The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories

Arthur Machen is a significant figure in supernatural literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His work, which mixes Gothic horror with fin-de-siècle mysticism, has influenced writers and film-makers (notably H. P. Lovecraft, Jorge Luis Borges, Stephen King, and Alan Moore). From the beginning of his literary career, Machen espoused a mystical belief that the humdrum ordinary world hid a more mysterious and strange world beyond. His gothic and decadent works of the 1890s concluded that the lifting of this veil could lead to madness, sex, or death, and usually a combination of all three. Machen's later works became somewhat less obviously full of gothic trappings, but for him investigations into mysteries invariably resulted in life-changing transformation and sacrifice. Aaron Worth is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at Boston University, having previously taught courses in English and American literature at Brandeis University. His book Imperial Media: Colonial and Information Systems in the British Literary Imagination, 1857-1918 was published by Ohio State UP in 2014 (reviewed in TLS and widely in scholarly journals; paperback edition in 2016). He has published essays on Victorian literature and culture in leading journals including Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Victorian Poetry, as well as original horror fiction in magazines including Cemetery Dance and Aliterate. Worth is the author of the entry on Horror Fiction in the recent Blackwell's Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature (2015).

Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Arthur Machen
The Lost Club
The Great God Pan
The Inmost Light
The Three Impostors
The Red Hand
The Shining Pyramid
The Turanians
The Idealist
Witchcraft
The Ceremony
Psychology
Midsummer
The White People
The Bowmen
The Monstrance
N
The Tree of Life
Change
Ritual
Explanatory Notes