Some, like "The Islington Mystery", "Out of the Picture", and "The Bright Boy" are about criminals and their misdeeds, but there is some supernatural element that twists the whole thing into some horrible aspect. I can defintiely see hints and phrases that HPL would pick up on and use in some of his work; also, the two were writing at the same time towards the end of Machen's life, so perhaps there was a common style of the times for them to use.

I can highly recommend this anthology as being worth collecting.

Arthur Machen is, of course, one of the preminent weird fiction writers of the early 20th century. Working at the same time as the Decadents, but most decidedly not one of them, his works would influence such writers as Lovecraft and his circle, as well as modern masters like Peter Straub.

The Terror is Chaosium's third volume of Arthur Machen's work, and as can be expected the best stories can be found in the previous two volumes. Editor S.T. Joshi admits as much in his introduction, but The Terror is still a worthy read.

"The Terror" is the same story featured in The White People, however this is the compete version, and the additions are most welcome. Most of the other stories do not reach such heights of sustained suspense as this story, the largest of the collection. "The Lost Club" deals with two men stumbling on a gentlemen's club that may be far more ominous than they first believe. "Munitions of War" is tale of ghosts and war. "The Islington Mystery" asks if a man can be a murderer if there's no body. "Johnny Double" concerns a boy who cannot possibly be in two places at once... but is. "The Cosy Room" also deals with a murder, but is it his guilt or the chase that drives him over the edge? "Opening the Door" deals with a man who literally disappears through a mysterious door in his garden. "The Children of The Pool" deals with a malignant genius loci that gives literal birth to the monstrous beings lurking within unwary visitors. "The Bright Boy" is an implausible story concerning a little boy who is not what he seems. In "Out Of The Picture," the subject of an artist's paintings menaces London. "Change" harkens back to Machen's early work concering the Little People; while on vacation in a sleepy Welsh town a family finds out just why the locals keep their lights on at night. "The Dover Road" deals with the mystery of a man who disappears within a haunted house... "Ritual," the final story, continues Machen's fascinations with children and pagan remnants of the dim past.

On the whole, these stories do not match Machen's earlier works... but at times the chills are just as sharp as they used to be... witness the first half of "The Dover Road," "Change" and "The Terror." If you like Arthur Machen's work you are well advised to read this book. If you're merely a fan of Lovecraft's predecessors or of Victorian/Edwardian fiction in general, try the previous Chaosium Machen collections first.

This is the third and final book in the Chaosium trilogy consisting of material from the early 1900's Welsh author, Arthur Machen. H. P. Lovecraft was a huge fan of a lot of his work, and this is a book put together in large part by S. T. Joshi, author of the prizewinning Lovecraft-biography. Whereas the two previous books were mostly larger tales or a few big ones with an addition of miscellaneous material, this is mostly miscellaneous material. Even though Joshi in his introduction mentions several pieces of unenclosed material as read worthy, he has still added an unabridged edition of the tale "The Terror", hence the title. This seems like a very strange choice to me; why not just include the other material referred to, instead of adding the same tale that came in the previous book, if in a slightly different version? A strange choice. The tale is fine until the end, when the badly chosen ending comes, which really ruins an otherwise fine tale.

The other tales included that I enjoyed were for example "The Lost Club", about a secret club for the rich elite in London, where each time one of the members is chosen to disappear from this earth. Quite original and creepy. "Johnny Double", a fine and amusing tale about an evil doppelganger wrecking someone's life without his knowledge. Don't you suspect you may have had someone like that too, after a night on town? I sure have, since someone looking exactly like me occasionally in my youth was rumoured to be quite the idiot after a G&T too many, but it couldn't have been me, so... ;-)

There's "Change", a great tale about the ancient European phenomenon of the "Changeling", something I in all honesty tend to not disregard at all in real life, but which would explain a thing or two sometimes. Another tale that I loved is "Out of the Picture", a tale very much in relation to Lovecraft's famous "Pickman's Model". Wonderful!

Apart from this the rest of the tales are a very varying mix of tales, some simply bad, some mediocre and some very much read worthy without having that tiny extra. I still highly recommend this book, since the good ones are tales you simply have to read if you like the genre.

S.T. Joshi concludes in his introduction to Chaosium second volume of the Best Weird Tales of Arthur Machen: "All that one need read of Arthur Machen in the weird vein are contained in these two Chaosium volumes of his tales..." As always Joshi is quite correct, so it begs the question why he found this third volume necessary at all. The stories included here are only a pale shadow of Machen at his best (e.g. The Three Impostors or the fabulous "A Fragment of Life"), and is only interesting for the sake of completeness. Greatly disappointing.

This is an odd short piece by Machen -- it appears to be a humorously told alchemical fable. Since Machen was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn and into esoteric stuff, one might suppose that the very considerable number of things that mean neither head nor tail to me are in fact genuine (tho' camouflaged or symbollic) alchemical information; on the other hand, they might be in-jokes that only a student of Alchemy (or 'Spagyric') will appreciate. "Drink plenty of good wine" is about the only teaching or moral that I can glean from the tale. The Purple Mouth Press edition's covers and several interior illustrations are by Mae and Danny Strelkov; at first glance I was going to call these amateurish or fanzine-ish, but that may not be quite fair; one could call the art style -- maybe -- primitive? naive? Grandma-Moses-folk-art-kind of thing?? For some reason they make me think, a little, or Russian icons.

A collection of nineteen occult stories by famous authors (Kipling, Hawthorne, Doyle, Saki) arranged into four categories (Secret Societies and Cults, Witchcraft and Magic, Spiritualism, Prophecy). While the stories are generally of high quality, some may-- inevitably-- already be familiar to readers of classic horror (James' "Casting the Runes"), some are a bit dated, and a few don't represent the best works of their authors (O'Henry's "Pheobe"). The arranging of the stories into the four categories is a bit awkward, also. Worth a look for those interested in early horror.