Arthur Machen, Tales of Horror and the Supernatural

Arthur Machen (3 March 1863 – 15 December 1947) was a Welsh author and mystic of the 1890s and early 20th century. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. His novella The Great God Pan (1890; 1894) has garnered a reputation as a classic of horror (Stephen King has called it “Maybe the best [horror story] in the English language”). He is also well known for his leading role in creating the legend of the Angels of Mons.
Around 1890 Machen began to publish in literary magazines, writing stories influenced by the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, some of which used gothic or fantastic themes. This led to his first major success, The Great God Pan. It was published in 1894 by John Lane in the noted Keynotes Series, which was part of the growing aesthetic movement of the time. Machen’s story was widely denounced for its sexual and horrific content and subsequently sold well, going into a second edition.
These stories are not mere horror though. They have another dimension to them. There is a literary uniqueness to them. Writer and newspaper man Vincent Starrett, an early enthusiast of Machen’s work, said of him that he was “a novelist of the soul. He writes of a strange borderland, lying somewhere between Dreams and Death, peopled with shades, beings, spirits, ghosts, men, women, souls — what shall we call them ? — the very notion of whom stops vaguely just short of thought.”
One of his most intriguing creations is “The Great God Pan”. It moves from the sublime to horror within the turn of a page. He gives us the opportunity to glimpse into the spiritual realm of Pan. On publication it was widely denounced by the press as degenerate and horrific because of its decadent style and sexual content. It has since garnered a reputation as a classic of horror. In Supernatural Horror in Literature (1926; revised 1933), H. P. Lovecraft praised the story, saying: “No one could begin to describe the cumulative suspense and ultimate horror with which every paragraph abounds”; he added that “the sensitive reader” reaches the end with “an appreciative shudder.”