Arthur Machen (1863–1947), born Arthur Llewellyn Jones, was an influential Welsh novelist and essayist widely regarded as a forerunner of 20th-century Gothic science fiction and a pioneer of “weird fiction,” so it’s a man after my own heart.
Machen lived most of his life in poverty as a clerk, teacher, translator, journalist, and even toured with an acting company. He created the famous Angel of Mons legend during World I through his story “The Bowman,” but he’s mostly known for his horror novel The Great God Pan.
The story begins with Dr. Raymond, a scientist obsessed with the belief that a supernatural world lies beyond human perception, performing a controversial brain operation on a 17-year-old woman named Mary. Yeah, it’s horror, I told you. By making a small incision in her cortex, he theorises he can lift the veil between ordinary reality and the divine realm, specifically allowing her to see the ancient god Pan. The surgery appears to succeed, if we can talk of success: Mary briefly perceives something beyond the visible world, then collapses into catatonia and becomes erratic. She dies nine months later but not before giving birth to a child. I told you it was horror.
Years later, Mr. Clarke and Mr. Villiers piece together a disturbing pattern: a woman known variously as Helen Vaughan, Mrs. Herbert, Mrs. Beaumont, and Miss Raymond has left ruin across London. Men who enter her orbit are financially destroyed, driven to madness, or found dead by suicide. As Clarke and Villiers exchange evidence and testimonies, the horrifying truth emerges: Helen is the daughter of Mary and Pan himself; she’s a half-human, half-divine creature whose existence is an affront to the natural order. Helen is cornered and forced to take her own life. Her death is a cascading dissolution through every form — human, animal, and something worse — before she ceases to exist entirely. Dr. Matheson describes attending the suicide victim’s body as it degenerates horribly down the evolutionary ladder, wavering from sex to sex. I told you it was horror.
Now, The Great God Pan is essential to understand what Machen means by horror, and you’ll find many of these themes in this delightful collection of short stories called Ornaments in Jade, in which you’ll find Machen in all his glory. The creeping, subtle sylvan horror, the panic as in Pan, who barely gets mentioned but whose presence lingers in the midst and in the shades, in the mysterious shape of a standing stone in the woods, in the eyes of women and children met at the wrong hour of twilight.
Here’s a list of the stories:
- The Rose Garden
- The Turanians
- The Idealist
- Witchcraft
- The Ceremony
- Psychology
- Torture
- Midsummer
- Nature
- The Holy Things
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