Arthur Machen is a significant figure in supernatural and horror literature, in the genre of 'weird fiction'. This collection brings together his best horror tales with a full contextual introduction and which helps to illuminate Machen's place in the literary and cultural milieu of 1890s Britain.
The Great God Pan is a horror and fantasy novella by Welsh writer Arthur Machen. Machen was inspired to write The Great God Pan by his experiences at the ruins of a pagan temple in Wales. What would become the first chapter of the novella was published in the magazine The Whirlwind in 1890. Machen later extended The Great God Pan and it was published as a book alongside another story, "The Inmost Light", in 1894. The novella begins with an experiment to allow a woman named Mary to see the supernatural world. This is followed by an account of a series of mysterious happenings and deaths over many years surrounding a woman named Helen Vaughan. At the end, the heroes confront Helen and force her to kill herself. She undergoes a series of supernatural transformations before dying and she is revealed to be the child of Mary and the god Pan.
Arthur Machen's "The Inmost Light" is a chilling tale of horror and the supernatural. This English horror story delves deep into the realms of the paranormal, gripping readers with its eerie narrative. Machen's mastery in crafting suspenseful tales is evident throughout. The story's dark undertones and unexpected twists ensure a haunting reading experience.
Ramsey Campbell is the world's most honored living horror writer, with more than twenty World Fantasy, British Fantasy, Bram Stoker, and other awards to his credit. Hailed as one of the most literate and literary writers of our time, in genre and out, Campbell has been acclaimed as a "master of dark fantasy" by Clive Barker, one of today's "finest writers of supernatural horror and psychological suspense" by the Charleston Post & Courier, the "master of a skewed and exquisitely terrifying style" by Library Journal, "one of the world's foremost horror writers" by the San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle, and a "master of mood" by Publishers Weekly. In The Darkest Part of the Woods, Campbell introduces readers to the Price family, whose lives have for decades been snarled with the fate of the ancient forest of Goodmanswood. Here, Dr. Lennox Price discovered a hallucinogenic moss that quickly became the focus of a cult-and though the moss and the trees on which it grew are long gone, it seems as if the whole forest can now affect the minds of visitors. After Lennox is killed trying to return to his beloved wood, his widow seems to see and hear him in the trees-or is it a dark version of the Green Man that caresses her with leafy hands? Lennox's grandson heeds a call to lie in his lover's arms in the very heart of the forest-and cannot help but wonder what the fruit of that love will be. And Heather, Lennox's daughter, who turned her back on her father's mysteries and sought sanctuary in the world of facts and history? Goodmanswood summons her as well . . . At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
"The Great God Pan is a haunting, deeply affecting play about the interaction of identity, psychology and pathology. Ms. Herzog writes with keen sensitivity to the complex weave of feelings embedded in all human relationships, with particular attention to the way we tiptoe around areas of radioactive emotion." - New York Times "Whatever the ideal contemporary American drama is, it has to look a lot like The Great God Pan. It is provocative and subtle, slowly, carefully revelatory, sweetly moving, thought-provoking, funny and insightful." - New York Observer "An intelligent, delicately articulate writer." - Village Voice "A moving and unsettling look at the nature of identity and the vagaries of memory. With subtlety and compassion, Herzog contemplates how well we can really know ourselves." - Backstage Jamie's life in Brooklyn seems just fine: a beautiful girlfriend, a burgeoning journalism career, and parents who live just far enough away. But when a possible childhood trauma comes to light, lives are thrown into a tailspin. Unsettling and deeply compassionate, The Great God Pan tells the intimate tale of what is lost and won when a hidden truth is suddenly revealed. Amy Herzog's plays include 4000 Miles (Pulitzer Prize finalist), After the Revolution and Belleville. Ms. Herzog is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Whiting Writers' Award, an Obie Award and the Helen Merrill Award for Aspiring Playwrights.
The Three Impostors; or, The Transmutations is an episodic horror novel by British writer Arthur Machen, first published in 1895 in The Bodley Head's Keynote Series. It was revived in paperback by Ballantine Books as the forty-eighth volume of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in June 1972. The novel comprises several weird tales and culminates in a final denouement of deadly horror, connected with a secret society devoted to debauched pagan rites. The three impostors of the title are members of this society who weave a web of deception in the streets of London-relating the aforementioned weird tales in the process-as they search for a missing Roman coin commemorating an infamous orgy by the Emperor Tiberius and close in on their prey: "the young man with spectacles". (wikipedia.org)
From ancient myth to contemporary art and literature, a beguiling look at the many incarnations of the mischievous—and culturally immortal—god Pan, now in paperback. Pan—he of the cloven hoof and lustful grin, beckoning through the trees. From classical myth to modern literature, film, and music, the god Pan has long fascinated and terrified the western imagination. “Panic” is the name given to the peculiar feeling we experience in his presence. Still, the ways in which Pan has been imagined have varied wildly—fitting for a god whose very name the ancients confused with the Greek word meaning “all.” Part-goat, part-man, Pan bridges the divide between the human and animal worlds. In exquisite prose, Paul Robichaud explores how Pan has been imagined in mythology, art, literature, music, spirituality, and popular culture through the centuries. At times, Pan is a dangerous, destabilizing force; sometimes, a source of fertility and renewal. His portrayals reveal shifting anxieties about our own animal impulses and our relationship to nature. Always the outsider, he has been the god of choice for gay writers, occult practitioners, and New Age mystics. And although ancient sources announced his death, he has lived on through the work of Arthur Machen, Gustav Mahler, Kenneth Grahame, D. H. Lawrence, and countless others. Pan: The Great God’s Modern Return traces his intoxicating dance.
'Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come - but I must not and cannot think!' H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was a reclusive scribbler of horror stories for the American pulp magazines that specialized in Gothic and science fiction in the interwar years. He often published in Weird Tales and has since become the key figure in the slippery genre of 'weird fiction'. Lovecraft developed an extraordinary vision of feeble men driven to the edge of sanity by glimpses of malign beings that have survived from human prehistory or by malevolent extra-terrestrial visitations. The ornate language of his stories builds towards grotesque moments of revelation, quite unlike any other writer. This new selection brings together nine of his classic tales, focusing on the 'Cthulhu Mythos', a cycle of stories that develops the mythology of the Old Ones, the monstrous creatures who predate human life on earth. It includes the Introduction from Lovecraft's critical essay, 'Supernatural Horror in Literature', in which he gave his own important definition of 'weird fiction'. In a fascinating contextual introduction, Roger Luckhurst gives Lovecraft the attention he deserves as a writer who used pulp fiction to explore a remarkable philosophy that shockingly dethrones the mastery of man.
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By turns bizarre, unsettling, spooky, and sublime, Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories showcases nine incomparable stories from master conjuror Algernon Blackwood. Evoking the uncanny spiritual forces of Nature, Blackwood's writings all tread the nebulous borderland between fantasy, awe, wonder, and horror. Here Blackwood displays his best and most disturbing work-including "The Willows," which Lovecraft singled out as "the single finest weird tale in literature"; "The Wendigo"; "The Insanity of Jones"; and "Sand." 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.