Something pushed out from the body there on the floor, and stretched forth a slimy, wavering tentacle...

Perhaps no figure better embodies the transition from the Gothic tradition to modern horror than Arthur Machen. In the final decade of the nineteenth century, the Welsh writer produced a seminal body of tales of occult horror, spiritual and physical corruption, and malignant survivals from the primeval past which horrified and scandalized late-Victorian readers. Machen's weird fiction has influenced generations of storytellers, from H. P. Lovecraft to Guillermo Del Toro - and it remains no less unsettling today.

This new collection, which includes the complete novel The Three Impostors as well as such celebrated tales as The Great God Pan and The White People, constitutes the most comprehensive critical edition of Machen yet to appear. In addition to the core late-Victorian horror classics, a selection of lesser-known prose poems and later tales helps to present a fuller picture of the development of Machen's weird vision. The edition's introduction and notes contextualize the life and work of this foundational figure in the history of horror.

Something pushed out from the body there on the floor, and stretched forth a slimy, wavering tentacle...

Perhaps no figure better embodies the transition from the Gothic tradition to modern horror than Arthur Machen. In the final decade of the nineteenth century, the Welsh writer produced a seminal body of tales of occult horror, spiritual and physical corruption, and malignant survivals from the primeval past which horrified and scandalised-late-Victorian readers. Machen's weird fiction has influenced generations of storytellers, from H. P. Lovecraft to Guillermo Del Toro-and it remains no less unsettling today.

This new collection, which includes the complete novel The Three Impostors as well as such celebrated tales as The Great God Pan and The White People, constitutes the most comprehensive critical edition of Machen yet to appear. In addition to the core late-Victorian horror classics, a selection of lesser-known prose poems and later tales helps to present a fuller picture of the development of Machen's weird vision. The edition's introduction and notes contextualise the life and work of this foundational figure in the history of horror.

Classic tales of the fantastic, creepy and weird, with a foreword from the award-winning director of The Shape of Water Guillermo Del Toro

Machen's weird tales of the creepy and fantastic finally come to Penguin Classics. With an introduction from S.T. Joshi, editor of American Supernatural Tales, The White People and Other Weird Stories is the perfect introduction to the father of weird fiction. The title story The White People is an exercise in the bizarre leaving the reader disoriented and on edge. From the first page, Machen turns even fundamental truths upside-down, as his character Ambrose explains, there have been those who have sounded the very depths of sin, who all their lives have never done an 'ill deed' setting the stage for a tale entirely without logic.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Welsh writer Arthur Machen (1863-1947) is one of the towering figures in the Golden Age of weird fiction, and his novels and tales have influenced generations of weird writers and remain immensely popular among readers. But much of his work has been difficult to obtain, remaining buried in obscure magazines and newspapers of a century ago or published in expensive limited editions.

This is the first edition of Machen's fiction to be based on a thorough examination of his manuscripts and early publications. It is also the first edition to arrange Machen's fiction chronologically by date of writing.

This first volume contains his charming picaresque novel The Chronicle of Clemendy (1888), an exquisite imitation of the medieval narratives of Chaucer and Boccaccio. At this time Machen was a young journalist who had moved from his native Wales to London, and he wrote a number of humorous and slightly risqu sketches for fashionable London magazines.

But then he published The Great God Pan (1894), one of the pioneering works in the entire range of weird fiction. It was condemned by contemporary reviewers as the work of a diseased mind. Machen followed it up with the episodic novel The Three Impostors (1895), containing the brilliant segments The Novel of the Black Seal (which features the Little People, a sub-human race lurking on the edges of civilization), The Novel of the White Powder, and other vivid narratives.

The edition has been prepared by S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on weird fiction and the author of The Weird Tale (1990) and Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012). Joshi has prepared textually corrected editions of the work of H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, and many other weird writers.

This third volume of Machen's collected fiction begins with a tale, The Thousand and One Nights, that has never before been reprinted. It continues with a succession of tales that Machen wrote during and just after World War I, a cataclysm that shook Europe to its foundations. The most famous of these is The Bowmen (1914), a narrative of medieval soldiers coming to the rescue of besieged British infantrymen in France was widely believed to be a true account, in spite of Machen's repeated protestations to the contrary. Machen's final war tale, the short novel The Terror (1916), is an imperishable depiction of the revolt of animals against humanity's rulership of the earth.

In the 1920s Machen resorted to humor and satire to convey his dissatisfaction with the increasing secularization of his era, which he felt was robbing the imagination of wonder and mystery. He also began contributing to anthologies of original weird fiction edited by Cynthia Asquith and others, producing several memorable tales as a result, including The Happy Children and The Islington Mystery.

Machen's final novel, The Green Round (1933), is a subtle tale of supernatural menace, narrated in the blandly repertorial prose that Machen had developed in his later work. He then published two final volumes of weird tales, The Cosy Room and The Children of the Pool (both 1936), which contain many memorable tales, including The Bright Boy and N.

Machen's collected fiction is a monument to the author's fifty years of rumination about human life and the obscure mysteries that may lurk hidden in far-away corners of the earth--and in our imaginations. They are filled with an intensity and sincerity of expression testifying to their author's earnest philosophical and religious beliefs, and they are written in some of the most mellifluous prose of their time.

The edition has been prepared by S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on weird fiction and the author of The Weird Tale (1990) and Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012). Joshi has prepared textually corrected editions of the work of H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, and many other weird writers.

This second volume of Machen's collected fiction begins with Machen's most accomplished novel, The Hill of Dreams (written in 1895-97 and published in 1907), which H. P. Lovecraft called a memorable epic of the sensitive aesthetic mind. It features Lucian Taylor, a young man from the country who struggles to become a writer in London. His ruminations on life, love, and authorship are extraordinarily poignant, and at one point he engages in a lengthy dream of being back in ancient Rome, in the town of Isca Silurum, near his birthplace in Wales.

Later in 1897 Machen wrote a series of exquisite prose poems that were later published as Ornaments in Jade (1924). These ten vignettes display Machen's luminous prose at its most evocative, and they touch upon the possibility of strange and wondrous phenomena concealed behind the outward fa ade of the mundane world.

Machen's most accomplished weird tale, The White People, is also found here. Its account of a young girl insidiously inculcated in the witch-cult, told entirely from her own perspective as she jots down her thoughts and impressions in a diary, achieves the pinnacle of clutching fear. A very different work is the short novel A Fragment of Life, telling of how a seemingly ordinary couple rediscover their sense of wonder in the world around them.

The novel The Secret Glory (written around 1907) is a discursive novel that searingly condemns the British school system for destroying the imaginations of its pupils. The entire work--including the final two chapters, first published only in a limited edition in 1992--is included here.

The edition has been prepared by S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on weird fiction and the author of The Weird Tale (1990) and Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012). Joshi has prepared textually corrected editions of the work of H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, and many other weird writers.

The Great God Pan (1894) is a novella by Arthur Machen. Condemned as decadent and obscene upon publication, The Great God Pan earned praise from Oscar Wilde and H. P. Lovecraft, and is now regarded as one of Victorian literature's finest-and most unsettling-stories of horror and the occult. Throughout the years, it has influenced such figures as Stephen King, Guillermo del Toro, and Josh Malerman with its depiction of the god Pan and unsettling blend of science, myth, and magic. Clarke has always taken an interest in occult matters, so when a friend offers him a chance to witness an experimental procedure intended to access the spirit realm, he cannot refuse. When the young patient Mary awakens, she shows signs of terror and soon succumbs to a catatonic state. Convinced of their success in discovering the world of the great god Pan, Clarke and Raymond agree to keep their discovery a secret. Years later, a nearby town begins reporting the mysterious disappearances of young children, all of whom have been seen in the forest with a young woman named Helen Vaughn. Before they can solve the case, however, Vaughn disappears, leaving Clarke and the townspeople traumatized. As their secret grows too terrible to bear, Raymond and Clarke must steel themselves in order to solve the connection between Mary and Helen, and to close the portal to the spirit realm for good. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan is a classic of British horror fiction reimagined for modern readers.

Arthur Machen (March 3, 1863 - December 15, 1947) was a leading Welsh author of the 1890s. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. He also is well known for his leading role in creating the legend of the Angels of Mons. His surname rhymes with blacken.

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 archeology. His 1914 story, 'The Bowmen' is the source of the legend of the Angel of Mons, where a supernatural bowman covered the retreat of soldiers in the first world war.

The Flame Tree Gothic Fantasy, Classic Stories and Epic Tales collections bring together the entire range of myth, folklore and modern short fiction. Highlighting the roots of suspense, supernatural, science fiction and mystery stories, the books in Flame Tree Collections series are beautifully presented, perfect as a gift and offer a lifetime of reading pleasure.

Mysterious deaths in London baffle authorities, but for two men the reason is quite clear: they have seen something unspeakably terrible and lost their lives for it. For Clark it goes back to events from years ago; events he had strangely forgotten.

The Great God Pan was written in the style of Bram Stoker's Dracula and first published in the Victorian year, 1894. The monster: the elusive pagan god figure, Pan, who none dare to look upon lest they die of horror.

Cuando un experimento científico intenta descorrer el velo que separa la realidad de lo desconocido, lo que se revela es un horror inimaginable. Una joven sufre una transformación aterradora y lo que emerge es un terror que supera cualquier pesadilla. Las consecuencias de este acto llegan a las sombrías calles del Londres victoriano, dejando un rastro de locura, misterio y una sombra que se cierne sobre la vida de aquellos infelices que, ajenos al mal que se cierne sobre ellos, disfrutan de una tranquila existencia.

Machen, con su prosa elegante y sus imágenes evocadoras, crea un ambiente de tensión y misterio que atrapa al lector desde la primera página y lo sumerge en un viaje por terrenos desconocidos, donde las leyes de la naturaleza y las antiguas creencias paganas chocan y convergen.

Celebrado por autores como H.P. Lovecraft y Stephen King, El gran dios Pan es una joya literaria que no solo define el género del terror, sino que lo eleva a su máxima expresión. Esta narración, que ha influido en generaciones de escritores, es esencial para cualquier amante de la literatura de horror y misterio.

Classics in speculative fiction, Arthur Machen's most famous stories are journeys through fear, madness, and the furthest regions of the unknown.

A woman is rendered catatonic after a doctor's botched attempt at brain surgery. The surgery, it seems, has opened the woman to a forbidden fold in existence, a place not meant for human eyes, a place where The Great God Pan dwells. Years later, men of good position begin committing suicide in the most heinous ways, and for no apparent reason. But behind this trail of bodies is a mysterious woman. What is her connection to the suicides? And even more disturbing, what secrets does she share with the catatonic victim of a horrid medical experiment, a devastated woman who was shown the horrors of The Great God Pan?

Also contains The Angels of Mons: The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War.

--Part of the BROKEN GROUND series of novellas--

The Broken Ground project is a series of classic novellas that have influenced, revolutionized, or perfected the art of storytelling. These groundbreaking stories forced the boundaries and formed the future of literature, sometimes creating entire styles and genres in the process. With the idea that such works should be studied so that foundations can be understood, Broken Ground is dedicated to presenting these short-but-powerful novellas in a quality - yet affordable - package worthy of the words they contain.

For a moment, my heart stood still, and I gasped for breath. Before me, in place of the familiar structures, there was disclosed a panorama of unearthly, of astounding beauty. In deep dells, bowered by overhanging trees, there bloomed flowers such as only dreams can show; such deep purples that yet seemed to glow like precious stones with a hidden but ever-present radiance, roses whose hues outshone any that are to be seen in our gardens, tall lilies alive with light, and blossoms that were as beaten gold.

Written in December, 1935, when Arthur Machen was his early 70s, N reveals itself as one of the finest of his pieces: a strange, mystical tale about a possible hidden paradise in the London suburb of Stoke Newington.

Arthur Machen was a hugely prolific essayist and journalist. In a career that spanned more than half a century, he wrote thousands of articles for such magazines and newspapers as the London Evening News, John O'London's Weekly, and the Independent. In these essays he articulates his distinctive mystical and religiously based outlook. Accusing science and rationalism of impoverishing the human imagination, he was an untiring defender of the essential mystery of the cosmos.

In his literary criticism-embodied in the treatise Hieroglyphics (1902) and in many separate essays-Machen made a frequent discussion between mere reading matter and genuine literature. The former comprised mundane realism; the latter the world of romance, fantasy, and the supernatural. While being skeptical of spiritualist phenomena, he found in the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Algernon Blackwood, Walter de la Mare, and other writers a vital expression of the wonders and terrors that humanity encounters even in everyday life.

This volume presents a robust selection of Machen's essays, detailing his philosophical and literary vision. It is a significant adjunct to his weird fiction, showing how the principles he outlined in his essays were applied to the supernatural tales he wrote over his lifetime. The volume has been edited by S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on Machen and the editor of Machen's colleced fiction as published by Hippocampus Press.

Of creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few can hope to equal Arthur Machen. -- H. P. Lovecraft
Arthur Machen (1863-1947), Welsh novelist and essayist, is considered one of the most important and influential writers of his time. While displaying a preoccupation with pagan themes and matters of the occult -- an interest he shared with his close friend, the distinguished scholar A. E. Waite -- his writing transcends the genre of supernatural horror. Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as Paul Bowles and Jorge Luis Borges are just a few of the literary notables who are counted among his admirers. Machen is also a key figure in the development of pulp magazine fiction (e.g., Weird Tales), a line of ancestry that leads directly to today's popular graphic novels. Further, Machen's name often crops up in the writings of theorists and practitioners of psychogeography, a school of thought and literature which explores the hidden links between the landscape and the mind.
In The Great God Pan, Arthur Machen delivers a tense atmospheric story about a string of mysterious suicides. With its suggestive visions of decadent sexuality, the work scandalized Victorian London. This edition also includes The White People, The Inmost Light, and The Shining Pyramid. Taken together, these short stories are considered some of the first works of horror and have inspired generations of subsequent writers and creators.

The Great God Pan is a novella by Welsh writer Arthur Machen. A version of the story was published in the magazine The Whirlwind in 1890, and Machen revised and extended it for its book publication (together with another story, The Inmost Light) in 1894. On publication it was widely denounced by the press as degenerate and horrific because of its decadent style and sexual content, but it has since garnered a reputation as a classic of horror. 1] Machen's story was only one of many at the time to focus on the Greek God Pan as a useful symbol for the power of nature and paganism. The title was possibly inspired by the poem A Musical Instrument published in 1862 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in which the first line of every stanza ends ... the great god Pan.Synopsis edit] Clarke agrees, somewhat unwillingly, to bear witness to a strange experiment performed by his friend, Dr. Raymond. The ultimate goal of the doctor is to open the mind of man so that he may experience the spiritual world, an experience he calls seeing the great god Pan. He performs the experiment, which involves minor brain surgery, on a young woman named Mary. She awakens from the operation awed and terrified but quickly becomes a hopeless idiot. Years later, Clarke learns of a beautiful but sinister girl named Helen Vaughan, who is reported to have caused a series of mysterious happenings in her town. She spends much of her time in the woods near her house, and takes other children on prolonged twilight rambles in the countryside that disturb the parents of the town. One day, a young boy stumbles across her playing on the grass with a 'strange naked man, '; the boy becomes hysterical and later, after seeing a Roman statue of a satyr's head, becomes permanently feeble-minded. Helen also forms an unusually close friendship with a neighbour girl, Rachel, whom she leads several times into the woods. On one occasion Rachel returns home distraught, half-naked and rambling. Shortly after explaining what happened to her mother (never revealed in the story), she returns to the woods and disappears forever. Years later, Villiers happens across his old friend Herbert, who has become a vagrant since they last met. When asked how he has fallen so low, Herbert replies that he has been corrupted body and soul by his wife. After some investigation with Clarke and another character, Austin, it is revealed that Helen was Herbert's wife, and that the two had been involved rather suspiciously in the death of a well-to-do man. Herbert is later found dead. Helen disappears for some time, supposedly taking part in disturbing orgies somewhere in the Americas. She eventually returns to London under the pseudonym Mrs. Beaumont, her appearance followed by a series of suicides. Villiers and Clarke, each learning of Mrs. Beaumont's true identity, band together and confront Helen in her house. They persuade her to hang herself, and Helen has a very abnormal death, transforming between human and beast before finally dying. It is finally revealed that Helen is the child of Mary and the great god Pan, who was let in when Dr. Raymond opened her mind up to him....... Arthur Machen (3 March 1863 - 15 December 1947) was a Welsh author and mystic of the 1890s and early 20th century. ...............

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible.

The White People (1904) is a short story by Arthur Machen. Originally published in Horlick's Magazine, the story was later printed in The House of Souls (1906), a short story collection. Condemned as decadent and obscene upon publication, Machen's writing earned praise from Oscar Wilde and H. P. Lovecraft. Throughout the years, Machen's work has been referenced and adapted by such figures as Stephen King, Guillermo del Toro, and Josh Malerman for its masterfully unsettling blend of science, myth, and magic. As the sun sets over the lush countryside, Cotgrave and his friend Ambrose discuss the thin boundary that separates sorcery and the sacred. Unable to agree about the nature of good and evil, on what defines a sinner as opposed to a saint, Ambrose offers his comrade a book to borrow. Surprisingly well-kept for its age, the green book accompanies Cotgrave on his journey home, where he opens it to discover a strange, mysterious tale. Its pages contain the diary of a young girl who, encouraged by her nurse, immerses herself in the world of magic. As she grows adept in the ways of witchcraft, the girl begins referring to strange beings and unknown places, all while doing her best to conceal her secret life from friends and family. When he reaches the diary's end, Cotgrave will wish he had never looked past its binding. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Arthur Machen's The White People is a classic of British horror fiction reimagined for modern readers.

Anglo-Welsh writer Arthur Machen (1863-1947) has gained deserved celebrity for his tales of horror (The Great God Pan, The White People), his moving novel of artistic expression, The Hill of Dreams, and a plethora of other works. Some of his most distinctive writings are his autobiographical volumes, Far Off Things (1922), Things Near and Far (1923), and The London Adventure (1924), written when Machen was being hailed as an elder statesman of late Victorian literature.

In these autobiographies, Machen carefully fashions an image of himself as the struggling artist dwelling in a London garret, surviving on tea and tobacco. His horror tales of the 1890s were condemned as the ravings of a diseased mind-but that only enhanced their popularity. But Machen continued to struggle financially, and in 1910 he began working as a reporter for the London Evening News. Soon after the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, he wrote The Bowmen, which catapulted him into notoriety, as the story was taken as a true account of angels coming to the rescue of beleaguered British soldiers.

This volume also includes a group of separately published essays that augment our understanding of Machen's life and mind. In addition, the rare and piquant volume Precious Balms (1924)-a reprinting of the hostile reviews Machen received over a lifetime-is included.

The volume is edited by S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on Machen and weird fiction.

Long out of print and presented here for the first time in paperback, is Arthur Machen's classic collection of prose poems. The ten exquisite piees included in this volume are: The Rose Garden, The Turanians, The Idealist, Witchcraft, The Ceremony, Psychology, Torture, Midsummer, Nature, and The Holy Things.