Selected and introduced by Stephen Carver

'Of living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few if any can hope to equal the versatile Arthur Machen.’ – H.P. Lovecraft.

There upon the floor was a dark and putrid mass, seething with corruption and hideous rottenness, neither liquid nor solid, but melting and changing before our eyes, and bubbling with unctuous oily bubbles like boiling pitch. And out of the midst of it shone two burning points like eyes…

A mysterious beauty leaves a trail of suicides in her wake; an innocent child is indoctrinated into witchcraft and depravity; the bowmen of Agincourt come to the aid of the British Expeditionary Force; animals inexplicably start killing people; and a fragment of Paradise randomly manifests in a London suburb… Welcome to the weird world of Arthur Machen, a writer that H.P. Lovecraft hailed as a ‘Master of Horror.’ Machen fervently believed in a mystical and eternal reality hidden beyond the veil of ordinary existence, that could be glimpsed by those who knew how to look. Sometimes the revelation would be beautiful, sometimes terrible. Using the mediums of horror and weird fantasy, Machen set out to unlock these visions of ‘Sorcery and sanctity.’

This collection comprises the majority of Machen’s short horror fiction, including his Decadent masterpiece The Great God Pan, his tales of the malevolent ‘Little People’ still living beneath the mountains and valleys of his native Wales, and the chilling novella The Terror.

Full contents:

Strange Story of a Red Jar 

The Autophone

A Double Return

The Lost Club

The Great God Pan

The Inmost Light

The Shining Pyramid

Novel of the Black Seal

Novel of the Iron Maid

Novel of the White Powder

The Red Hand 

The White People

The Bowmen

The Soldiers’ Rest 

The Monstrance 

The Great Return 

Out of the Earth 

The Terror 

The Happy Children 

Ornaments in Jade: 

-The Rose Garden 

-The Turanians 

-The Idealist 

-Witchcraft 

-The Ceremony 

-Psychology 

-Torture 

-Midsummer 

-Nature 

-The Holy Things 

Opening the Door 

The Bright Boy 

The Children of the Pool 

The Exalted Omega 

Out of the Picture 

Change 

The Cosy Room 

N 

The Dover Road 

Ritual 

Appendix: Introduction to The Bowmen