Last month, in August, the British Library published its latest volume in the "Tales of the Weird" series.
The Horned God: Weird Tales of the Great God Pan, edited by Michael Wheatley, was described somewhere as volume 32 in the series but I don't see a series number anywhere. It comprises eleven stories and six poems. The theme has as much or more to do with nature-mysticism as it does with "the weird": thrills are rather thin on the ground. The contents (I apologize for the clumsy formatting--I have had to type this out myself):
Introduction by Michael Wheatley
"Pan: A Double Villanelle" -- poem by Oscar Wilde
"The Great God Pan" -- Arthur Machen
"Pan" -- George Egerton
"A Musical Instrument" -- Elizabeth Barrett Browning
"The Moon-Slave" -- Barry Pain
"The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" -- Kenneth Grahame
"The Music on the Hill" -- Saki
"The Haunted Forest" -- Edith Hurley
"The Story of a Panic" -- E. M. Forster
"The Touch of Pan" -- Algernon Blackwood
"Moon of Wran" -- A. Lloyd Bayne
"How Pan came to Little Ingleton" -- Margery Lawrence
"The Devil's Martyr" -- Signe Toksvig
"Bewitched" -- Willard N. Marsh
"The Golden Bough" -- David H. Keller
"Forest God" -- Dorothy Quick
"The Cracks of Time" -- Dorothy Quick
A number of web entries for this title cite Greye La Spina as one of the authors included, but as the above t.o.c. indicates, whatever was under consideration by her didn't make the final cut. And that's really too bad. From the British Library's blurb:
In 1894, Arthur Machen’s landmark novella The Great God Pan was published, sparking the sinister resurgence of the pagan goat god. Writers of the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, such as Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster and Margery Lawrence, took the god’s rebellious influence as inspiration to spin beguiling tales of social norms turned upside down and ancient ecological forces compelling their protagonists to ecstatic heights or bizarre dooms.
Assembling ten tales and six poems – along with Machen’s novella – from the boom years of Pan-centric literature, this new collection revels in themes of queer awakening, transgression against societal bonds and the bewitching power of the wild as it explores a rapturous and culturally significant chapter in the history of weird fiction.
I had the electronic edition of this book (it's not being published over here till next March). Some of the choices seem odd. Thus far, the best of the tales that are new entries for me is Dorothy Quick's "The Cracks of Time," which works just as well as an ironic comment upon a failing marriage in the brittle Bohemian society of late 1940s London as it does an evocation of "the weird."
I'll write further comments in a subsequent post.
H.