I first discovered Arthur Machen via H.P. Lovecraft. Machen, a lover of the occult and all things supernatural, was a strong influence on Lovecraft’s brooding, claustraphobic horror style. Lovecraft’s short stories are wonderful in their ability to quickly evoke an atmosphere of dread. However, their ornate wording can be dense and a little over the top at times…

And there was something else that I didn’t realize about the author until coming across it in Stephen King’s excellent On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. In a passage on writing dialogue, King noted that:

“H. P. Lovecraft was a genius when it came to tales of the macabre, but a terrible dialogue writer. He seems to have known it, too, because in the millions of words of fiction he wrote, fewer than five thousand are dialogue.” (p. 181)

But Machen’s work The Great God Pan reads the way you wish Lovecraft’s would. The novella begins with a girl’s disastrous brain operation which is performed in the hopes of her coming into contact with the pagan god Pan. The rest of the story deals with a strange woman’s involvement in the mysterious death’s of several London gentlemen.

Upon its release, the work was considered controversial for its grotesque and decadent themes, as well as its implied sexual content.

So if you’re a fan of turn-of-the-century Gothic horror, (and who among us isn’t…), check out this minor masterpiece of the genre. The text is available on Gutenburg, but I also made a pdf version for easy readability:

PS: Quick tip for reading pdfs: hit ctrl+k and change the document text to white and the page background to dark and then hit ctrl+shift+h, then up and down to scroll….

PPS: The pics are from the movie Pan’s Labyrinth – They aren’t related to Machen’s story, but seem strangely appropriate.

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