Ten Tales of the Supernatural by Arthur Machen

by Arthur Machen

This Halcyon Classics ebook collection contains ten of the best works by Welsh author Arthur Machen (1863-1947). He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. His novella THE GREAT GOD PAN has garnered a reputation as a classic of horror. Stephen King called it "Maybe the best [horror story] in the English language."

He also is well known for his role in creating the legend of the ANGELS OF MONS, a legend in which the spirits of dead English soldiers from the Battle of Agincourt protected British soldiers at the Battle of Mons in World War I. While fictional, Machen's newspaper account became the basis for the legend which was widely regarded as fact during the Great War.

This ebook is DRM free and includes an active table of contents with back-linking for easy navigation.




The Great God Pan
The Shining Pyramid
The Three Imposters
The Red Hand
The Hill of Dreams
The White People
The Angels of Mons
The Inmost Light
The Islington Mystery
A Fragment of Life

This unexpurgated edition contains the complete text, with minor errors and omissions corrected.

Genres: Horror

401 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 8, 2010

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.