The Great God Pan & The Inmost Light (Heathen Edition) - by Arthur Machen (Hardcover)

About the Book

Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan was widely denounced for its sexual and horrific content upon publication, but is now considered a classic of horror.

Book Synopsis

Arthur Machen (1863-1947) was the pen name of Arthur Llewellyn Jones, a prolific Welsh author, and mystic of the 1890s and early 20th century. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction often depicting man at war with stifling scientific materialism, the dominant worldview of his time. His novella and first major success The Great God Pan (1894) was widely denounced for its sexual and horrific content and consequently sold well. It has since garnered a reputation as a classic of horror. The story begins with an experiment to allow a woman named Mary to see the supernatural world, followed by a series of mysterious happenings and deaths over many years surrounding a woman named Helen Vaughan. Are the two women connected? If so, how? The answer, and how you arrive there, is why Stephen King has described this terrifying tale as "One of the best horror stories ever written. Maybe the best in the English language."

Review Quotes

"One of the best horror stories ever written. Maybe the best in the English language." -Stephen King

"Of creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few can hope to equal Arthur Machen. No one could begin to describe the cumulative suspense and ultimate horror with which every paragraph abounds." -H.P. Lovecraft

"One of the greatest supernatural tales ever written." -Elizabeth Hand, The Washington Post

"The archetypal Decadent horror story. Highly original." - Brian Stableford

" . . . too morbid to be the production of a healthy mind." -Richard Henry Stoddard

"Told with exquisite reticence and grace, and with a plausibility that is as extraordinary as it is immoral. More than Hawthorne or Tolstoy, Machen is a novelist of the soul. His sentences move to sonorous, half-submerged rhythms, swooning with pagan color and redolent of sacerdotal incense." -Vincent Starrett, Arthur Machen: A Novelist of Ecstasy and Sin

"A fascinating, troubling story, and, for all its influence, not like much else than I can think of. It's not simple, and yet it's effective, more so than can easily be explained." -Matthew David Surridge, Black Gate

"What can I say about a writer whose influence has been acknowledged by H.P. Lovecraft, Peter Straub, T.E.D. Klein, M. John Harrison, and Clive Barker? Perhaps that he managed to communicate a sense of the inexpressibly and awesomely supernatural with more power than he ever knew." -Ramsey Campbell