Perhaps no figure better embodies the transition from the Gothic tradition to modern horror than Arthur Machen. In the final decade of the nineteenth century, the Welsh writer produced a seminal body of tales of occult horror, spiritual and physical corruption, and malignant survivals from the primeval past which horrified and scandalized late Victorian readers. Machen’s ‘weird fiction’ has influenced generations of storytellers from H. P. Lovecraft to Guillermo Del Toro, and it remains no less unsettling today.

This new collection, which includes the complete novel The Three Impostors as well as such celebrated tales as ‘The Great God Pan’ and ‘The White People’, constitutes the most comprehensive critical edition of Machen yet to appear. In addition to the core late-Victorian horror classics, a selection of lesser-known prose poems and later tales helps to present a fuller picture of the development of Machen’s weird vision.

Arthur Machen was born in 1863 in Caerleon, Monmouthshire, the son of a Welsh clergyman. His birthplace, rich in history and legend, was to have a decisive impact on his later fiction. Machen attended Hereford Cathedral School, but his father’s poverty precluded a university education. During the 1880s Machen worked in London as a tutor, translator, and cataloguer, while finding his way as a writer. Then, between 1890 and 1900, he produced a body of tales of horror, wonder, and the borderland between the two. The most popular, or notorious, of these in its day was ‘The Great God Pan’, associated, then and now, with the Decadent movement in literature. ‘Pan’ and other works written during that decade, including The Three Impostors, The Hill of Dreams, and ‘The White People’, are now recognized as classics of weird fiction. At the start of the First World War, Machen caused a stir with a short story about a supernatural rescue of an English company at Mons, ‘The Bowmen’, which many readers refused to accept as fiction. Despite Machen’s very high reputation among other weird writers, his popular appeal, even to fans of horror and the supernatural, has ever waxed and waned. Machen died at St Joseph’s Nursing Home in Beaconsfield in 1947.

Aaron Worth is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at Boston University. He is the author of Imperial Media: Colonial Networks and Information Technologies in the British Literary Imagination, 1857–1918 (2014), as well as critical essays discussing the work of such Victorian horror writers as Arthur Machen, M. R. James, and Richard Marsh. His own horror fiction has appeared in publications including Cemetery Dance Magazine and Aliterate.

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