Horror: The 100 Best Books

  26-50

  26: [1906] ARTHUR MACHEN - The House of Souls

  The House of Souls assembles most of the best of Arthur Machen’s occult, ghost and horror fiction. It reprints two-thirds of his linked collection, The Three Impostors (1895); “The Novel of the Black Seal” and “The Novel of the White Powder.” The book also includes Machen’s best-known, most widely-reprinted stories, “The White People” and “The Great God Pan”, and several other fine pieces, “A Fragment of Life”, “The Inmost Light”, and “The Red Hand”. Much of Machen’s output draws on folklore and legends, particularly the pre-Christian beliefs found in parts of his native Wales. A teacher, translator, actor, journalist, and genuine occult devotee, Machen (1863-1947) also wrote The Hill of Dreams (1907), The Angels of Mons: The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War (1915), The Terror: A Fantasy (1917), and The Children of the Pool and Other Stories (1936).

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  One of my longest-held ambitions — not a particularly lofty one, but the sort that all too easily gets put off, decade after decade, until one suddenly discovers it’s too late — is to spend a year or so motoring around the British Isles, from Penzance to John o’ Groats, stopping wherever I please. The back seat of my car would of course be filled with books: with the dozens of travel guides, highway atlases, and gazetteers of haunted houses, prehistoric sites, battlefields, and castles that I’ve been collecting all my life. But in addition to the carload of reference works, I’d want to take three volumes of memoirs and a book of supernatural tales. The memoirs are those of Arthur Machen and, together, they constitute a rambling autobiography: Far Off Things, Things Near and Far, and The London Adventure. The story book is Machen’s The House of Souls. Machen (rhymes with “blacken”) was a Welsh clergyman’s son who, as a young man, left the countryside behind and moved to London in the hope of becoming a writer, nearly starving in the attempt; later he toured with a company of Shakespearean actors, but for most of his eighty-four years he made his living as a journalist. He was born in Caerleon-on-Usk on March 3, 1863, and died in Amersham, near London, on December 15, 1947. I was privileged to share the earth with him for precisely five months. Machen is, to my mind, fantasy’s preeminent stylist. What makes his work so special is the rhythmic quality of his prose: one hears in it the short, seductive cadences of a fairy tale or the Bible. With the eye of a visionary and a language that is, for all its simplicity, at times truly incantatory, he reveals the wonder — and frequently the terror — that lies hidden behind everyday scenes. No other writer’s work so perfectly blends the two elements of Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s phrase “the ecstasy and the dread”. (Indeed, Machen’s longest foray into literary criticism, Hieroglyphics, sees the key attribute of great literature as “the master word — Ecstasy”.) Jack Sullivan has noted that in Machen’s best tales “beauty and horror ring out at exactly the same moment”, and praises Machen for “his ability to make landscapes come alive with singing prose”. Philip Van Doren Stern saw Machen’s imagery as “rich with the glowing color that is to be found in medieval church glass”. No one is better at evoking the enchantment of the Welsh hills, or the sinister allure of dark woods; no one makes London a more terrifying or magical place, a latter-day Baghdad filled with exotic dangers and infinite possibilities. Wherever he looked, he saw a world filled with mystery. Every word he wrote, from youth to old age, reflects his lifelong preoccupation with “the secret of things; the real truth that is everywhere hidden under outward appearances”. But perhaps this “secret of things” is too shocking for the human mind to accept. That, at least, is the premise of The House of Souls’ best-known story. “The Great God Pan”, in which a ruthless scientist seeks to rend the “veil” of everyday reality. (“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.”) In a laboratory set amid “the lonely hills”, he performs a delicate operation on the brain of a young girl, reawakening atavistic powers and enabling her to glimpse that real world — a process he calls “seeing the god Pan”. The result is not enlightenment but horror: the child goes mad from what she’s encountered and dies “a hopeless idiot”, but not before giving birth to a daughter, a malign being who, decades later, in the form of a seductive woman, causes an epidemic of sin and suicide in Victorian London. Today, for all its power, the tale’s decadent frissons may seem rather dated, but at the time, “Pan” outraged the more prudish English critics. Machen, who took a perverse pleasure in his bad reviews (he even collected them all in a book, Precious Balms), relished “the remark of a literary agent whom I met one day in Fleet Street. He looked at me impressively, morally, disapprovingly, and said: ‘Do you know, I was having tea with some ladies at Hampstead the other day, and their opinion seemed to be that … “The Great God Pan” should never have been written.’” Two other stories in the book, “The Novel of the Black Seal” (part of a longer work, The Three Impostors) and “The Red Hand”, can still provoke a shudder, even today. They theorize — as do later Machen tales — that the so-called “Little People” of British legend, the fairy folk, were in fact the land’s original inhabitants, a dark, squat, malevolent pre-Celtic race now driven underground by encroaching civilization, yet living on in caves beneath the “barren and savage hills” and still practising their unsavoury rites, occasionally sacrificing a young woman or some other luckless wanderer they can catch alone outdoors at night. Writers such as John Buchan have also made use of this theme, but none so chillingly. The book’s most remarkable story is “The White People”. (It was the direct inspiration, incidentally, for my own novel The Ceremonies, which quotes from it at length.) Most of it purports to be the notebook of a young girl who, introduced by her nurse to strange old rhymes and rituals, has a series of nearly indescribable mystical visions involving supernatural presences in the woods. We learn, at the end, that she has killed herself. The girl’s stream-of-consciousness style, at once hallucinatory and naive, lends a spellbinding immediacy to the narrative, and for all its confusion and repetitiveness, it remains the purest and most powerful expression of what Jack Sullivan has called the “transcendental” or “visionary” supernatural tradition. Most other tales of this sort, such as Algernon Blackwood’s “The Wendigo”, E. F. Benson’s “The Man Who Went Too Far”, and Machen’s own “Black Seal” and “Pan”, merely describe encounters with dark primeval forces inimical to man, “The White People” seems an actual product of such an encounter, an authentic pagan artifact, as different from the rest as the art of Richard Dadd is different from the art of Richard Doyle. Lovecraft, who regarded Machen as “a Titan — perhaps the greatest living author” of weird fiction, ranked “The White People” beside Blackwood’s “The Willows” as one of the best horror tales ever written. Machen, who often denigrated his own efforts, and who once wrote “I dreamed in fire, but I worked in clay”, himself termed the tale merely “a fragment” of the one he’d intended to write, “a single stone instead of a whole house”, but acknowledged that “it contains some of the most curious work that I have ever done, or ever will do. It goes, if I may say so, into very strange psychological regions”. E. F. Bleiler’s assessment strikes me as more accurate: “This document is probably the finest single supernatural story of the century, perhaps in the literature.”

  Bibliographical note: Machen had no love for technology, the modern world, or scientific logic; appropriately, his bibliography is somewhat illogical. English and American editions of various collections are at times dissimilar; two American collections entitled The Shining Pyramid have different publishers and largely different contents. Before their appearance in the 1906 House of Souls, “The Great God Pan” and its thematic sequel, “The Inmost Light” — another tale of inhuman evil, similarly fragmented in form, albeit with a huge opalescent jewel as the source of the horror — had originally been published in 1894 in a separate edit
ion. The Three Impostors, containing within it a number of loosely connected stories, had also appeared separately in 1895. It reappeared in the 1906 Souls minus one of its chapters, and, in the more commonly seen 1922 Knopf edition, it and “The Red Hand” were omitted entirely, appearing in a volume of their own. — T. E. D. KLEIN

  27: [1908] ALGERNON BLACKWOOD - John Silence, Physician Extraordinary

  This collection features a Sherlockian detective who happens also to be a medical doctor with an interest in the supernatural. His cases — in some of which he plays a relatively minor role — deal with standard ghostliness (“A Psychical Invasion”), a townful of Devil-worshipping shapeshifters (“Ancient Sorceries”), an elemental attracted to violence and blood (“The Nemesis of Fire”), Satanic rites in a secluded German monastery (“Secret Worship”), and lycanthropy in the woods (“The Camp of the Dog”). The last tale features a novel frill on the werewolf legend whereby the fiend can be identified in his human form if the observer has been smoking hashish. Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur started to adapt “Ancient Sorceries” when ordered by RKO Pictures to make a film called Cat People in 1942, but the story was largely abandoned when the team decided to make up their own werecat myth. Although J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Martin Hesselius, the linking character of In a Glass Darkly (1872), was a psychic sleuth before John Silence took up the profession, it was Blackwood’s character who set the tone for such followers as William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder, Manly Wade Wellman’s John Thunstone and Joseph Payne Brennan’s Lucius Leffing.

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  It is the penalty of true literary success that a man who has achieved it shall be seriously criticized. Mr. Blackwood’s book The Empty House, a book of ghost stories, was reviewed in these columns with a praise due to a work of the greatest merit. It was much more worthy of the term “genius” than are nineteen out of twenty of the books to which this term is applied in a decade of reviewing. It had the quality, inseparable from genius, of conviction; it had the second quality, inseparable from genius, of creation; it had the third quality, inseparable from genius, of art. It was remarked in that former review that if the English people possess one quality more than another remarkable in European letters that quality is the quality of the romantic and the mysterious; and certainly Mr. Blackwood presented the English ghost story to his readers in a way that reminded them of the triumphs of the past in this region of literature and which was yet startlingly modern in its methods and in the scientific basis upon which that method reposed. So excellent was the work that some were tempted to see in it the disguise of an older and better known hand. The present writer has heard it suggested (he discarded the suggestion) that Ambrose Bierce, the master of Bret Harte and of all the Californians, was the true author of the work. Indeed, The Empty House was so widely and justly discussed that the mere discussion was a true compliment to its powers. Mr. Blackwood has followed that book up by this volume called John Silence. It must first be described in what way John Silence differs from The Empty House. John Silence is a collection of stories dealing with the supernatural. The Empty House was a considerable series of short stories, quite a number of them. In John Silence the most important stories are lengthy; no story of this description appears in The Empty House. In The Empty House, therefore, Mr. Blackwood was attempting the easier task; the task easier to anyone who desires to be poignant, and especially to be poignant in the sphere of awe. In John Silence there is more of the underlying philosophy which has produced this marvellous talent; for, when one says that Mr. Blackwood’s work approaches genius the phrase is used in no light connection, and when one says that genius connotes conviction one is asserting something which the breakdown of modern dilettante writing amply proves. There is no doubt that the writer of these arresting and seizing fictions most profoundly believes the dogmas upon which they repose; in all there is the supposition (universal before the advent of Christian philosophy) that Evil can capture the soul of a man whether that soul be deserving or undeserving, and in all there is the presupposition that (in the words of St. Thomas) “All things save God have extension,” that spiritual essences can take on, or rather must take on, corporeal form. What has hitherto been said of this very remarkable book tells the reader little of its intimate character or of its subjects. Its subjects are a case of Possession, a case of Transmutation into another and more evil World, a case of Devil Worship, a case of an old Fire-Curse that went down the ages from Egypt and ended in an English country house, and a case of Lycanthropy. Through all of these runs the personality of a man who has given ample means and leisure to the study of occult things and who has graduated in medicine for the purpose of healing psychic disorders. But this personality, which is that of John Silence, connects rather than dominates the book; what dominates the book is its method. And that method consists in presenting human life (and animal life too, for that matter) as being a close part of one whole, and but a small part of that whole, in which vast Intelligences and vaster Wills stand towards the boundary and control everything within. It is the scheme of the Mystic, but of the Mystic absolute. It is not a mysticism in which the dual solution of Right and Wrong is afforded: it is a sort of Monist Mysticism in which, while Evil and Good are recognized, each is regarded as but one out of two poles attaching to a common substance. All this would mean very little but for the art in which all of it is involved. Mr. Blackwood’s writing is of that kind which takes the reader precisely as music takes the listener. It creates a different mood. A man in the middle of one of these stories does not leave it. If he is interrupted he takes it up again where he put it down. It dominates his thought while he is concerned with it; it remains in his mind after he has completed it. In a word, the whole work is a work of successful literary achievement in the most difficult of literary provinces. It is, as its writer must by this time know, a considerable and lasting addition to the literature of our time and let it be remembered that, tedious and paltry as the literature of our time may be, excellent writing stands in exactly the same place whether it appear among a few, and an elect few, under conditions of high taste, or in a time like ours, when everyone writes, and when most of the best of those who write are less than the worst of other and more worthy generations. — HILAIRE BELLOC

  28: [1908] G. K. CHESTERTON - The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

  After a discussion about anarchy, Lucian Gregory finally convinces his fellow poet Gabriel Syme of his seriousness by taking him to a meeting of the Central Anarchist Council. The members of the Council are named after days of the week, and Syme is persuaded to join in the place of the recently-deceased Thursday. Syme, however, is not the poet he seems to be, but a Scotland Yard man assigned to penetrate the Council. But each member of the Council has his secrets, and it gradually emerges that there are at least as many, if not more, infiltrating detectives as there are genuine Anarchists. Above all, there remains the mysterious, perhaps Satanic, perhaps Divine, secret of Sunday, the almost inhuman President of the Council. G. K. Chesterton was a prolific author whose detective stories, prophetic fantasies and humorous tales often contain bizarre, horrific or supernatural elements. He is best known for the “Father Brown” mysteries.

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  We all know some wonder-book that bowled us over in youth and miraculously seems as good or better now. For me it was Methuen’s chunky G. K. Chesterton omnibus, comprising The Napoleon of Netting Hill, The Man Wno Was Thursday and The Flying Inn. I approached this with the suspicion appropriate to Literature with the capital L, opened it at random, and found myself falling upward through a glittering realm of energy and wit. Over several years and rereadings, I came to see that for all its grotesque exuberance, The Man Who Was Thursday merits the subtitle “A Nightmare”. Chesterton walked some dark paths before attaining his colossal optimism, and Thursday’s epigraph to E. C. Bentley observes that “This is a tale of those old fears, even of those emptied hells, And none but you shall understand the true thing that it tells.” I certain
ly didn’t: the dazzle of the writing, the narrative antics of poetic police, rhetorical anarchists and farcical unmaskings, kept me skating at high speed over some very thin ice. Underneath, Thursday is a metaphysical chiller in which Chesterton, always adept at seeing wonder and comedy in everyday things, now evokes their terror as well. A staircase, a wood, a running man, a smile: each becomes an image of fear. Nihilism first appears as a caricature, but its philosophy is soon defined with horrible precision. “The innocent rank and file are disappointed because the bomb has not killed the king; but the high-priesthood are happy because it has killed somebody.” Horror and hilarity mingle in the figure of Sunday, the huge leader who makes jolly little jokes while our approaching hero Syme is “gripped with a fear that when he was quite close the face would be too big to be possible, and that he would scream aloud.” A sulphurous reek hangs over the members of the Central Anarchist Council with their weekday codenames. From the moment when the vast stones of the Embankment loom like Egyptian architecture over him, Syme in his spying role of Thursday walks all too close to hell. The hideously aged and decaying Friday pursues him with impossible speed through a London snowstorm; blank-eyed Saturday chills him with a mechanistic vision of scientism (“He was ascending the house of reason, a thing more hideous than unreason itself); in his sword-duel with Wednesday he meets a demonic opponent who refuses to bleed; eventually the whole earth rises up against his lonely spark of sanity. “The human being will soon be extinct. We are the last of mankind.” There are further unmaskings to come: Thursday is not only a nightmare but a joke, and Chesterton knew that some of the most breathtakingly effective surprises are happy ones. But when the last mask is stripped away from Sunday (a symbol so vast as to be pictured only in terms of the universe itself), the thing behind is not a joke, and nobody familiar with Chesterton’s faith will mistake it. The Man Who Was Thursday is an extraordinary metaphysical melodrama, an intellectual shocker; its chillier passages have the rare quality of growing more chilly with familiarity. Few horror novels of the raw-liver persuasion have the durability of this 1908 nightmare. — DAVID LANGFORD