The Great God Pan

I love moody, atmospheric horror. The kind of that creeps upon you, inducing chills without resorting to the cheap shock common in horror today. TGGP is that kind of spookiness. Though the storytelling is a product of its time (wooden characters, melodrama, lack of graphic content of any sort) the tale is beautifully executed, slowly unfolding a mystery and ratcheting the suspense until the horrific climax. It leaves an awful lot to the imagination, partly due to Victorian-era necessity, but it’s not a copout. Machen knows what you’re thinking and he masterfully works your imagination against you. The story begins with a research doctor making an experimental surgical adjustment to a girl’s brain that he believes will enable her to see the world as it really is, as opposed to how mankind has been conditioned to perceive it. He calls this “seeing the Great God Pan”. “Pan” being the Greek god of nature. The experiment sets in motion a sequence of events spanning many years. As the story progresses we shift to new characters who are drawn into a mystery from various angles. Only at the end do the pieces come together. Occult imagery abounds, but the genius of the story is that the deviltry is ambiguous enough to be compatible with just about any worldview. It’s simply a terrifying encounter with the unknown. Machen was an interesting man. The son of a clergyman, he was raised in a Christian home, but developed a deep interest in the occult. His knowledge influenced his fiction, but he apparently stayed true to his faith until his death. As far as I know he is the only Christian weird fiction writer of his day. If this were written today, it would probably merit 3.5 stars. But given that it was highly original in 1894, and prototypical of weird fiction that would become popular in the coming decades, it gets an easy 5 stars. Read more

The Great God Pan is by Arthur Machen, a Welsh author and mystic who wrote in the late 1800s. I first made his acquaintance with the spectacularly creepy short story The White People, so moved to this — considered a horror classic. It is focused on similar themes of his later books, an occult world existing in the shadows of this world, hidden and mysterious but also some how more real. The novella from 1890 opens with a young woman willingly participating in questionable medical experiment performed by a surgeon intent on helping humankind experience the mystical realm directly. He has, apparently, found the structure in the brain that prevents easy access to the spiritual realm (what he calls, “seeing the god Pan”), though curiously, he offers no insights as to why nature may have seen fit to prevent the veil from being lifted. He surgically alters the brain of the young woman to bridge the “unthinkable gulf that yawns profound between two worlds, the world of matter and the world of spirit.” He is successful, after a fashion. She awakens from anesthesia, seems to have a flash of mystical insight, but the wonder quickly fades, replaced by terror — she is reduced, in his words to a “hopeless idiot” for life. The novella flashes forward, and flashes forward again, and from that rocky start, things go progressively downhill. There are strange rituals in the woods, children driven insane by the sight of Roman statues, child abductions, orgies (not children, thankfully), suicides (also not children) and an apparent deicide. “Though horror and revolting nausea rose up within me, and an odour of corruption choked my breath, I remained firm. I was then privileged or accursed, I dare not say which, to see that which was on the bed, lying there black like ink, transformed before my eyes. The skin, and the flesh, and the muscles and bones, and the firm structure of the human body that I had thought be unchangeable, and permanent as adamant, began to melt and dissolve.” It’s a cracking good read, and certainly deserves to be included in the library of horror classics of horror, especially because, apparently, the novella influenced HP Lovecraft. Equally intriguing is the underlying conceit that evolution or civilization or just plain old ignorance compounded by the passage of time somehow lowered a veil between the two realms — matter and spirit. And that, at least according to this Welsh writer, bridging these two worlds has such dark and tragic consequences. Read more

“. . . that man no longer belonged to this world; it was a devil’s face I looked upon.” The ending was great, the story had a few quotable passages, but I don’t think I’ll reread this; and, to boot, Peter Straub wore the dress better with Ghost Story; also H.P. Lovecraft utilized Machen’s story devices a lot more effectively. Also, I’ve come to realize that I mostly don’t like Machen’s prose, nor do I like his syrup-sweet dialogue (at least Lovecraft’s dialogue was so laughably bad that there was a charm to it via an entertainment factor). Finally, this particular edition has many, many typos involving quotation marks—the first “ is always a smart quotation (as it should be), but the second one is a straight quotation mark; likewise, whenever a single quotation mark is used—via a quote within a quote—the first one is always facing the wrong way. This eyesore almost made me give it a 2-star rating, but I resisted. Read more

When you read something written in the 1890s you have to remember it's not like modern horror. The horror lives in what isn't said, what isn't described. It's almost as if the author themselves is afraid to write the heinous ideas they have floating around in their minds. I wasn't sure what to expect from this story. I knew it was about an experiment gone wrong and the evils that happened after. What I got was an eerie mystery surrounding a woman named Helen. A brief description of a lobotomy is how the story starts and I was a little taken aback by how nonchalant the characters were about performing it in the doctor's parlor. I was fascinated when the mystery unraveled and it turned into a fantastic cosmic horror. Definitely a great read if you like Lovecraft. Read more