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    The Great God Pan
    The Great God Pan
    The Great God Pan
    Ebook99 pages1 hour

    The Great God Pan

    By Arthur Machen

    3.5/5

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    A sensation when first published in 1894, this frightening story involves evil scientists and the women that become monsters at their hands. An experiment into the sources of the human brain through the mind of a young woman has gone horribly wrong—she has witnessed the God Pan and will die giving birth to a daughter, Helen Vaughan. Twenty years later Helen becomes the source of much fevered speculation when she is feted as a society hostess of great charm. Many men are infatuated with her beauty, but great beauty has a price. Linking horror with prurient sexuality, this classic of horror sheds light on late Victorian misogyny and the public’s interest in theories of evolutionary degeneration.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherParthian Books
    Release dateOct 1, 2010
    ISBN9781908069627
    Author

    Arthur Machen

    Arthur Machen (1863–1947) was a Welsh author and actor best known for his fantasy and horror fiction. He grew up with intentions of becoming a doctor, but followed a boyhood passion of the supernatural and occult and started to write. In 1890, Machen began publishing short stories in literary magazines. Four years later, he released his breakthrough work, The Great God Pan. Decried upon initial publication for its depictions of sex and violence, the tale has since become a horror classic and has been hailed as “maybe the best [horror story] in the English language” by Stephen King. Machen continued to publish supernatural novels but spent time as actor in a traveling player company after his wife’s death. His literary career revived once more with the publication of his works The House of Souls and The Hill of Dreams. During World War I, Machen became a full-time journalist. Though he rallied for republications of his works, Machen’s literary career ultimately diminished, and he lived much of his life in poor finances. 

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    Reviews for The Great God Pan

    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      "Consider the matter well, Raymond. It's a great responsibility. Something might go wrong; you would be a miserable man for the rest of your days.""No, I think not, even if the worst happened. As you know, I rescued Mary from the gutter, and from almost certain starvation, when she was a child; I think her life is mine, to use as I feel fit. Come, it's getting late; we had better go in."Dr. Raymond believes that 'a trifling rearrangement of certain cells' in the brain would allow anyone to see the Great God Pan but his foolhardy attempt to prove his theory ends in disaster, to the horror of his friend Mr. Clarke who was invited to watch the surgery. The rest of the story concerns Mr. Clarke's occult interests, which lead him to the intertwined stories of a strange young girl fostered by a farmer, a beautiful but somehow repulsive woman who married and ruined a friend of a friend, and of a series of suicides by rich young men with everything to live for.The sort of horror story without any monsters, but where the sense of evil permeates everything.
    • 1/5
      It could be me but the ending of this novel confused me. The end result is clear and also how the ending relates to the beginning. It is only hinted at what Helen actually was and what had happened in the woods.
    • 5/5
      A young woman named Mary -- a foundling picked up off the streets by one Dr. Raymond -- becomes the unwitting subject in an experiment to allow a human to see what many consider to be the "real world", a wondrous place in which nature and all manner of creatures live just beyond the veil of what humans normally see. Witnessed by Dr. Raymond and his colleague Mr. Clarke, Mary wakens from the experiment, her eyes appearing to focus on something beautiful and far away. But soon her expression changes to horror, and she collapses to the floor in a fit of madness.Time passes and Mr. Clarke runs into a beggar who turns out to be an old chum. They walk together, and Clark learns of how his friend wound up in such dire circumstances. His friend tells him of his wife, a strange woman named Helen, who many claim to be beautiful and yet no one enjoys being in her presence. A sinister air hangs about her person and their home. She ruined him, he claims, and then disappeared. Clarke investigates further, and tales of madness and unexplained deaths surrounding a similar woman begin cropping up. Curious if she is somehow connected to the events with Mary, he questions Dr. Raymond about that night. The Doctor warns him to leave things be before something happens to him. Clarke, however, is determined to uncover the truth.Perhaps not as horror-filled by today's standards, The Great God Pan still manages to evoke chills not by blood and gore, but by providing moods and glimpses of evil. It's as if you notice something's not quite right, something that you can't see or explain, but you can't pinpoint it. The story works on your mind, wreaking havoc with your fears and imagination until you can't escape. That unknown element is probably more terrifying than knowing that a vampire or a zombie or some familiar creature is lurking about."The Great God Pan" is quite an unnerving tale and has earned its place as a classic horror tale. If you've not read it, I recommend checking it out.
    • 4/5
      An effective example of its genre - early cosmic horror, locating the horrific in inexplicable natural phenomena, and achieving its effectiveness through a lack of description of the specific horrors - but of course just as problematic as Victorian fiction will always tend to be. I'm intrigued by the fact, though, that there is a reading of this book, completely coherent with the text, where all the horrible consequences come from the original violation of a woman's agency and bodily integrity.
    • 4/5
      An old-fasioned "weird" story and a darned good one! --Alden R. Carter, author of Dogwolf
    • 4/5
      I didn't find The Great God Pan (or the other stories in this volume) as scary as I expected to, given the introduction, but there's definitely a sense of chill, a sense of the uncanny. I think they're just so very restrained compared to the guts and gore you come across now -- I don't find these tales as horrifying as Val McDermid's The Mermaids Singing, for example, and I don't think that's intended to be horror. There's something very sedate about Machen's writing, and something picturesque, too.

      His is more a horror of not-knowing-quite-what, of things out there in the dark that aren't understood, of rationality meeting the unexplained. I think I prefer it to more modern horror, even if it doesn't give me quite the chill it should.
    • 3/5
      Not really decadent enough for my tastes, though the ontological horror at the end is almost enough of a pay off.

      I can imagine folks complaining about Machen's inability to vary his tone. All his characters sound the same (so no wonder virtually everyone's of the same class of Drones). For example, here are two characters talking:

      "I was wide awake enough. Even if I had been dreaming as you say, what I saw would have roused me effectually."

      "What you saw? What did you see? Was there anything strange about Crashaw? But I can't believe it; it is impossible."

      We might say that Machen's displayed the smooth workings of this world of humans, beyond which lies the horror of Pan's world, where we have, for example, "the hideous form upon the bed, changing and melting before your eyes from woman to man, from man to beast, and from beast to worse than beast." In other words, the very blandness and sameness of the dialog, the indistinguishability of the characters, perfectly represents the world's unvarying and proper order. Change itself, then, is Machen's great horror.

    • 4/5
      A wonderful Victorian melodrama, as recommended by Javier Marias, Guillermo del Toro, Nicholas Lezard & Stephen King. Clearly the work of a lunatic.
    • 3/5
      When I was young I swore by H P Lovecraft while my friend championed Machen. At the time I thought The Hill of Dreams pretty insipid compared to anything with Cthulhu in it. Several decades on I felt that I have to give Machen another chance, as it were, and this edition of The Great God Pan (and the two companion pieces in this volume, The White Pyramid and The Shining People) provided the opportunity.Machen fin-de-siècle novels are still a taste I have yet to acquire. By today's standards the horror (and Machen tends to get his characters to refer to 'horror' in case we can't put a word to their feelings) is pretty tame, more alluded to than described. The title story is about the degradations that are begat on a particular individual and visited on those that come into intimate contact with her. The answers to the mysteries are obvious to the reader, but the narrators and protagonists, not to mention the dilettantes and flaneurs of Late Victorian Britain, seem blind to the implications of what they are investigating, and the tale seems rather overlong as a consequence.The other two slighter tales are, strangely, more convincing. The White People suffers from a clumsy framing device, but the ever-flowing and scattergun chattiness of the child narrator in the central portion strike me as typical of children's descriptions generally, in the way that the dialogue in the opening section (on the nature of evil) is rather artificial and less true to life. The Shining Pyramid has been described as almost an occult Sherlock Holmes story, but I find the detective figure's deductions, for all their apparent logic, come over as pure leaps in the dark as far as realism is concerned, and the climax oddly anti-climactic.Machen's strengths are in creating atmosphere, whether in gloomy London or the eerie depths of the countryside. Claustrophobia is induced by descriptions of dark streets or fog-bound moors and woods, intensified by a general geographical vagueness. Characterisation is less successful; in all three stories I had little sense of individuality, for the men in particular, and had to keep looking back in the text to see who was who in any given passage. While I was unmoved by these tales, I would still like to revisit some of his other stories like The Great Return to see if time has played more fairly with them in my memory. But I'm almost certain my youthful obsession with Lovecraft is a thing of the past, so I shan't waste time on him.A brief word of praise here for this edition's cover artist Chris Iliff, due to his capturing precisely the look I imagined Machen ascribing to the title story's femme fatale. No wonder men went mad staring into those eyes! The Foreword by Ramsey Campbell is, like Machen's prose, strong on atmosphere but comes over chiefly as eulogising, while Tomos Owen's notes (which add in some of the historical, cultural and literary contexts) are workmanlike if not very inspired.

    Book preview

    The Great God Pan - Arthur Machen

    THE GREAT GOD PAN

    ARTHUR MACHEN

    Contents

    Title Page

    I: The Experiment

    II: Mr Clarke’s Memoirs

    III: The City of Resurrections

    IV: The Discovery in Paul Street

    V: The Letter of Advice

    VI: The Suicides

    VII: The Encounter in Soho

    VIII: The Fragments

    NOTES ON THE TEXT

    About the Author

    Copyright

    LIBRARY

    OF

    WALES

    THE GREAT

    GOD PAN

    I

    The Experiment

    ‘I am glad you came, Clarke; very glad indeed. I was not sure you could spare the time.’

    ‘I was able to make arrangements for a few days; things are not very lively just now. But have you no misgivings, Raymond? Is it absolutely safe?’

    The two men were slowly pacing the terrace in front of Dr Raymond’s house. The sun still hung above the western mountain line, but it shone with a dull red glow that cast no shadows, and all the air was quiet; a sweet breath came from the great wood on the hillside above, and with it, at intervals, the soft murmuring call of the wild doves. Below, in the long lovely valley, the river wound in and out between the lonely hills, and, as the sun hovered and vanished into the west, a faint mist, pure white, began to rise from the banks. Dr Raymond turned sharply to his friend.

    ‘Safe? Of course it is. In itself the operation is a perfectly simple one; any surgeon could do it.’

    ‘And there is no danger at any other stage?’

    ‘None; absolutely no physical danger what ever, I give you my word. You were always timid, Clarke, always; but you know my history. I have devoted myself to transcendental medicine for the last twenty years. I have heard myself called quack and charlatan and impostor, but all the while I knew I was on the right path. Five years ago I reached the goal, and since then every day has been a preparation for what we shall do tonight.’

    ‘I should like to believe it is all true.’ Clarke knit his brows, and looked doubtfully at Dr Raymond. ‘Are you perfectly sure, Raymond, that your theory is not a phantasmagoria – a splendid vision, certainly, but a mere vision after all?’

    Dr Raymond stopped in his walk and turned sharply. He was a middle-aged man, gaunt and thin, of a pale yellow complexion, but as he answered Clarke and faced him, there was a flush on his cheek.

    ‘Look about you, Clarke. You see the mountain, and hill following after hill, as wave on wave, you see the woods and orchards, the fields of ripe corn, and the meadows reaching to the reed beds by the river. You see me standing here beside you, and hear my voice; but I tell you that all these things – yes, from that star that has just shone out in the sky to the solid ground beneath our feet – I say that all these are but dreams and shadows; the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes. There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision, beyond these ‘chases in Arras, dreams in a career’, beyond them all as beyond a veil. I do not know whether any human being has ever lifted that veil; but I do know, Clarke, that you and I shall see it lifted this very night from before another’s eyes. You may think all this strange nonsense; it may be strange, but it is true, and the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan.’

    Clarke shivered; the white mist gathering over the river was chilly.

    ‘It is wonderful indeed,’ he said. ‘We are standing on the brink of a strange world, Raymond, if what you say is true. I suppose the knife is absolutely necessary?’

    ‘Yes; a slight lesion in the grey matter, that is all; a trifling rearrangement of certain cells, a microscopical alteration that would escape the attention of ninety-nine brain specialists out of a hundred. I don’t want to bother you with ‘shop’, Clarke; I might give you a mass of technical detail which would sound very imposing, and would leave you as enlightened as you are now. But I suppose you have read, casually, in out-of-the-way corners of your paper, that immense strides have been made recently in the physiology of the brain. I saw a paragraph the other day about Digby’s theory, and Browne Faber’s discoveries. Theories and discoveries! Where they are standing now, I stood fifteen years ago, and I need not tell you that I have not been standing still for the last fifteen years. It will be enough if I say that five years ago I made the discovery to which I alluded when I said that then I reached the goal. After years of labour, after years of toiling and groping in the dark, after days and nights of disappointment and sometimes of despair, in which I used now and then to tremble and grow cold with the thought that perhaps there were others seeking for what I sought, at last, after so long, a pang of sudden joy thrilled my soul, and I knew the long journey was at an end. By what seemed then and still seems a chance, the suggestion of a moment’s idle thought followed up upon familiar lines and paths that I had tracked a hundred times already, the great truth burst upon me, and I saw, mapped out in lines of sight, a whole world, a sphere unknown; continents and islands, and great oceans in which no ship has sailed (to my belief) since a Man first lifted up his eyes and beheld the sun, and the stars of heaven, and the quiet earth beneath. You will think all this highflown language, Clarke, but it is hard to be literal. And yet; I do not know whether what I am hinting at cannot be set forth in plain and homely terms. For instance, this world of ours is pretty well girded now with the telegraph wires and cables; thought, with something less than the speed of thought, flashes from sunrise to sunset, from north to south, across the floods and the desert places. Suppose that an electrician of today were suddenly to perceive that he and his friends have merely been playing with pebbles and mistaking them for the foundations of the world; suppose that such a man saw uttermost space lie open before the current, the words of men flash forth to the sun and beyond the sun into the systems beyond, and the voices of articulate-speaking men echo in the waste void that bounds our thought. As analogies go, that is a pretty good analogy of what I have done; you can understand now a little of what I felt as I stood here one evening; it was a summer evening, and the valley looked much as it does now; I stood here, and saw before me the unutterable, the unthinkable gulf that yawns profound between two worlds, the world of matter and the world of spirit; I saw the great empty deep stretch dim before me, and in that instant a bridge of light leapt from the earth to the unknown shore, and the abyss was spanned. You may look in Browne Faber’s book, if you like, and you will find

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