The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen (1894) – Years after witnessing an attempt to open the mind of a young woman to the spiritual world (an attempt he believed had failed), Clarke hears of a beautiful girl with disturbing powers in Wales. He follows her to learn more. The trail will be littered with madness and death.

Helen Vaughn entices children into the woods surrounding their village, where strange things happen to them. A few years after that, he discovered Helen was now married to an old friend, Herbert. There had been high expectations for the man, but he now lives as a vagrant. His wife is Helen Vaughn, and she continues to wreak havoc on the lives around her. The mystery surrounding her draws together a group of dedicated young men who work to reveal her identity and stop her.

Why I Liked It – A fascinating look at the roots of modern horror.

I’m not sure why I read this book. Not to take anything away from the story, but it’s a horror story. That’s not one of my core genres. It is a novella, and that was the deciding factor. I needed something short while I waited for a book on hold at the library. I’d never heard of the author or the story, but sometimes those are the best places to discover something new. That was the case here.

The story stands at the edge of science fiction with the “mad scientist” at the start of the tale, but moves more fully into horror after the first chapter. There are obvious connections with murder mysteries as well. The century of writing between Shelley’s “Frankenstein” in 1818 and the launch of the science fiction-only magazine “Amazing Stories” in 1926 saw many experiments in writing styles that covered the mysterious, criminal, science, and horror. While reviled when first published, this novella has developed a reputation as a classic of the horror genre. Horror icon Stephen King has called it the scariest story ever written in the English language.

I will admit that I struggled a little. This was not originally written as a novella. The first two chapters were published as standalone stories. Only later did Machen decide there was a connection and write most of the rest of what became the finished work. But the ending eluded him for a while, to the point that he didn’t think he would ever complete the work. For me, this made the whole story lurch a little as we progressed from one piece to another. The other issue is shifting my brain into a mode where it can deal with the, for me, overly ornate vocabulary of the day. It’s fine, but not a “native” reading style for me.

What you get in the end is a story that can give the hair on the back of your neck a small thrill. Helen Vaughn, in all her incarnations, is a frightening and, in some ways, rather modern antagonist. Machen finds a way to reasonably tie all the stories together.

If you enjoy your horror with a touch of the gothic, I think you’ll enjoy this one.

Rating – *** Worth A Look