Arthur Machen's Decadent, Mystical Weird Fiction

“There are sacraments of evil as well as of good about us, and we live and move to my belief in an unknown world, a place where there are caves and shadows and dwellers in twilight. It is possible that man may sometimes return on the track of evolution, and it is my belief that an awful lore is not yet dead.”

                                                                  — Arthur Machen

Arthur Machen wrote as though the world were a veil stretched thin over ancient mysteries—mysteries that, when glimpsed, could transfigure the soul or drive it to madness. His horror still stands apart from that of his contemporaries due to its deep roots in mysticism, spiritual awe, and reverence for the unseen. Unlike the shock-driven Gothic or the materialist supernaturalism of many Victorian and Edwardian writers, Machen’s narratives are built around suggestion, implication, and the rupture of spiritual reality into the mundane world. His horror is rarely explicit; instead, it manifests as a sense of spiritual trespass—a glimpse into dimensions of being that mankind was never meant to understand. This is seen in stories like The White People, where horror arises not from violence or monsters, but from a diary of strange rituals and eerie purity, rendered in the innocent voice of a child. The tone is never sensationalist; rather, it is hushed, awed, and liturgical in cadence, echoing Biblical rhythms.

Machen’s unique blend of horror also draws from his belief in the sacredness of mystery and the terror of its profanation. He was profoundly influenced by Christian mysticism, Welsh folklore, and classical notions of the numinous. Unlike Lovecraft’s cold, indifferent cosmos, Machen’s universe is morally charged: the unseen world is not merely alien, but spiritually potent—capable of blessing or blighting the human soul. He held a sacramental philosophy – one rooted in the belief that the material world is suffused with spiritual significance, capable of revealing divine truths to the attentive soul. Machen viewed the physical as a veil behind which eternal realities pulse and shimmer, suggesting that ordinary objects, landscapes, and experiences could serve as conduits to the sacred.

This worldview—a kind of mystical sacramentalism—asserts that beauty, terror, and ecstasy were not psychological anomalies but evidence of a hidden, transcendent order. For Machen, the world was a living tapestry of signs and symbols, a shadowy reflection of a higher reality. It was a philosophy which drove the distinctive tone of his fiction, where uncanny events or grotesque transformations often signal a rupture in the veil between the seen and the unseen. Rather than dismiss the supernatural as irrational, Machen embraced it as more real than modern materialism could ever allow—a radiant and terrifying reminder that the divine is never far from the mundane.

This conviction was not merely theoretical—it was rooted in Machen’s own life, which was punctuated by vivid, personal encounters with what he perceived as the hidden spiritual dimensions of reality. He often spoke of profound mystical experiences throughout his life, both in childhood and adulthood, though he stopped short of claiming overtly "supernatural" events in the traditional sense. As a child growing up in the borderlands of Monmouthshire, Wales, he reported feelings of spiritual ecstasy and awe triggered by the landscape—ancient ruins, pagan relics, wild hills, and forest paths—that gave him an overwhelming sense of the numinous, the holy terror and wonder that later defined his fiction. He referred to these as moments of ecstasy or rapture, in which the veil of ordinary perception seemed briefly lifted, and he glimpsed a reality more real than the visible world.

In adulthood, particularly during his mystical “conversion” in 1899 following the death of his first wife, Machen experienced a deeper and more painful spiritual transformation, which he chronicled symbolically in A Fragment of Life and The Hill of Dreams. Though not framed as traditional ghostly encounters, these episodes were marked by a sense of profound spiritual presence, awe, and even dread. He also believed he had once encountered a vision of a saint—possibly St. Joseph of Arimathea—while walking in a garden, and was deeply moved by moments of what he called “sacramental” perception, when the material world momentarily revealed divine mysteries. These spiritual and quasi-supernatural encounters deeply informed his worldview and writing, blending mystical Christianity, pagan awe, and a powerful conviction that another world was always just behind the veil.

His recurring theme is that of a fall from grace, or the dreadful consequences of transgressing divine or natural boundaries. In The Great God Pan or “The Novel of the White Powder,” horror unfolds as a corruption of the self, a grotesque inversion of transcendence. This spiritual decay, expressed with restraint and symbolic depth, gives Machen's horror a sacramental tone—more akin to a dark liturgy than a ghost story.

MACHEN’S MYSTICAL LITERARY LINEAGE:

EXPRESSIVE INFLUENCES FROM THE

GOLDEN LEGEND TO THE YELLOW NINETIES

Stylistically, Machen’s prose is baroque yet controlled, filled with archaisms and long, winding sentences that evoke antique gravitas and unease. He preferred revelation to explanation, creating a mood of dread that lingers rather than climaxes. This stylistic reserve—echoing Biblical scripture, medieval chronicles, and Romantic poetics—set him apart from contemporaries like M. R. James, whose horrors often center on antiquarian puzzles or revenants, and from writers like Bram Stoker, who relied on dramatic exposition. Machen’s restraint intensifies his effect: the unknown is left largely undefined, which allows the reader’s imagination to supply the terror. His horror is not about monsters, but about the violation of metaphysical order—making it not only unsettling, but spiritually disquieting.

Machen was deeply rooted in the literary and mystical traditions of Western Europe. Among his earliest and most potent influences were the works of the Romantic poets—particularly William Blake, whose visionary mysticism and spiritual rebellion resonated strongly with Machen’s own metaphysical sensibilities. The supernatural and ecstatic imagery of Blake’s poetry provided Machen with a framework for fusing horror and spirituality in a way that was neither dogmatically religious nor entirely secular.

Other Romantic influences included Wordsworth and Coleridge, whose treatment of the sublime and the supernatural helped shape Machen’s approach to landscape and inner consciousness. He also admired Edgar Allan Poe for his ability to blend psychological insight with gothic dread, though Machen’s style veered more toward awe than terror.

Equally important were Machen’s deep readings in Christian mysticism, Catholic hagiography, and pagan mythology. He was heavily influenced by medieval and Renaissance writers like Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme, whose esoteric and symbolic interpretations of the universe infused his worldview with alchemical and Gnostic overtones. The mystical ecstasies of saints such as Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross fascinated him, especially their intense, often erotically tinged visions of divine union. This synthesis of Catholic mysticism and ancient pagan belief systems—both of which emphasized ecstatic transcendence—became foundational to his narrative style and thematic concerns. His fascination with hidden knowledge, lost rituals, and ancient cults found a literary model in the Decadent and Symbolist writers of the late 19th century, especially Baudelaire, Huysmans, and the English Decadents like Oscar Wilde.

He was also influenced by earlier Gothic writers such as Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and especially Charles Maturin. Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer—with its themes of diabolic pacts, existential dread, and cosmic horror—had a profound effect on Machen’s own storytelling. He took the wandering, cursed protagonist and transformed it into a more mystical figure, one whose encounter with terror was also an encounter with the divine or the preternatural. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde also left its mark, especially in Machen’s The Great God Pan, which similarly explores the duality of human nature and the dangers of tampering with the hidden fabric of reality. However, while Stevenson’s narrative is moralistic, Machen’s is more mystical and metaphysical, emphasizing spiritual dimensions rather than merely ethical ones.

A VISIONARY WORLD OF ECSTASY AND UNEASE:

EXAMINING MACHEN’S PHILOSOPHY, CAREER, AND VOICE

Machen’s fiction is remarkable for its hypnotic voice, emphasis on rapturous horror, and apparent use of shifting dimensions, time holes, and lapses in natural order. Growing up in the hill country of southeastern Wales, he was constantly reminded of the relativity of time and space by the very geography that surrounded him. Druid artifacts, Roman fortifications, Saxon ruins, Norman churches, and medieval architecture intermingled in a landscape whose vast wildness defied human industry. Young Machen was persistently aware of the fleeting nature of civilizations, the immortality of Nature, and the smallness of the human individual. And yet, he remained obsessed with the idea of merging a solitary spirit into the profound Oversoul of the cosmos – grafting an individual soul into the nebulous tides of space and time, melding a finite identity with the vastness of eternity. It was a vision that both delighted and terrified him – what one commentator called “the ecstasy of fear” – and which would recur throughout his fiction, where the pursuit of mystic bliss can just as easily lead to spirit-shredding terror as orgasmic transcendence.

Machen’s worldview is almost exclusively unique – a potent blend of Christian mysticism and pagan pantheism – which attracted criticism from both orthodox Christians and secular atheists, but which continues to imbue his literary universe with a combination of moral authority and cosmic chaos. Although raised in an unimaginative, Protestant home, young Arthur was profoundly fascinated by the ecstasies of Catholic saints – highly erotic experiences of spiritual bliss that introduced the immensity of the universe to physical organs of life – and found himself drawn to the primitive faith of rustic, underground Catholicism. Rather than nit-picking over socially-coded moral behaviors, Machen’s spiritually-robust faith was a source of inspiration, and it enriched his imagination with mingled bliss and horror. An almost alchemical mystic, he was not dogmatic enough to discount the traditions of Celtic paganism as the hallucinations of savages, and was equally fascinated by the ancient religions whose pantheism resonated with his ecumenical spirituality.  

Machen’s first foray into horror was also his most famous, and it also provided a highly represented sample of what the remainder of his supernatural corpus would look like. Written in 1890, The Great God Pan introduced the world to his unique philosophies, his highly mystical spirituality, and his antagonism toward modern institutions. Here he illustrated the bone-deep distrust he harbored for the intelligentsia’s blind faith in Western science and the middle-class materialism of industrial capitalism, because he believed they stripped the world of its mystery, severed humanity from the spiritual realm, and reduced the soul to a machine.

The novella (which tells the story of a seductive, otherworldly woman whose birth was the result of a paranormal rape) was met with instantaneous outrage – much to his delight – turning him into an icon of the fin de siècle bohemians on par with Stevenson, Hardy, and Wilde. In the following fifteen years he would produce most of his high-quality work: The Three Imposters, The Hill of Dreams, and A Fragment of Life. In 1904 he published his supernatural masterpiece, “The White People,” which reworked elements of Pan and The Three Imposters in the narrative of a young girl’s gradual sexual initiation into an ancient cult.

For a period of ten years, Machen’s output of notable speculative fiction was dampened, but he surged back into the public imagination when “The Bowmen” was published in 1914. It was a fictional article claiming that an army of medieval ghosts had interceded on behalf of the British Expeditionary Force during their retreat at the Battle of Mons. The story gained fanatical, “true-believer” supporters who accused him of participating in a government conspiracy to fictionalize the truth, and – while he continues to remembered today primarily because of “The Bowmen” – it rapidly became a thorn in his side – a fact bitterly alluded to in “Out of the Earth.”

During the early years of the war, Machen created a handful of sentimental ghost stories which highlighted the Germans’ scientific hubris and misanthropic militarism (“The Soldier’s Rest,” “The Monstrance”), but after the ghastly Battle of the Somme (with its 650,000 Allied casualties), his patriotic zeal shriveled into humanitarian disgust. His remaining works of note were either prayerful fantasies like “The Great Return” (which imagines the recovery of the Holy Grail and the mystical “restoration of all things”) and apocalyptic nightmares like The Terror (a haunting tale of animals turning on humanity which influenced “The Birds”). In his final two decades of life, he largely languished in obscurity, although his pupils – like Lovecraft, Aleister Croweley, and Paul Bowes – fought and clawed to restore the reputation of a man they considered a genius of the first water.

WEAVING AN UNASSUMING WEB OF SEDUCTIVE TERRORS:

ANALYZING MACHEN’S QUIET BRAND OF COSMIC DREAD

Unlike Lovecraft – secular, cynical, and confidently so – Machen was a quiet, spiritual seeker, and even his most disturbing tales can be characterized as gentle searches for the unseen spiritual reality he believed could be glimpsed through Nature. Where Lovecraft would burst into a scene with barrels blazing (sometimes literally – with subtitles like “Six Shots by Midnight”), Machen was far more akin to Algernon Blackwood – whose own rugged pantheism mirrored Machen’s homespun mysticism – in that his stories were not driven by action and drama as much as by the slow, steady build-up of tension – beautifully executed without ever raising the volume. M. R. James, Oliver Onions, and Robert W. Chambers were also known for their extreme self-control, but no one had more restraint than Machen.

His understated stories of implication and unease have certainly disappointed many Stephen King fans who had heard that King considered him a major influence. Unlike King – who both defined and excelled at gory “gross-out” spectacles – Machen’s terror is more rapturous, more erotic, and more enticing. While we are utterly repulsed by the rotting crone in Room 217 (237 for Kubrick fans), we are hypnotically drawn to “The White People”’s surreal playland.

And herein lies its power: we almost want to experience his terrors, we are somehow drawn to them. Unlike Lovecraft (although somewhat like Poe), Machen presents the alluring beauty of the Outer Powers – rivers the look and taste like sweet, yellow wine; waters that encase your feet like warm silk; landscapes made of rich colors that the eye has never before seen. But it is no Wonderland that he has invited you to, merely the diamond-like glitter of a spider’s web dripping in dew; the soothing numbness of poison rushing to your heart; the orgasmic warmth of lungs starving for oxygen.

Lovecraft found this to be Machen’s most agreeable trait – his ability to beautifully and melodically unpack a tale of terror. Writing on “Pan” Lovecraft remarked:

“the charm of the tale is in the telling. No one could begin to describe the cumulative suspense and ultimate horror with which every paragraph abounds without following fully the precise order in which Mr. Machen unfolds his gradual hints and revelations.”

However, for all of the beauty that he was capable of suggesting, Machen’s oeuvre does not fail to deliver shudders. Like Blackwood, he was a true believer in the message that he was describing: he saw mankind’s spirituality as a genuine gate to a world of unfelt experiences, and – again like Blackwood, whose tales bristle with spiritual bliss just before the characters are sent plunging into unknown terrors – he understood that touching the face of the Outer Powers would inspire rapture along with fear.

But the rapture of Machen’s fiction does little to take the edge off for the attentive reader – quite the opposite, it lulls them into a false security which makes the climactic reveal all the more disturbing and unsettling. He wrote from a combination of intuition and experience, and his stories glow with genuine passion. They are also haunted by genuine villains and inspired by genuine fears – stalked by the same adversaries whom he saw draining the life out of his beloved Wales as slowly and steadily as any vampire. But Machen’s antagonists were all too human.

THE SACRED RESISTANCE:

REVOLTING AGAINST THE DEHUMANIZATION OF MATERIAL MODERNITY

Throughout his literary career Machen was primarily antagonized by two forces: the hubris and intellectual elitism of the scientific establishment and the forces of industrial capitalism. He credited both with a severe destabilization of British communities – and in many respects he was correct. He was born some eighty years after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but in the remote hills of southeastern Wales the destabilizing impact of urban flight to the factory towns – Cardiff, Swansea, Bristol, Newport, etc. – was delayed by perhaps half a century.

By the time Machen sat down to write “The White People” – wherein a girl is sucked into a witch cult under the nose of her materialistic father – the forces of industrialization had been bloodletting Welsh villages for the better part of fifty years, but its social and anthropological effects were still yet to be felt. In some ways the full force of industrialization – the breaking apart of communities and loss of folk history – wasn’t felt until the 1920s. Machen, who oversaw the slow depletion of his community’s population, culture, and economy, was disgusted by the impact that English captains of industry in West London suburbs were having on the rural villages and historic cultures of rural Wales.

Elitists – be they intellectual or socio-economic – would forever raise Machen’s ire. He viewed capitalism, industrialism, and materialism as profoundly destabilizing forces that undermined folk culture and values, dimming the traditions that close communities (be they the hill country of Wales, the rice paddies of Vietnam, or the hollers of Appalachia) had passed on for generations. As the middle classes continually divorced themselves from communities, traditions, religions, folklore, and history – turning to the democratization of science and capitalism which permitted a man to do as he damn-well pleased – he foresaw the perils of a world off the leash.

The greed and materialism that motivated 19^th century industrialists also led them – and British culture writ large – to patronize rural communities as backwards, simple-minded, and unsophisticated. As the 20^th century dawned and the Edwardian Era – marked by clubbable glamour and panache – moved the country even further towards fashionable cosmopolitanism, there were few things as out of style and unattractive than the family life of a Welsh backwater hamlet.

Machen blamed this increase in materialism for the Great War (once he himself had fatigued of patriot zeal, circa 1916), and featured it as a leading force of disunity, hubris, and spiritual deadness in his wartime horror fiction, like The Terror and “Out of the Earth.” The conclusion of The Terror traces the violent uprising of animal life against humanity to mankind’s abdication of its spiritual birthright – its interest in things higher in worth than money, empire, or materialism. He elaborates:

“‘Spiritual’ does not mean respectable, it does not even mean moral, it does not mean ‘good’ in the ordinary acceptation of the word. It signifies the royal prerogative of man, differentiating him from the beasts. For long ages he has been putting off this royal robe, he has been wiping the balm of consecration from his own breast. He has declared again and again that he is not spiritual, but rational; that is, the equal of the beasts over whom he was once sovereign. He has vowed that he is not Orpheus, but Caliban. But the beasts also have within them something which corresponds to the spiritual quality in men; we are content to call it instinct. They perceived that the throne was vacant; not even friendship was possible between them and the self-deposed monarch. If he was not king, he was a sham, an impostor, a thing to be destroyed.”

Demoralized and disappointed by the intoxicating power of industrial consumerism, he chastised mankind for being too concerned with possessions and greed while the world went to hell in a hand basket. But not all was helplessness and dismay: it was in the midst of these despairs that Machen put pen to paper in an almost therapeutic bid to imagine the possibilities of a culture that focused on spiritual ecstasies over material smugness.

In a supernatural work that is far more hypnotic than horrifying – A Fragment of Life – a young couple reject the lure of consumerism by retreating into the country where they live a transcendental life of rapturous mysticism: Thoreau meets Hesse by way of Borges. In The Secret Glory he describes the adventures of a young boy whose obsession with the Holy Grail leads him to run away from his suppressive boarding school in search of spiritual expression and bliss: The Giver meets Spirited Away by way of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. In the wartime fable “The Great Return,” the Grail supernaturally returns to Wales where it brings healing, peace, and restoration to war-weary citizens once consumed by petty quarrels, greed, and sickness. The closest thing Britons could find to the Grail, Machen believed, was to stop buying the lies of a consumerist culture that valued profits over lives and status over souls.

SCIENCE WITHOUT A SOUL:

ABUSES OF POWER BY A DESENSITIZED INTELLECTUAL ELITE

Machen’s second great antagonist was the Western, academic establishment. Machen was by no means anti-science, anti-intellectual, or anti-education. What he did oppose, however, was the cultural arrogance that he inferred in the condescending attitudes that intellectual elites wielded over the same rural communities that were being leeched dry by the Industrial Revolution. The same chauvinistic arrogance that inspired the White Man’s Burden was also critical of and demeaning to homegrown rustics. The academic elites viewed folk culture with the same spite that they held for the traditions, superstitions, and lore of their African colonies.

It was, as Machen saw it, an intolerant attitude of superiority that privileged the upper classes, the suburbs, and the elite colleges (not to mention white men, and white men of a very particular background). Science and education became a sort of litmus test that could be used to keep unwanted castes out, and Arthur Machen – whose almost feminine search for spiritual rapture – certainly did not fit into their club. Spirituality, religion, intuition, emotion, sensuality, premonition, expressiveness, and awe were traits that the intellectual establishment reviled as womanly, backwards, and uncivilized. Any true “chap’s chap” knew that faith was for old women, spirituality for the feeble minded, and emotion for uncouth rustics. Since Machen was drawn to the spiritual side of life, he was quickly written off by his intellectual peers – writers, journalists, scientists, and critics – as a confused relic of rural manhood.

Arrogant “good-old-boy” scientists and their violations of moral leadership are prominent themes in Machen’s work. The most obvious is the meta-physicist in The Great God Pan who uses his lower-class, female ward as a human guinea pig in an experiment to contact the “other side.” When the test results in her lunacy, rape, pregnancy, and death he writes it off as acceptable collateral damage in the war for scientific progress – an understandable oopsy-daisy. Such scientists are also instigators of human misery – for the sake of “knowing” – in “The Inmost Light” (this time the victim of a reckless experiment is the academic’s own wife), “The Black Seal” (a scholar takes in a mutant boy as a scientific curiosity before disappearing in search of more knowledge), “The White Powder” (here it is a careless pharmacist), and “The Shining Pyramid” (an anthropologist watches a human sacrifice with remote interest).

Machen resented the hubris, privilege, and elitism of scientists on a personal level, but in a broader sense – as illustrated by his stories – he feared their recklessness, ambition, and deep sense of entitlement. While we today may see the ignorance and arrogance of the common lay people to be far more frightening than the hubris of scientists (whom we valorize and look up to as the only benevolent authority figures left in the postmodern age), Machen was eventually proven tragically right. Chemical warfare, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb, World War Two, the Rape of Nanking, eugenics, and Social Darwinism were all made possible by the arguments of the scientific community, who endorsed the scientific superiority of races, encouraged the cleaning-up of the global gene pool, and began the arms race to nuclear war before Hitler had even invaded Poland. In spite of all his misgivings, it should be noted, science genuinely fascinated Machen and he was receptive to the cause of human progress – done the right way with the right kind of power balance.

His love-hate relationship with secular academia was no more fraught than his dubious rapport with orthodox religion: in both cases he rejected prideful attitudes and sought to embrace the mystery of life – to be okay with “not knowing.” Critic Damien G. Walter remarked on this issue in an article for “The Guardian”:

“The qualities which made Machen's work important are the same that have driven the tradition of weird fiction. From his early story The Great God Pan, through his acclaimed masterpiece The Hill of Dreams to his later work on The Secret Glory, Machen remained determined to take readers into worlds of mysticism and the supernatural. In a society gripped by Christian zeal, he drew on pagan and occult ideology to energise his writing. At a time when scientific rationalism was coming fully to the fore, Machen and other writers of weird fiction continued to argue for the mystical experience as an important tool for understanding the modern world. It is an argument which is still being made today.”

FAIRIES, FREAKS, AND THE FALL OF MAN:

MORAL CHAOS AND METAPHYSICAL TRANSMUTATIONS

Throughout his career, Machen found great horror in blurred boundaries, and nearly all of his horror stories involve a monstrosity, mutation, or outrage that fails to tidily comply with scientific or spiritual definitions of being: the chaos of disorder. Like Robert Louis Stevenson, he was obsessed with the concept of vestigial evil – a sort of atavistic will-to-wickedness that clung to the back of men’s brains like a hungry parasite in spite of all our science, manners, and political correctness. He – like so many of his peers in the Late Victorian Era – was fascinated by the implications of Darwin and the possibilities suggested by human evolution. Most if not all of his supernatural fiction explores the idea of mankind’s ability to transmute – to shift in its spiritual or physical identity, going either higher (into heights of spiritual rapture) or lower (into depths of carnal brutalization).

The infamous “Little People” – a wicked race of soulless troglodytes who feature in some half-a-dozen of Machen’s tales – are what he uses to illustrate the possible degeneration of humanity: this, he says, is what we could become. These, he suggests, are the real-world fairies who have inspired legends of sinister shorties lurking in subterranean nests when they aren’t prowling country lanes for victims to kidnap. This is, of course, entirely unlike the sanitized version of fairies we are familiar with today: the gossamer sprites and elegant pixies handed down to us by his Victorian contemporaries. Originally, of course, as Machen demonstrates in stories like “The Shining Pyramid,” “The Red Hand,” and “The Black Seal,” the fairy folk were sinister – almost demonic – tricksters who switched out babies with changelings, kidnap young children, put curses and spells on humans they dislike, lecherously kidnap or seduce maidens, and hypnotize innocent people (the famous “come hither”) into spending eternity dancing and cavorting in their endless, subterranean orgies. In “Out of the Depths,” more so than any other tale, he makes it clear that the troglodytes do harbor the infectious ability to corrupt. Their presence alone – which is implied to have a paranormal or interdimensional nature – spreads a contagion of paranoia, fear, and misbehavior.

In “The Inmost Light” – a riff on Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” – he depicts a woman whose soul has been absorbed from her body into a crystal, leaving a leering, abhuman, Mrs. Hyde in her stead. The divorce of spirit and flesh had been conducted, but the spirit was powerless to act without the materiality of the body, and the body was an animalistic abomination without its spirit. As much as Machen wished to plunge into the intoxicating bliss of the spirit, he was all too aware of the necessary relationship between the physical and the psychical, and he knitted this philosophy into so many of his stories. Nearly all of them involve corruption, destabilization, or mutation of the human spirit.

The subtitle of The Three Imposters – “Or, the Transmutations” – is a tiny thesis statement of Machen’s speculative corpus: it nearly always concerns the concept of transmuting – changing shape or nature – an act that (in “The White People”) one of his characters would claim to be the ultimate definition of sin: the rejection of Nature, the violation of the cosmic laws that prevent chaos from turning us topsy-turvy.

The transmutation of order into chaos became the primary theme of Machen’s Gothic fiction. Normalcy is warped into turmoil. Nature is bedeviled by freaks. Natural development is overwritten by mutations. Boundaries are blurred, warped, trampled, and discarded. What is human in one moment is something else in the next. Machen was both something of a conservative and something of a radical – a man of moderation, restraint, and balance. He wasn’t bound to traditions, he defied bourgeois expectations, and he was nothing if not enamored with “la vie bohème,” but he valued the gentle balance that bohemians and the bourgeoisie gave to one another’s lives, and though he wasn’t a hard-nosed traditionalist, the destructiveness of anarchy was never lost on him. 

In some way or other, all of Machen’s villains (and his victims) are undone by a transmutation of their essential nature. And they are not the puritanical ravings of a dogmatic zealot: Machen was writing to himself more than anyone – reminding himself that his desire to break free of his physical limitations could only end in disappointment. It is perhaps advice that he did not heed: when he died in 1947 he was disillusioned, wistful, and hopelessly nostalgic for the powerful feelings of spiritual ecstasy that had inspired him during his youth.

ARTHUR MACHEN’S ONGOING LITERARY LEGACY

Machen’s own influence on future generations of writers was considerable, especially in the field of weird fiction and supernatural horror. H. P. Lovecraft openly acknowledged him as one of his greatest literary idols, praising The White People and The Great God Pan as masterpieces of cosmic horror. Lovecraft adopted his themes of forbidden knowledge, unseen worlds coexisting with ours, and the fragility of human perception. While Lovecraft stripped these elements of their spiritual or mystical context, he inherited his dread of what lies beyond the veil of the material world. Machen’s evocation of ancient evils lurking beneath modern civilization directly inspired the Lovecraftian mythos of elder gods and alien intelligences.

In Britain, Machen’s influence can be traced through writers like Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, and later, John Cowper Powys and Walter de la Mare. M. R. James admired his ability to suggest horror obliquely, through implication and atmosphere rather than direct confrontation. De la Mare and Powys shared his interest in mysticism, altered states of consciousness, and the overlapping of the natural with the supernatural. Even T. S. Eliot, though not a writer of fiction, echoed his vision of spiritual desolation in the modern world in his poems, particularly The Waste Land. Similarly, Machen’s impact extended beyond horror and into literary modernism, where his resistance to industrial rationalism and his embrace of myth prefigured elements of mythopoeic fiction.

Later 20th-century and contemporary writers have continued to draw from Machen’s rich blend of horror, mysticism, and symbol. Stephen King has cited him as an influence, particularly admiring his ability to evoke primal dread. Clive Barker, in blending body horror with spiritual and metaphysical concerns, follows a path not unlike Machen’s. Alan Moore, the graphic novelist known for From Hell and Providence, has woven his ideas and even his persona into his fiction, recognizing him as a key predecessor in the tradition of occult storytelling. The British horror writer Ramsey Campbell, too, acknowledges his foundational role in shaping British weird fiction, praising his depth, ambiguity, and aesthetic power.

In sum, Arthur Machen was both a literary synthesist and an innovator. Drawing from Romanticism, Christian mysticism, Decadence, and Gothic horror, he crafted a unique voice that prized wonder, fear, and transcendence in equal measure. In turn, he profoundly shaped the course of supernatural fiction in the 20th century, inspiring not only horror writers but also literary figures intrigued by the boundaries of perception and the presence of the numinous in everyday life. His legacy lies in the countless writers who continue to mine the eerie interstices between the seen and unseen, the material and the spiritual, the individual and the eternal.

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This humble volume presents the very best of Arthur Machen’s weird tales and fantasy. These are stories which investigate themes studied by Poe and Stevenson: corruption of innocence, the power of the will, social hypocrisy, vestigial evil, and hidden sin. Heavily influenced by those writers and by his mystical blend of Celtic Paganism and gnostic Christianity, Machen’s stories plumb the dark unconscious of humanity, seeking and discovering subterranean monstrosities.

The tales here include stories of murderous Pagan cults, dark eldritch gods, human sacrifices, witches’ Sabbaths, crossbreeding between humans and evil deities, unevolved races of brutal troglodytes, demonic possession, putrefying zombies, animals declaring war on all humanity, ghostly wartime visions, murder mysteries, and occult detectives. Machen’s works study the Platonic duality of human nature – the good and the evil, the flesh and the spirit – and beckon us to peer behind the veil of daily life at the horrible reality we rarely stop to notice.

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