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    The Great God Pan
    The Great God Pan
    The Great God Pan
    Ebook89 pages1 hour

    The Great God Pan

    By Arthur Machen

    3.5/5

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    Condemned by the media when it was first published, The Great God Pan is a mesmerisingly dark novella by Arthur Manchen, often regarded as one of the best horror stories ever written.

    The book begins with Dr. Raymond and his attempts to perform a highly dangerous experiment on a young woman named Mary so that she may make a connection to the spiritual world. His friend Clarke witnesses the horrifying brain surgery from which Mary awakes in awe, claiming to have been in the presence of the great god Pan. But Mary quickly deteriorates, and what follows are many strange, and often deathly, events.

    The Great God Pan was first published in 1894 and was condemned for its sexual content and horrifying imagery. Machen’s enduring reputation as one of the greatest writers of fantastical horror has influenced the likes of Bram Stoker and H.P. Lovecraft, as well as contemporary horror writer, Stephen King.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFantasy and Horror Classics
    Release dateNov 22, 2018
    ISBN9781528785365
    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

    242 ratings14 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Strange, influential story. You would need to be focused to read this to not miss anything. Stephen King called it as one of the greatest horror stories in English. Has some sexual scenes that must have been very surprising to readers back when this book came out in 1890. I liked it.
    • 3/5
      On the positive, the work set a nice gothic tone at the outset and created an interesting story line. Lots of potential.

      Unfortunately, unnecessary characters ultimately made the narrative a bit confusing and the ending was very unsatisfying, e.g., simplistic and unimaginative.
    • 5/5
      An exceptional, suspenseful story that prickles the imagination. Beyond its time, certainly, but a classic horror nonetheless.
    • 3/5
      A short novella, easily read in an hour or two. The story was based on an interesting idea, but I found the presentation too disjointed for my liking. The book is presented as a series of events. All are connected, but we don't know exactly how until the very end of the book. Most of the "atrocities" in the book take place out of our sight, so the reader is left to use his imagination for the most part. First published in the 1890's, the books writing style definitely shows it's age. I don't think it holds up as well as some others in the genre.
    • 4/5
      Somewhat disjointed, but ultimately satisfying tale of the trespasses of science into the supernatural. Seems to be a bit of a theme with Machen, after reading Novel of the White Powder and this; the blending or imposition of the medical, scientific, rational worldview, and the the occult, mythological, spiritual system of belief upon one another. An author I will need to catch up more with in the future.
    • 3/5
      This novella was written in 1894 and is included in NPR best 100 Horror Novels and Stories. This story has a doctor who believes he has the right to mess with a young girl that he is taken in and therefore her life is his. A picture of the paternalism of the medical field in this period of time when men were the dominate members of physicians. The doctor does some kind of surgical procedure and Mary is able to see into the world beyond our reality. She has an encounter with what is considered the God Pan, a Roman god. A satyr, Satan. Mary's life is destroyed but not only her life but her child and many other men are destroyed because this physician felt he had the right to do this experiment on this young woman.

      It is a bit disjointed and somewhat hard to follow. There are characters that are briefly introduced and I am not so sure they really needed to be. Over all, I can understand why this was included in NPRs list of 100 best horror novels and stories. This one is a novella.
    • 1/5
      So disappointing. I don't understand Machen's revered reputation. All his stories follow this same general pattern: 1) man makes aquaintence of another 2) 2nd guy is doing some sort of research but won't say what 3) 2nd man wanders off 4) 1st man finds notes telling of mysterious people 2nd is out to find 5) 2nd man goes missing and story ends. So essentially nothing happens, no answer is offered, and you realize you wasted your time reading a bunch of empty baloney.
    • 2/5
      Stephen King has said that this is a horror story that has haunted him all his life. The influence on his novels and others (including H. P. Lovecraft) is undeniable, but despite all the apologists, it is hard to see this story as anything other than an expression of fear and othering of women, especially women who assert their independence. There are two female characters, neither of which gets to speak for herself. One is a meek victim who is violated without much sense of guilt or remorse; consider these words by the doctor who performs brain surgery on her without her consent, causing her to literally lose her mind: "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."

      The other woman never actually appears on the page, but is only talked about. She victimizes men, with their consent, at least at first. She also terrifies every man in the piece, but she didn't particularly terrify me. Helen is a woman of independent means, who does what she wants when she wants, who indulges her own pleasures, and who cannot be controlled; therefore, she must be destroyed.

      I often find that these Pan-inspired stories are seething with misogyny. Compare with Harvest Home.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.

    • 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

    1.png

    THE GREAT GOD PAN

    By

    ARTHUR MACHEN

    This edition published by Read Books Ltd.

    Copyright © 2018 Read Books Ltd.

    This book is copyright and may not be

    reproduced or copied in any way without

    the express permission of the publisher in writing

    British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

    A catalogue record for this book is available

    from the British Library

    Contents

    ARTHUR MACHEN

    THE EXPERIMENT

    MR. CLARKE'S MEMOIRS

    THE CITY OF RESURRECTIONS

    THE DISCOVERY IN PAUL STREET

    THE LETTER OF ADVICE

    THE SUICIDES

    THE ENCOUNTER IN SOHO

    THE FRAGMENTS

    ARTHUR MACHEN

    Arthur Machen was born in Caerleon, Monmouthshire, Wales in 1863. At the age of eleven, he boarded at Hereford Cathedral School, where he received a comprehensive classical education. Family poverty ruled out going to university, and Machen was sent to London, where he sat entrance exams at medical school but failed to get in. In the capital, he lived in relative poverty, working in a variety of short-lived jobs and exploring the city during the evenings. However, he began to show literary promise; in 1881, at the age of just eighteen, he published a long poem, 'Eleusinia', and in 1884, he published his second work, the pastiche The Anatomy of Tobacco.

    By 1890, Machen was publishing in literary magazines, and writing stories with Gothic and fantastic themes. His first major success came in 1894, with the novella The Great God Pan. Although widely denounced by the press as degenerate and horrific because of its decadent style and sexual content, it has since garnered a reputation as a classic of horror; indeed, author Stephen King has called it maybe the best [horror story] in the English language. Machen next produced The Three Impostors (1895), a novel composed of a number of interwoven tales which are now regarded as some of his best works.

    Between 1900 and 1910, Machen dabbled in acting, and published what is generally seen as his magnum opus, The Hill of Dreams (1907). He accepted a full-time journalist's job at Alfred Harmsworth's Evening News in 1910, where he remained throughout the war, not leaving until 1921. Machen accepted this role mainly to pay his bills – fiction-writing was his true passion, and he carried on producing novels and short stories throughout the 1910s – but he came to be regarded as a great Fleet Street character by his contemporaries.

    The early 1920s saw something of a Machen boom; his works became popular in America, and he brought out his two-volume autobiography. However, by 1929 he was struggling financially again, and left London with his family. It was only a literary appeal launched on the occasion of his eightieth birthday – which drew contributions from admirers such as T. S. Eliot and Bernard Shaw – that eventually ended Machen's money woes. He died some years later in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England, aged 84. His legacy remains formidable; his work has influenced countless other artists, and is seen as setting the stage for – amongst other things – the Cthulhu horrors of H. P. Lovecraft.

    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 hills. 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 whatsoever, I give you my word. You are 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 orchard, 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 this all 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

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