Post by darkglobe on Nov 21, 2006 21:45:46 GMT -5
This is a powerful early horror novel well worth reading. It's availible online here:
www.gutenberg.org/etext/389
You can read more about the artist here:
www.machensoc.demon.co.uk/
Most of Machen's fiction is short. His long short story "The Great God Pan" (1894), his first major success, caused a furore in London as through its central figure of a pagan demoness it seemed to readers to link the sense of horror with a prurient sexuality. Other short stories of around this time also explored paganism and sexuality: most famous are "The Inmost Light" and "The White People", the latter an eerie first-person account of a young girl's haunting by an evil statue she discovers in a wood. The Three Impostors (1895) is essentially a collection of short stories linked together in a single frame: the most often reprinted have been "The Black Seal", the story of an anthropologist who discovers a tribe of throwback hominids living in the Welsh mountains, and "The White Powder", which concerns an unfortunate young man's degeneration into primeval slime. All of these stories can be seen as examples of the fantastic genre, set identifiably in the real world, yet tending to disturb our sense of its familiar possibilities. They were also very racy indeed for their time, and helped to found the modern horror-genre.
In all the above tales, malefic powers are evoked: something ancient and terrible, demon, demoness or primeval throwback surfaces into the modern world. Like many tales of horror, these are moralistic; the reader is often encouraged to enjoy the rise of atavistic powers, as they punish those who have sinned. Machen had his first successes with this kind of work, which is still popular today, but for many readers today his finest fiction was written in the later 1890s. By this time his moralistic attitudes had shifted. He came very close to allowing that these same dark, pagan powers might have a regenerative possibility. Preeminent among these slightly later works is the novel The Hill of Dreams (1907), which charts the gradual possession of a young artist by a kind of pagan faun-creature who lives within him, rather as Stevenson's Hyde lives within Jekyll. This novel, often considered Machen's finest work, evokes a dark, hallucinatory London, as powerfully realized in a different mode as that inhabited by Sherlock Holmes. A series of very short pieces written at the same time, eventually collected as Ornaments in Jade, similarly shows a more ambiguously positive celebration of pagan sexual powers, and also demonstrates Machen's interest in the avant-garde prose poetry of the French decadence.
www.gutenberg.org/etext/389
You can read more about the artist here:
www.machensoc.demon.co.uk/
Most of Machen's fiction is short. His long short story "The Great God Pan" (1894), his first major success, caused a furore in London as through its central figure of a pagan demoness it seemed to readers to link the sense of horror with a prurient sexuality. Other short stories of around this time also explored paganism and sexuality: most famous are "The Inmost Light" and "The White People", the latter an eerie first-person account of a young girl's haunting by an evil statue she discovers in a wood. The Three Impostors (1895) is essentially a collection of short stories linked together in a single frame: the most often reprinted have been "The Black Seal", the story of an anthropologist who discovers a tribe of throwback hominids living in the Welsh mountains, and "The White Powder", which concerns an unfortunate young man's degeneration into primeval slime. All of these stories can be seen as examples of the fantastic genre, set identifiably in the real world, yet tending to disturb our sense of its familiar possibilities. They were also very racy indeed for their time, and helped to found the modern horror-genre.
In all the above tales, malefic powers are evoked: something ancient and terrible, demon, demoness or primeval throwback surfaces into the modern world. Like many tales of horror, these are moralistic; the reader is often encouraged to enjoy the rise of atavistic powers, as they punish those who have sinned. Machen had his first successes with this kind of work, which is still popular today, but for many readers today his finest fiction was written in the later 1890s. By this time his moralistic attitudes had shifted. He came very close to allowing that these same dark, pagan powers might have a regenerative possibility. Preeminent among these slightly later works is the novel The Hill of Dreams (1907), which charts the gradual possession of a young artist by a kind of pagan faun-creature who lives within him, rather as Stevenson's Hyde lives within Jekyll. This novel, often considered Machen's finest work, evokes a dark, hallucinatory London, as powerfully realized in a different mode as that inhabited by Sherlock Holmes. A series of very short pieces written at the same time, eventually collected as Ornaments in Jade, similarly shows a more ambiguously positive celebration of pagan sexual powers, and also demonstrates Machen's interest in the avant-garde prose poetry of the French decadence.