Arthur Machen

[Michael]

If Machen's work is a dinner, then "The Terror" is the steamed vegetables. Not bad, actually lot of good there, but as you said James, flat.

It had the potential to be another Machen classic, particularly with the besieged family sections. It just got bogged down in the details, and lost out on greatness for it.

I'm going to read The Hill of Dreams next. This is more like it.

[Michael]

The Hill of Dreams is dessert.

[Druidic]

Actually, I like The Terror. I don't think the book "lacks focus" so much as we forget it's in large part a mystery novel.
You tell the Pioneer from the arrows in his back.
Machen did it first but after Du Maurier's short story was filmed the plot was pretty widely known and...the element of suspense in Machen's novel was decimated. .

I grew to like it by the end, but the first half is told in a very distant manner which I found a chore to get through. Things pick up considerably later on though, and the image of the cloud of glowing moths was quite unsettling.

BBC Radio 4 - Arthur in the Underworld

[Sand]

Tartarus Press have announced the publication of The Library of the Lost by Roger Dobson, a collection of literary essays including four on the writings of Arthur Machen. Roger was one of the foremost Machen scholars of his time, and here explores aspects of The Hill of Dreams, The Three Impostors, The Great God Pan, Machen's London and his links with Wilde. The book also covers Montague Summers, W B Yeats, M P Shiel, John Gawsworth, and a host of other colourful literary characters.

[Sand]

News of an edition of The London Adventure from Mark Simmonds, an author and designer who runs Alma Matters, “a micro-press publishing books on quotidian magic”. He describes Machen's book as “a veiled treatise on reading the urban landscape and uncanny customs of the modern world.” He published the book as a homage to Machen, whose work he discovered when he was writing a book of wanderings around Arnhem, where he was studying typography.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

Found it kind of funny how in "Novel Of The White Powder" the chemist starts getting carried away and describes windswept bare hills in the letter, when everything else he writes is getting across his understanding of the history.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

SPOILER ALERT!

Why does the protagonist of "The Bright Boy" hate the mother just from secretly listening to her before he flees? At that point her crimes had not yet been revealed.