Listen. I have a LOT of books on my bookshelves waiting patiently to be read. Some of them are more desperate to be read, it must be said, but the books I’m most eager to read are the ones trying to coax me with promised of dark arcane spells and forbidden knowledge of tentacle horrors or evil forces that wreak demonic havoc. And the ones tempting me with immortality or whisper only at night in alien tongue about cosmic fungus and necromantic powers. And the ones singing of glorious adventures into enchanted woods with dryads and tiny mushroom royalty.

As if my books are possessed by the ghost of their authors.

That’s why I’ve been exploring the most influential authors of fantasy, science fiction, horror and weird fiction. And now, thanks to the group “weird fiction”, I’ve had the opportunity to read the next such influential author on my list: Arthur Machen.

Lovecraft introduces Machen in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” as follows:

“Of living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few if any can hope to equal the versatile Arthur Machen; author of some dozen tales long and short, in which the elements of hidden horror and brooding fright attain an almost incomparable substance and realistic acuteness (…) His powerful horror-material of the ’nineties and earlier nineteen-hundreds stands alone in its class, and marks a distinct epoch in the history of this literary form.” (82)

Reading this paragraph again after reading my first eight Machen short stories made me squint for a little while and go:

Riiiiiiight.

I guess I started at the wrong end of Machen’s bibliography, because I just don’t see it.
My edition of this book, by the way, is not available in e-book format and is different than the original from 1948 and the 1970s printing, containing fewer stories. Here is a table of contents:

1 - The Shining Pyramid • (1895)
2- The Bowmen • (1914)
3 - The Great Return • (1915)
4 - The Happy Children • (1920)
5 - The Bright Boy • (1936)
6 - Out of the Earth • (1915)
7 - The Children of the Pool • (1936)
8 - The Terror • (1917)

In general, based on this collection, Machen’s characters often seem to be faced with some kind of mystery that they’re eager to solve. Strange evidence (or lack thereof) and wild, cryptic, assumptive, exaggerated or incoherent rumors etc. make their task harder and creates a growing sense of uneasiness in the reader as Machen lays all of the pieces out on the table like a supernatural puzzle to be solved and revealing some evidence here and divulging a little bit of the answer there, but uncovering in the end the origin of the mystery or eventually explaining whatever phenomenon has arisen.

That phenomenon or mystery is what I believe Lovecraft means by “hidden horror”, and because a lot of time is spent on thinking and reasoning and explaining before the supernatural encounter, there’s this growing “brooding fright”, which eventually creates that sense of “realistic acuteness” when things reveal themselves, either as answers in the character’s minds or as an observed physical thing. Sadly, I didn’t see or feel any horror, fright or acuteness.

Machen certainly pays strict attention to detail within a disciplined plot structure, and then there’s the psychological state of his characters, the atmosphere and tone in his writing, all of which is fluctuating between the reasonable or logical and the baffling or obscure. Between the precise, sober, journalistic and the profound, imaginative or resplendent. Between the natural and the supernatural, the down to earth and the otherworldly. Between the realistic and the fantastic. His characters are also fairly rigid, though smart, intrigued and highly inquisitive middle aged and male. Most of this certainly sounds brilliant in theory, but it’s all executed in a slightly too dispassionate and innocuous manner. Much like a theory, then. And even though there are flashes or brilliance and beauty, I’m left feeling underwhelmed – in large part because there are a lot of repeating elements.

I’d say his fiction is like a flower, which starts out as an unassuming bud, then it slowly grows into full bloom and then withers into some brown grime - all happening very predictably.

Furthermore, this collection is called “Tales of Horror and the Supernatural: Terrifying stories by a master of the ghostly and the macabre”, which is very misleading. These stories are not horrifying, terrifying, ghostly or macabre. They’re just dealing with the supernatural in some way. Sometimes just barely.

The last story – “The Terror” – is an outlier, though. It stands out like a masterpiece compared to all the others and is mostly exempt from all the negative criticism I’ve shared so far. Keep that in mind, because I actually highly recommend that one.

Here's a review of each story with some memorable quotes:

The Shining Pyramid - Terningkast 3

Two men are talking about a mysterious tragedy involving a young girl and about some strange flint signs. They try to uncover the meaning behind the flint signs, but it just doesn't make sense to them, which makes one of them particularly invested. He investigates the matter, and halfway through the story, things escalate pretty quickly. In the last part of the story, everything is basically explained away, unfortunately, and all the initial excitement and mystery is gone. The characters are kind of stone faced too and lack emotional depth. I think these things and there being an excess of minutiae along the way here, makes it all a bit dull for me. I think perhaps if Machen had ended the story after that supernatural traumatic experience, I'd probably give it at least four stars, so it ended up being slightly below average for me.

“[…] the hissing of their speech grew more venomous, and he saw in the uncertain light the abominable limbs, vague and yet too plainly seen, writhe and intertwine […] at his heart something seemed to whisper ever ‘the worm of corruption, the worm that dieth not,’ and grotesquely the image was pictured to his imagination of a piece of putrid offal stirring through and through with bloated and horrible creeping things. The writhing of the dusky limbs continued […]” (24)

“In that instant Vaughan saw the myriads beneath; the things made in the form of men but stunted like children hideously deformed, the faces with the almond eyes burning with evil and unspeakable lusts; the ghastly yellow of the mass of naked flesh […] ” (24)

The Bowmen - Terningkast 2

I have no idea why this story is even included in this collection. It's very short, four pages, and it's basically just a report from a battlefield where Germans and Englishmen are fighting. War is horrifying, sure, but it's very out of place in here. Also, it’s boring.

“His heart grew hot as a burning coal, it grew cold as ice within him, as it seemed to him that a tumult of voices answered to his summons.” (33)

The Great Return - Terningkast 3

There's something special about this one, but I have mixed feelings. It's divided into chapters, with the first one called "The rumour of the Marvellous", which is a big hint as to what it's about. Something strange has happened to the people of a place called Llanstrisant. It seems as if they've all had some collective auditory hallucination of some sort. Something else happens to them too of course, but I won't be revealing that here. I enjoyed the build-up, and there are some great moments in here. Some brilliant and beautiful ones as well. This is a positive kind of weird fiction, pertaining some glorious otherworldly phenomenon. Machen's writing was just right in those moments, amplifying the experience perfectly, but he could've ended the story in chapter 5 or 6. As it stands, it's just too long, slow and long-winded, and I lost interest in the second half. And there are too many characters, which makes it confusing as well. He just doesn't know when to stop, unfortunately.

(This is a perfect example of what happens in basically every single one of these stories)

“So far I have not told the story of the things of Llantrisant, but rather the story of how I stumbled upon them and among them, perplexed and wholly astray, seeking, but yet not knowing at all what I sought; bewildered now and again by circumstances which seemed to me wholly inexplicable; devoid, not so much of the key to the enigma, but of the key to the nature of the enigma. You cannot begin to solve a puzzle till you know what the puzzle is about.” (49)

“Such things were remembered by the old and told to the young that evening, in the streets of the town and in the deep lanes that climbed far hills. The sun went down to the mountain red with fire like a burnt offering, the sky turned violet, the sea was purple, as one told another of the wonder that had returned to the land after long ages.” (54)

“And the difficulty in recording this state is this, that it is so rare an experience that no set language to express it is in existence. A shadow of its raptures and ecstasies is found in the highest poetry; there are phrases in ancient books telling of the Celtic saints that dimly hint at it; some of the old Italian masters of painting had known it, for the light of it shines in their skies and about the battlements of their cities that are founded on magic hills. But these are but broken hints. ” (59-60)

The Happy Children - Terningkast 2

Fairly unexciting. A man investigates a rumor (again!), but this time it’s the Germans who are doing some shady business. The narrator later discovers something called the White order of Innocents. That's basically it. Nothing supernatural, nothing remotely creepy or scary or weird. Shallow characterizations yet again too.

So, you can move on. There’s nothing to see here.

“I saw the wonder of the town in the light of the afterglow that was red in the west. The clouds blossomed into rose-gardens; there were seas of fairy green that swam about isles of crimson light; there were clouds like spears of flame, like dragons of fire.” (71)

The Bright Boy - Terningkast 2

I’m afraid there’s very little to see here as well. This is a drawn-out account of how Joseph Last came to work as a tutor for a gifted boy. Machen wastes a lot of time writing about Last's life and some of the conversations had along the way. It's all very unassuming, irrelevant and pointless. What's funny is I think Machen comments on that observation too, because a character, miss Pilliner, says: "I'm so sorry (...) to trouble you with this long narrative, which I am sure, must be a sad trial of your patience" (84) and later, Last thinks: "Miss Pilliner's long and ceremonious approach was lulling him into a mild stupor; he wondered faintly when she would come to the point, and what the point would be like when she came to it, and chiefly, what on earth this rather dull family history could have to do with him" (85), and lastly, mirroring my own experience with this entire short story: "Last was resigned. The point of the long story seemed to recede into some far distance, into vanishing prospective" (86).

Good. Well said, Joseph Last. Well said.

“And then he went on to wonder whether curiosity, often regarded as a failing, almost a vice, is not, in fact, one of the greatest virtues of the spirit of man, the key to all knowledge and all the mysteries, the very sense of the secret that must be discovered.” (94)

“A chance word or two may take root in a child's mind and contaminate his whole nature.” (99)

“The tutor had dealt with many little boys, though with none so young as Henry; and he had found them as a whole a stodgy and podgy race, with faces that recorded a fixed abhorrence of learning and a resolution to learn as little as possible.” (92)

"Out of the Earth" - Terningkast 3

This one’s not too shabby, actually. I've kept several noteworthy quotes from it, so I liked the writing. The idea is neat, but things are starting to feel a bit too repetitive. The narrator has again heard some rumors/reports/gossip/speculations and sets out to investigate. At first there has been some "complaint during last August of the ill behavior of some children". Machen seems to dislike children an awful lot, for some reason, as his characters often do suspect children of doing something mean-spirited, as if he has an irrational fear of them. I think that’s called pedophobia.
Anyways, there seems to be that some horrible things are happening to people. A little girl (again!), for instance, has been subject to foul play, and the narrator must investigate (again!). While he investigates, "the story grew, and grew more monstrous and incredible", as speculations and myths are wont to do. Had this been the first story, I think I would've liked it a lot more. There are just one too many elements being repeated here in the same way from the other stories.

“An inventor of fantasies is a poor creature, heaven knows, when all the world is at war […]” (106)

“I knew all the time that it was all nonsense, but I couldn't understand in the least what it meant, or who was pulling the wires of rumour, or their purpose in so pulling. I began to wonder whether the pressure and anxiety and suspense of a terrible war had unhinged the public mind, so that it was ready to believe any fable, to debate the reasons for happenings which had never happened.” (109)

“He peered over the green wall of the fort, and there in the ditch he saw a swarm of noisome children, horrible little stunted creatures with old men's faces, with bloated faces, with little sunken eyes, with leering eyes.” (111)

"Children of the Pool" - Terningkast 5

Finally a 5 story! Here is a man who is tired of city life one summer and visits some old friends on the Welsh border. He stays at their farm called Lanypwll, which means “by the pool”. He meets an old acquaintance there too, James Roberts, and together they decide to investigate (!) the mysterious nearby pool. It’s a strange, ugly-looking black water of marshland with “all manner of rank and strange growths that love to have their roots in slime” and “a tangle of undergrowth (…) with taller trees rising above the mass (…) white, and bare and ghastly, with leprous limbs” (117). Later, James Roberts seems to be haunted by some undefined presence from his past that frightens him a great deal, or at least he has a nervous breakdown of some sorts.

I really liked how this story can be interpreted in different ways, and that there are different layers to it. It’s a well-structured, well-balanced story - psychoanalysis, philosophy and the supernatural at its core - with some nice, descriptive paragraphs and themes and ideas that gave me food for thought. I found the narrator’s final arguments very convincing and well thought-out. You know, it actually expanded my way of thinking a little bit. There’s a new way of seeing the world and ourselves in here, and I think I’d like to read it again someday.

“It is not altogether unheard of for very decent men to have had a black patch in their lives, which they have done their best to live down and atone for and forget.” (125)

“Now, everybody, I suppose, is aware that in recent years the silly business of divination by dreams has ceased to be a joke and has become a very serious science. It is called "Psycho-analysis"; and is compounded, I would say, by mingling one grain of sense with a hundred of pure nonsense. From the simplest and most obvious dreams, the psycho-analyst deduces the most incongruous and extravagant results. A black savage tells him that he has dreamed of being chased by lions, or, maybe, by crocodiles: and the psycho man knows at once that the black is suffering from the Œdipus complex. That is, he is madly in love with his own mother, and is, therefore, afraid of the vengeance of his father. Everybody knows, of course, that "lion" and "crocodile" are symbols of "father." And I understand that there are educated people who believe this stuff.” (129)

“In him, as in many men, there was a great gulf fixed between the hidden and the open consciousness; so that which could not come out into the light grew and swelled secretly, hugely, horribly in the darkness. If Roberts had been a poet or a painter or a musician; we might have had a masterpiece. As he was neither: we had a monster.” (130)

“[…] the "sadness" which we attribute to a particular landscape is really and efficiently in the landscape and not merely in ourselves; and consequently that the landscape can affect us and produce results in us, in precisely the same manner as drugs and meat and drink affect us in their several ways. Poe, who knew many secrets, knew this, and taught that landscape gardening was as truly a fine art as poetry or painting; since it availed to communicate the mysteries to the human spirit.” (131)

“The Terror” - Terningkast 6

“They have risen once – they may rise again” (224)

My favorite story of the collection. It’s novel length, but I loved it. Like I said, this story is exempt of all my initial criticism, and here’s where I wholeheartedly agree with Lovecraft: it’s a story “in which the elements of hidden horror and brooding fright attain an almost incomparable substance and realistic acuteness”, and as such, it’s like it “stands alone in its class”. And dare I say the very epitome of speculative fiction, because it masterfully conveys the power of speculation - the effects of rumor, vague stories, gossip and lack of convincing first-hand evidence. And whenever you don’t have a trustworthy authority figure or source, speculation turns into conspiracy theories or suspicion of invasion as people start to become afraid, then panic, and that’s when we let our imagination run wild. That’s when it’s hard to separate the nonsense from the evidence, the reasonable from the maddening, or actually that “no one knew how to distinguish undoubted fact from wild and extravagant surmise” (141)

“A whole country, was visited by a series of extraordinary and terrible calamities, which where the more terrible inasmuch as they continued for some time to be inscrutable mysteries. (141)

Machen portrays a society which begin to unravel in the face of inexplicable deaths. These deaths can at first be explained as accidents, but when newspapers don’t report on the deaths, and when the military starts showing up, people suspect there’s more to it, yet they have no idea what to believe:

“’Nobody knows what is happening,’ Merritt repeated, and he went on to describe the bewilderment and terror that hung like a cloud over the great industrial city in the Midlands, how the feeling of concealment, of some intolerable secret danger that must not be named, was worst of all.” (167)

What comes next, is not only an investigation into these deaths, but into our way of thinking in the face of incomprehensible terror, into what people do when they attempt to grapple with things that are way beyond their understanding and scope of imagination. Machen maps these cognitive patterns on a bigger scale, and his main characters are the only ones capable of finding the answer, in large part thanks to outside-the-box thinking like this:

"My theory," said that ingenious person, "is that human progress is simply a long march from one inconceivable to another. Look at that airship of ours that came over Porth yesterday: ten years ago that would have been an inconceivable sight. Take the steam engine, take printing, take the theory of gravitation: they were all inconceivable till somebody thought of them. So it is, no doubt, with this infernal dodgery that we're talking about: the Huns have found it out, and we haven't; and there you are. We can't conceive how these poor people have been murdered, because the method's inconceivable to us." (154)

And this:

“Dr. Lewis maintained that we should never begin to understand the real significance of life until we began to study just those aspects of it which we now dismiss and overlook as utterly inexplicable, and therefore, unimportant.” (211)

And this:

“You can't believe what you don't see: rather, you can't see what you don't believe. It was so during the time of the terror. All this bears out what Coleridge said as to the necessity of having the idea before the facts could be of any service to one. Of course, he was right; mere facts, without the correlating idea, are nothing and lead to no conclusion. We had plenty of facts, but we could make nothing of them.”(212)

How do you expand your way of thinking about the world? How do you project yourself into a state of “ahead of my time” to contend with things you’re currently not equipped to deal with? What are the basis of facts? There comes a point where you simply can’t dismiss evidence, people’s shared experience and observations, but you don’t want to be paranoid or crazy either. You must connect the dots in a reasonable and intelligent manner.

There’s some real craftmanship that went into this story, which made quite the impression on me. For every horrible event, every unexplainable death, there’s an accumulation of tension and dread, and along the way you’re taking the time to digest and reflect upon our collective state of mind. There’s a high degree of suspense built into the plot, and it kept me engaged all the way. The ending came as a surprise to me as well.

“Dr. Lewis made no answer. He was watching the growth of a new, unknown tree in his garden.” (161)

Awesome! This is the work of a great writer! Too bad most of the others were subpar. He's either grown a lot as a writer here or he's more adept at writing longer stories. Small sample size, though, I know, but somewhere in my mind I have the inclination that “The Terror” has inspired more than one author and screenwriter. I have no idea how the rest of his fiction is, but even though I really liked the last two, six of these stories disappointed me a great deal based on all the “hype” and acclaim. I'd very much like to read more of his work in the future, just in case, because I’m convinced that I’ll discover all the reasons he’s such an influential writer in his field.