Arthur Machen

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

I finished Tales Of Horror And The Supernatural today. Sorry to say I found most of it hard work, sometimes painfully so. This might be partly due to hearing a few people say it's one of the best collections ever released. I alternated between bored and fascinated so often I wasn't quite sure how I felt about most of the stories overall.
But every story had something I really liked in it (apart from "The Bowmen" but that's too short to complain much).

I love the obvious ones like "Great God Pan" and "The White People". The latter seems remarkably fresh to me, because apart from the framing parts, the motions don't feel familiar to that era of supernatural fiction.

"Shining Pyramid" and "The Children Of The Pool" have very fine chilling moments even though they weren't favourites.

"The Great Return" was my least favourite by a long way, but some of the visions were interesting.

"The Terror" had a lot of ups and downs for me but on the whole it does get more interesting as it progresses. The thing about the chimney was a great idea (oddly Tanith Lee in Horror: Another 100 Best Books says that this is the best story of the collection).

If I have a general complaint, it's the long conversations and long-windedness of the accounts. There's definitely lots of interesting ideas, musings and digressions within them but it still seemed to me a major flaw that dragged down the stories (I know plenty will vehemently disagree with that).

But the thing that I enjoyed most of the time was Machen's talent for settings and visions. So many beautiful countryside and village descriptions, especially in "The White People", "The Terror" and "The Shining Pyramid". Settings are very important to me so I don't consider this small praise.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

There's a goodreads review claiming The Green Round as Machen's weakest piece but also insisting that it contains his most terrifying scene. That's frustrating because I don't think I want to be that completist with his fiction.

Anyone read much of his poetry?

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

I'd imagine there was a planned second Machen collection by Penguin that would have had "Great God Pan".

[Michael]

Now I'm rereading The White People after your post James. That's my weekend.

What is opinion here of The Green Round? I cannot find a copy for cheap and am unsure if it is worth the price whilst I am so poor. Online opinions on it are scarce, although bizarrely I found a recommendation from Stewart Lee, whose stand up I enjoy a great deal.

My Machen obsession has returned again in full force. Tonight I read The Red Hand for the umpteenth time, which features interesting use of symbolism and landscape as dreamscape. I think I should reread The Terror. I overall liked it last time, despite its longueurs, but now I'm a true obsessive fan I may be more forgiving of its rough edges, as I am with Hodgson's work.

[Doctor Dugald Eldritch]

Quote Originally Posted by James Sucellus

What is opinion here of The Green Round? I cannot find a copy for cheap and am unsure if it is worth the price whilst I am so poor.

I think it was sometime last year that I read The Green Round in the library, so my memory of the book may not do justice to it. It returns to the fey themes of his earlier work, yet is inferior to them and not entirely worthy of being ranked alongside them. I am sure there was a moment or two, and is of interest to those wishing to explore Machen's state of mind around the time it was written (1930s); but generally it is a slight novel. It does, however, feature one of my favourite Machenesque tropes: that of the solitary quester of esoteric lore, at odds with the mundane world around him, who scribbles down his musings in his notebook. Alas! the poor notebook is torn to shreds by an unknown, poltergeist-like force.

Hmm. No hurry then, as it sounds like it's around the same quality as his other later horror tales.

I am enjoying The Terror a lot more this time around as I'm taking it slowly in small chunks. It is quite a cleverly constructed tale in how its narrative is itself a commentary on journalism, whilst also being a device to add verisimilitude. It would have been a very frightening thing to read in the paper in its original form.

[Ibrahim]

After putting it off for ages, i've finally read The Terror, and it was much better than i had expected. I once started out reading at the end (don't ask), where of course the dénouement is, and although Machen's central argument carries some weight for me, it spoiled wanting to find out how the story gets there.
But the landscape descriptions are vivid, and Machen has, much like G. K. Chesterton, a knack for describing the uncommon as normal & vice versa.

[R.P.Dwyer]

The London Adventure or The Art of Wandering
by Arthur Machen

My review:
What motivated me to read this book was high ratings for this book from two goodreads friends. This book was published in 1924 and is out of print. I went to the Newberry Library in Chicago and read this book in one sitting. The Newberry Library is a private, non-circulating library which contains older works, some of which are hundreds of years old.

Based on reviews, I expected an auto-biography, and based on the book's title I expected a telling of Arthur Machen's experience in London. The former is true but the latter isn't.

If I were to describe this book, I'll put it this way: Arthur Machen wrote an autobiography comprising of humorous incidents in his life. Coming from a maestro of supernatural horror, this was wonderfully unexpected!

Machen anticipated post modernism, and I can see how Machen influenced Borges. In _The London Adventure_, we have "writing about writing. " Machen wrote: "But here we are, still delaying over the great work, "The London Adventure"; and nothing done. I begin to reflect on the matter very seriously, as the summer wears on.."

Machen, in _The London Adventure_, reprints and comments on a negative review of one of his previous books.

Machen also gives extracts from his notebook of unrealized story ideas. Though these story ideas are not Kilgore Trout bad, I can see why Machen never developed them into a story.

Machen recounts a conversation:

"He was a very odd man from what they say," said the brass founder. "So was his cousin. He confuted Darwin."
"Really!" I interjected. "Surely not."
"Oh, yes he did," confirmed the dealer in aluminum. "He proved that Darwin was all wrong by the Hebrew Alphabet--and by the stars."

The prose style is musical. The prose has rhythm and sometimes a sentence is repeated, like the refrain in a song.

I'll close my review with a quote from the book:

"Strangeness which is the essence of beauty is the essence of truth, and the essence of the world. I have often felt that; when the ascent of a long hill brought me to the summit of an undiscovered height in London; and I looked down on a new land."

I enjoyed this. M. P. Shiel on Machen:

http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/remachen.htm

Shiel's tale Phorpor struck me as hitting heights of Machenesque anti-materialist beauty. Machen singled out his collection Shapes in the Fire for rightful praise.