Complete Works (Novels, Poems, Horror Short Stories And Others). Illustrated: The White People, The Secret Glory, The Great God Pan, The Hill of Dreams and others

by Arthur Machen

Arthur Machen is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. His novella The Great God Pan (1890; 1894) has garnered a reputation as a classic of horror, with Stephen King describing it as "Maybe the best [horror story] in the English language."
Machen was a great enthusiast for literature that expressed the "rapture, beauty, adoration, wonder, awe, mystery, sense of the unknown, desire for the unknown" that he summed up in the word ecstasy.
The Novels
THE HILL OF DREAMS
THE TERROR
THE SECRET GLORY
EPILOGUE
THE GREEN ROUND
The Shorter Fiction
THE CHRONICLE OF OR THE HISTORY OF THE IX JOYOUS JOURNEYS. CARBONNEK
INTRODUCTION
EPISTLE DEDICATORY
MASTER PERROT'S DISCOURSE OF ALE
THE PORTREEVE'S GAUDY-DAY
STRANGE STORY OF A RED JAR
THE SPIGOT CLERK'S FIRST TALE
HOW THE FOLK OF ABERGAVENNY WERE PESTERED BY AN ACCURSED KNIGHT
THE LORD MALTWORM'S FIRST TALE
HOW A MAN OF CAERLEON FOUND A GREAT TREASURE
THE RUBRICAN'S FIRST TALE
THE TANKARD MARSHALL'S FIRST TALE
THE QUEST OF CONSTANCY
BY THE WAY
THE SPIGOT CLERK'S SECOND TALE.
THE PORTREEVE'S SOLEMNITY
THE TALE TOLD BY THE SEIGNEUR OF LA ROCHE NEMOURS
THE JOURNEY HOMEWARD
SIGNOR PIERO LATINI'S TALE
THE LORD MALTWORM'S SECOND TALE
THE RUBRICAN'S SECOND TALE
EPILOGUE
THE GREAT GOD PAN, AND THE INMOST LIGHT
The Great God Pan
The Inmost Light
THE THREE OR THE TRANSMUTATIONS
THREE IMPOSTORS PROLOGUE.
ADVENTURE OF THE GOLD TIBERIUS.
THE ENCOUNTER OF THE PAVEMENT.
NOVEL OF THE DARK VALLEY.
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER.
NOVEL OF THE BLACK SEAL.
INCIDENT OF THE PRIVATE BAR.
THE DECORATIVE IMAGINATION.
NOVEL OF THE IRON MAID.
THE RECLUSE OF BAYSWATER.
NOVEL OF THE WHITE POWDER.
STRANGE OCCURRENCE IN CLERKENWELL.
HISTORY OF THE YOUNG MAN WITH SPECTACLES
ADVENTURE OF THE DESERTED RESIDENCE.
THE HOUSE OF SOULS
A Fragment of Life
The White People
The Red Hand
THE ANGELS OF MONS
The Bowmen
The Soldiers' Rest
The Monstrance
The Dazzling Light
The Bowmen And Other Noble Ghosts
Postscript
THE GREAT RETURN
THE SHINING PYRAMID, 1923
The Priest and the Barber
The Spagyric Quest of Beroaldus Cosmopolita
A Wonderful Woman
The Lost Club
Nature, or, The Splendid Holiday
Drake's Drum
THE SHINING PYRAMID, 1924
The Arrow-Head Character
The Eyes on the Wall
The Search for the Bowl
The Secret of the Pyramid
The Little People
THE GLORIOUS MYSTERY
The Rose Garden
Psychology, or, Fragments of Paper
The Holy Things
A New Christmas Carol
THE COSY ROOM AND OTHER STORIES
The Cosy Room
A Double Return
Munitions of War
The Gift of Tongues
The Islington Mystery
Awaking
Opening the Door
The Compliments of the Season
THE CHILDREN OF THE POOL, AND OTHER STORIES
UNCOLLECTED TALES
The Poems
ELEUSINIA
THE ASSEMBLING.

6251 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 22, 2022

About the author

Arthur Machen was a leading Welsh author of the 1890s. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. His long story The Great God Pan made him famous and controversial in his lifetime, but The Hill of Dreams is generally considered his masterpiece. He also is well known for his leading role in creating the legend of the Angels of Mons.

At the age of eleven, Machen boarded at Hereford Cathedral School, where he received an excellent classical education. Family poverty ruled out attendance at university, and Machen was sent to London, where he sat exams to attend medical school but failed to get in. Machen, however, showed literary promise, publishing in 1881 a long poem "Eleusinia" on the subject of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Returning to London, he lived in relative poverty, attempting to work as a journalist, as a publisher's clerk, and as a children's tutor while writing in the evening and going on long rambling walks across London.

In 1884 he published his second work, the pastiche The Anatomy of Tobacco, and secured work with the publisher and bookseller George Redway as a cataloguer and magazine editor. This led to further work as a translator from French, translating the Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre, Le Moyen de Parvenir (Fantastic Tales) of Béroalde de Verville, and the Memoirs of Casanova. Machen's translations in a spirited English style became standard ones for many years.

Around 1890 Machen began to publish in literary magazines, writing stories influenced by the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, some of which used gothic or fantastic themes. This led to his first major success, The Great God Pan. It was published in 1894 by John Lane in the noted Keynotes Series, which was part of the growing aesthetic movement of the time. Machen's story was widely denounced for its sexual and horrific content and subsequently sold well, going into a second edition.

Machen next produced The Three Impostors, a novel composed of a number of interwoven tales, in 1895. The novel and the stories within it were eventually to be regarded as among Machen's best works. However, following the scandal surrounding Oscar Wilde later that year, Machen's association with works of decadent horror made it difficult for him to find a publisher for new works. Thus, though he would write some of his greatest works over the next few years, some were published much later. These included The Hill of Dreams, Hieroglyphics, A Fragment of Life, the story The White People, and the stories which make up Ornaments in Jade.

Reviews

[Sean Farrell]

Though not completely finished (!), I did read The Great God Pan, The Hill of Dreams, and a few other short stories. My first reading of Machen, I found his style interesting and the subject matter more-so. A proto Lovecraft, though with less a penchant for the inconceivable, eldritch horror of the old gods; and more or a focus on the horror of the otherness of the Fae, nature spirits, and other ancient hidden beings. Many stories worth reading, but the narrative style is of its time, and may be difficult for modern readers.