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Post by dem bones on Sept 19, 2009 18:04:46 GMT
Dennis Wheatley (ed.) - A Century Of Horror (Hutchinson, 1935) Thanks to Richard Humphreys for allowing us to reproduce his cover scan. Introduction - Dennis Wheatley
Algernon Blackwood - Ancient Sorceries H. T. W. Bousfield - The Unknown Island Margaret Irwin - The Earlier Service Guy Endore - Lazarus Returns L. A. G. Strong - Breakdown Evelyn Waugh - The Man Who Liked Dickens Mrs. Oliphant - The Open Door Augustus Muir - The Reptile Saki - The Music On The Hill F. Tennyson Jesse - The Canary Arthur Machen - The Great God Pan H. G. Wells - The Red Room R. H. Barham - The Leech Of Folkestone Ex Private X (A. M. Burrage) - Smee Ex Private X (A. M. Burrage) - One Who Saw Francis Isles - Dark Journey E. W. Hornung - The Fate Of Faustina Martin Armstrong - The Pipe-Smoker William Younger - The Angelus Edgar Allan Poe - The Case Of M. Valdemar Michael Joseph - A Glass Of Milk Blanche Bane Kuder - From What Strange Land Honore de Balzac - El Verdugo Richard Hughes - Poor Man's Inn E. M. Winch - A La Tartare Sir Hugh Clifford - The Ghoul F. Marion Crawford - The Dead Smile T. F. Powys - The House With The Echo A. E. Coppard - Arabesque: The Mouse Alec Waugh - The Last Chukka John Metcalfe - Mr. Meldrum's Mania Wilkie Collins - A Terribly Strange Bed Theodore Drieser - The Hand Thomas Burke - The Bird M. R. James - The Treasure Of Abbot Thomas Guy de Maupassant - Vendetta Ambrose Bierce - An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge James Hilton - The Mallet Hugh Walpole - The Silver Mask Bram Stoker - The Judges House Mark Channing - The Feet Louis Golding - The Call Of The Hand Bernard Bromage - The House Walter De La Mare - All Hallows C. E. Montague - The First Blood Sweep John Russell - The Fourth Man John Russell - The Price Of The Head John Russell - The Lost God William Hope Hodgson - The Island Of The Ud William Hope Hodgson - The Whistling Room William Hope Hodgson - The Derelict Dennis Wheatley - The Snake 1024 pages. They don't make 'em like this any more ... Wheatley reproduced several of the stories over two Arrow paperbacks, Shafts Of Fear and Quiver Of Horror for Arrow in 1964, adding two new Charles Birkin stories and his own A Life For A Life.
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Post by dem bones on Oct 30, 2019 15:20:45 GMT
"The ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan." Arthur Machen - The Great God Pan: (The Inmost Light, 1894). Dr. Raymond performs minor brain surgery on Mary Vaughan, a seventeen-year-old he rescued from the gutter as a child so therefore, "I think her life is mine to use as I see fit." The object of the exercise is to allow Mary a glimpse of the real world that lies beyond the veil. Nothing, he assures Clarke, who is to act as witness to the experiment, can possibly go wrong. The girl is in no danger whatsoever.
Three days later, Raymond is forced to concede that OK, maybe miscalculated. "Yes, it is a great pity. She is a hopeless idiot. However, it could not be helped; and after all, she has seen the Great God Pan."
Mary has done far more than merely seen Pan. Nine months later she gives birth to something which is ostensibly a human being and dies.
The child, Helen, is raised in secret by Raymond at Caermaen. As she reaches maturity, Helen haunts the woodlands where she is in the habit of cavorting with "a strange naked man in a glade." Raymond, knowing she is not of this world and potentially lethal, washes his hands of her. Helen Vaughan heads for London where we lose sight of her. Until ...
Villiers, an antiquarian, chances upon an old friend from Oxford begging in London's theatre land. Charles Herbert's life fell apart when he fell for and married a strangely attractive party girl. "Villiers, that woman, if I can call her woman, corrupted my soul." The pair lived at 20 Paul Street, Tottenham Court Road, an address which quite recently achieved notoriety in connection with a suspicious death.
Our femme fatale, now trading as popular hostess "Mrs. Beaumont," and residing in Ashley Street, Piccadilly, continues to wreak havoc on London society, corrupting a succession of men of good position and driving them to self-destruction. "The West End Horrors" - a suicide epidemic among the Mayfair elite - coincides with the Ripper murders in Whitechapel. Villiers, who has tirelessly pieced together a chronicle of Helen Vaughan's crimes, confronts this latest version with his evidence, offering a stark choice: exposure or suicide? Only during her death throes do we catch glimpses of the real 'Helen' - and it isn't pretty.
It had been so long since I read this novella that I'd fondly misremembered Helen as a multi-tentacled Lovecraftian entity chasing some unfortunate toff through Soho - I'm really upset to be disillusioned of that haunting image. Not that she's the real monster of the piece.
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Post by Dr Strange on Oct 30, 2019 17:06:28 GMT
Yeah, it's been a while since I read The Great God Pan too, but I've fond memories of being surprised by how downbeat the whole thing was. It's got that whole late Victorian decadence / degeneration thing going on (surely influenced by Jekyll & Hyde and Dorian Gray), but also prefigures the likes of Lovecraft's From Beyond and The Dunwich Horror as well as the whole devil's spawn genre of films (Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, etc.) - it's odd that it's never been filmed itself when I think about it. Apparently there's a book that retells the story from Helen's perspective - Helen's Story (2013) by Rosanne Rabinowitz.
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Post by dem bones on Oct 30, 2019 18:12:01 GMT
Yeah, it's been a while since I read The Great God Pan too, but I've fond memories of being surprised by how downbeat the whole thing was. It's got that whole late Victorian decadence / degeneration thing going on (surely influenced by Jekyll & Hyde and Dorian Gray), but also prefigures the likes of Lovecraft's From Beyond and The Dunwich Horror as well as the whole devil's spawn genre of films ( Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, etc.) - it's odd that it's never been filmed itself when I think about it. Apparently there's a book that retells the story from Helen's perspective - Helen's Story (2013) by Rosanne Rabinowitz. I first read The Great God Pan in Hamlyn's Best Ghost Stories which is also where I first encountered The Dunwich Horror, so I guess over intervening years aspects of both stories morphed in my head. The most downbeat aspect for me is Raymond's callous indifference to the human cost of his vanity project. He has no difficulty exonerating himself from any blame whatsoever as he was working for the advancement of science and anyway, Mary was his to do with as he pleased. A top Victorian rotter, and Machen is smart enough to let him escape comeuppance.
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Post by andydecker on Oct 30, 2019 18:35:46 GMT
I really have to read this story. I have a few Machen editions, among them the first part of the Pinnacle book. I have read that there are two versions of Pan. Is there a big difference?
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Post by dem bones on Oct 31, 2019 14:01:16 GMT
I really have to read this story. I have a few Machen editions, among them the first part of the Pinnacle book. I have read that there are two versions of Pan. Is there a big difference? Would like to know that too. Most anthologists seem to prefer the later, book version, which seems to have upset some contemporary critics. Was Victorian culture really that "enfeebled"?
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Post by helrunar on Oct 31, 2019 15:55:44 GMT
I agree with a lot of the observations in the thread about The Great God Pan, including Dem's statement regarding who the actual "monster" is in the story, as well as Joshi's assertion that "The White People" is the superior yarn. I somehow never read "The White People" until a few years ago and it absolutely knocked my socks off. It might be the best story about Pagan survivals and Witchcraft ever written in the English language. I suppose most don't agree with that assessment since I seldom see the story discussed. Perhaps that is for the best, all things considered.
When I re-read Pan a few years ago, what actually happened in the story to drive the men insane and/or kill them seemed pretty obvious to me, but I confess my response to this ghastly revelation was to giggle unwholesomely. I have a diseased imagination so will spare you my thoughts. But it seemed really obvious to me. Curious to have a look at the book purporting to tell Helen's own side of the story. It could be good, or not so good, depending upon the skill of the author and her ability to write at least somewhat in the vein of Victorian horror.
I think The Great God Pan is one of Machen's more psychological stories. Lovecraft was obviously influenced by the structure of "The Novel of the White Powder," which is more along the lines of what people tend to expect from a horror tale.
Best wishes, Helrunar PS Happy Hallowe'en!
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Oct 31, 2019 16:21:12 GMT
Was Victorian culture really that "enfeebled"? I think not. When reading Joshi, it is instructive to keep the following simple rule in mind: Joshi is always wrong about everything.
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Post by David A. Riley on Oct 31, 2019 16:50:11 GMT
Was Victorian culture really that "enfeebled"? I think not. When reading Joshi, it is instructive to keep the following simple rule in mind: Joshi is always wrong about everything. I agree. His views do tend to be quite narrow. I was put off when he wrote this about the author Graham Masterton, which I thought overly elitist and arrogant: "Les Imaginales is a convention devoted to fantasy, science fiction, and horror, with perhaps a slightly greater emphasis on the first of these genres. A fair number of authors, both French and English-speaking, were in attendance, and I spent a fair amount of time with some of the latter, including Mark Henwick (the w in his last name is silent), Vic James, Christopher Priest, and others. Regrettably, the hack writer Graham Masterton was one of the featured guests, but I did my best to stay as far away from him as possible. It is unlikely that he has read my evisceration of The Manitou in The Rise, Fall, and Rise of the Cthulhu Mythos."
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Oct 31, 2019 17:39:16 GMT
I somehow never read "The White People" until a few years ago and it absolutely knocked my socks off. It might be the best story about Pagan survivals and Witchcraft ever written in the English language. That was my reaction to the story, too. The writing in "The Green Book" section is mesmerizing.
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Post by helrunar on Oct 31, 2019 17:44:21 GMT
I've barely read any of S. T. Joshi's criticism. I start to read and my eyes immediately glaze over, somehow.
He sounds like a character in one of Dem's legendary stories where the bitter, vituperative author/critic/superfan attends a horror convention, viciously insults everyone unfortunate enough to cross his path, and winds up being served with the lagniappe in shredded form at the Con banquet. Or something.
H.
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Post by andydecker on Oct 31, 2019 18:03:19 GMT
Hm, think I am in the minority here. I like a lot of Joshi's work. His Lovecraft biography is very well done, his Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos is more often right then wrong. But he sure can be a bit hard to take sometimes and has developed some hard to follow opinions.
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Post by andydecker on Oct 31, 2019 18:06:04 GMT
I really have to read this story. I have a few Machen editions, among them the first part of the Pinnacle book. I have read that there are two versions of Pan. Is there a big difference? Would like to know that too. Most anthologists seem to prefer the later, book version, which seems to have upset some contemporary critics. Was Victorian culture really that "enfeebled"? If the Victorians had read one of Alan Moore's issues of Providence they would have gone rigid from shock
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Post by Dr Strange on Oct 31, 2019 18:07:52 GMT
I have read that there are two versions of Pan. Is there a big difference? From what I've been able to find online, it seems the earlier "version" might only be the first chapter of the book. From wikipedia - What is now the first chapter of the novella was published in 1890 in a magazine called The Whirlwind, while what is now the third chapter of the book was published in the same magazine the following year as a standalone short story called "The City of Resurrections". Machen only viewed the two works as connected after they were finished. Once he decided the two stories were connected, Machen wrote the rest of The Great God Pan in a single evening save for its final chapter. Machen did not think of an ending for the tale for months, and in that time believed that the novella would remain unfinished forever. The last chapter was completed in June 1891. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_God_Pan#Background
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Post by David A. Riley on Oct 31, 2019 18:08:28 GMT
Hm, think I am in the minority here. I like a lot of Joshi's work. His Lovecraft biography is very well done, his Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos is more often right then wrong. But he sure can be a bit hard to take sometimes and has developed some hard to follow opinions. His biography of Lovecraft is amazing and the best ever written, a million times superior to the Sprague de Camp one. I do tend to agree to a lot of what he says, but he does sometimes lapse into a kind of arrogant elitism and he certainly has his strong dislikes - as do we all, of course! No one, though, can doubt the depths of his knowledge. That's phenominal.
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