His first novella, The Great God Pan , appeared in to reviews of unparalleled hostility. Deemed "the most acutely and intentionally disagreeable book yet seen in English" by the Westminster Gazette and summed up by the Manchester Guardian as "an incoherent nightmare of sex", Machen's debut concerns a working-class waif named Mary and her wealthy benefactor, who grooms her to become a guinea pig in a grotesque early experiment in brain surgery.
Ritual & Other Stories - Arthur Machen - Google Книги
Under the scalpel, she experiences a vision of the vast and formless deity of nature, only to awaken as a drooling idiot. Following up with The Novel of the White Powder and its companion piece, The Novel of the Black Seal , Machen introduced one of his most cherished themes, the survival of the folkloric "little people", the children of Danu who are supposed to have disappeared into the Welsh hills but live on in a kind of transdimensional "otherworld" from which they continue to exert an obscure and baleful influence over human affairs.
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The sudden decline of his young wife, Amy, diagnosed with cancer, spurred the creation of The White People , one of Machen's finest stories and an acknowledged masterpiece of supernatural fiction, an unsettling first-person narrative depicting a child on the cusp of puberty and her fatal communion with the inhabitants of faeryland. Machen's tale would inspire countless writers, from HP Lovecraft to Stephen King, but the genre he helped to create held no further interest for him.
A real-life "horror of the soul" took hold of him and, working in a grief-stricken frenzy, he completed his first novel, The Hill of Dreams. Here he moved away from his opiate-laced prose and returned to the half-remembered landscapes of his youth to create a thinly veiled account of his own pursuit of the mysteries.
The opening passage, concerning an amorous tryst with an elemental woodland spirit, is described with the lucidity of first-hand experience, a conviction that places his work in a different class from his imitators. Eschewing the sensationalism of "yellow" fiction, Machen won critical respect but set himself on the road to ruin by alienating his readership.
Turning to the occult for solace, he was initiated into the Order of the Golden Dawn on November 21 , taking the name Frater Avallaunius. He might have abandoned literature entirely had it not been for the great war and the controversy sparked by the appearance of his hastily penned potboiler The Bowmen.
This tale of the ghostly archers of Agincourt coming to the aid of the retreating tommies was retold by a nurse on the western front to cheer her wounded charges, and was repeated orally from one soldier to the next until it found its way back to the British papers as a statement of fact.
In an echo of modern UFO hysteria, Machen's attempts to set the record straight led to public accusations that he was involved in a convoluted conspiracy to cover up the "real truth".
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The breadth of material here, from the beginning of Machen's writing career right until the This should be viewed as a supplementary book to Tartarus' prior release: The breadth of material here, from the beginning of Machen's writing career right until the end, is generally of lesser quality than the fiction featured in Tartarus' primary 'best of' volume, but while later period Machen can be frustratingly diffuse and unfocused the rambling and flagrantly unnecessary side story about a young telekinetic in the otherwise solid tale Out of the Picture is a key example of this , he's rarely, if ever, outright bad.
The abstracted, journalistic style of his later career means his stories don't dazzle as much as his more famous work from the s, when he wrote the classic decadent horror novella The Great God Pan and one of my personal favourite novels from any author The Hill of Dreams, but they still cultivate the appropriate sensation of mystery, and lesser Machen is still better than most weirdists achieve. Unsurprisingly, the best written pieces in the volume are from Machen's great decade of the s — these being the prose poems formerly collected within his book Ornaments in Jade.
From his later period I would single out the title story and particularly Change as effective folk horror tales and Opening the Door as a tale of wonder akin to his classic story N. If you finished Tales of Horror and the Supernatural still the perfect Machen starter book and only enjoyed Machen as a sort of proto-Lovecraft writer of fun horror stories then this book isn't for you. Machen actually, despite his reputation, wrote relatively few horror stories, and hardly any feature here. This is exclusively for those mystic wanderers whose trembling hands seek to pierce the veil in search of another fix from this most brilliant, visionary artist of mystery and awe.
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Para fans de Lovecraft, para amantes de los Poltergeist, must read. Oct 18, Jay Rothermel rated it it was amazing. This is an excellent career-spanning survey of Machen's career. All the great subjects are here, as well as mouthful gems and several works from the post-war period that I have no hesitation declaring masterpieces: My review In the last five weeks I have read nothing but the works of Arthur Machen. It has been a wonderful experience.
I now understand why Mach This is an excellent career-spanning survey of Machen's career. I now understand why Machen's fans are so passionate.
Ritual and Other Stories
My least favorite Machen stories are the short pieces he wrote during World War One. But though they smack of bourgeois chauvinism, even in these stories the craftsmanship and authorial pleasure are evident. I paticularly appreciate Machen's late stories from the s.
They are not the exuberant tales of the s, endlessly inventive and flowing with incident. But they are perhaps more architecturally arresting. Read in full at: Ritual and Other Stories by Arthur Machen http: Keith rated it it was amazing Aug 27, Angel Guerra rated it really liked it Oct 21, Manuel Tru rated it it was amazing Apr 19, Charles Schneider rated it really liked it Aug 10, Richard rated it really liked it Jan 14, Donny Lemur rated it really liked it Mar 10, Doyle rated it really liked it Jun 04, Brian rated it really liked it Nov 13, Nicolas Granger-taylor rated it it was amazing Sep 27, Sam rated it it was amazing Aug 21, James rated it really liked it Mar 02, Oliver Smith rated it it was amazing Sep 07, T rated it it was amazing Jan 13, Andrey Dolganov rated it really liked it Oct 10, Moudry rated it really liked it May 26, Drazen Kozjan rated it it was amazing Aug 03, Fonch rated it did not like it Dec 07, Todd rated it really liked it Jul 19, Laura rated it really liked it Mar 27, Jim rated it it was amazing Jul 24, Madsplp rated it really liked it Jan 06, Fritz rated it liked it Jun 02, Chris rated it really liked it Feb 12, Isil rated it it was amazing Apr 01, William Maynard rated it really liked it Sep 28, Chris rated it it was amazing Mar 25,