Arthur Machen - The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories

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. Machens 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 Machens weird vision.

Arthur Machen was born in 1863 in Caerleon, Monmouthshire, the son of a Welsh clergyman. His birthplace, rich in history and legend, was to have a decisive impact on his later fiction. Machen attended Hereford Cathedral School, but his fathers poverty precluded a university education. During the 1880s Machen worked in London as a tutor, translator, and cataloguer, while finding his way as a writer. Then, between 1890 and 1900, he produced a body of tales of horror, wonder, and the borderland between the two. The most popular, or notorious, of these in its day was The Great God Pan, associated, then and now, with the Decadent movement in literature. Pan and other works written during that decade, including The Three Impostors, The Hill of Dreams, and The White People, are now recognized as classics of weird fiction. At the start of the First World War, Machen caused a stir with a short story about a supernatural rescue of an English company at Mons, The Bowmen, which many readers refused to accept as fiction. Despite Machens very high reputation among other weird writers, his popular appeal, even to fans of horror and the supernatural, has ever waxed and waned. Machen died at St Josephs Nursing Home in Beaconsfield in 1947.

Aaron Worth is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at Boston University. He is the author of Imperial Media: Colonial Networks and Information Technologies in the British Literary Imagination, 18571918 (2014), as well as critical essays discussing the work of such Victorian horror writers as Arthur Machen, M. R. James, and Richard Marsh. His own horror fiction has appeared in publications including Cemetery Dance Magazine and Aliterate.

Cover image: PictuLandra/Shutterstock

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the Universitys objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

Selection and editorial material Aaron Worth 2018

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

First Edition published in 2018

Impression: 1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of theabove should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above

You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017950098

ISBN 9780198813163

ebook ISBN 9780192549570

Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc