One of the first and most immediate continuators of the legacy of Edgar Allan Poe it is this Welshman with a tormented soul who, if reincarnations skip a decade, ended up being reflected in the work and life of the Baltimore genius. You will certainly find in Arthur Machen another narrator from the depths of the soul, where the light does not reach and fear presses with its physical sensation of narrowness for the spirit.
It is also true that Machen seems to be the missing link between Poe and Lovecraft, combining in his intermediate life time between the two large doses of fears and fantasies. Ultimately, this swimming between two waters may have worked against him so that his work could reach the transcendence of the other two. Because sometimes it is better to focus the shot than not to diversify the plot.
Time, however, always ends up doing justice for the work of a great author. Machen sits at the table with Poe and Lovecraft. And together the three drink their wines or whatever they like. delirium tremens. Because only from there you can reach certain places that not even nightmares reach.
Top 3 recommended books by Arthur Machen
The great god Pan
Nature, our environment, has that magical side that once translated into legend, myths and even beliefs, as the story was passed from generation to generation. Fear also inhabited that imaginary and the horrors of death found due explanation in the esoteric and even the telluric.
Tutor, translator, proofreader, rare book cataloger, theater actor and especially journalist, Machen translated his rapt and melancholic dreams to paper with that rare intensity and loneliness typical of poetry, trying to unravel the most hidden enigmas beyond existence and outside of time and making beauty and horror sound in unison in their stories.
Unlike Le Fanu or MR James, Machen, inspired by his Celtic origin, did not write about ghosts, but rather about elemental forces, surviving curses, or evil powers invoked by folklore and fairy tales, such as the malevolent "people." small", that enigmatic and horrible pre-Celtic race, black and stunted, forced to live in the bowels of the earth, where it still practices its infamous sacrificial rites. This volume collects four extensive stories (The Great God Pan, The Light Within, The Novel of the Black Seal and The Novel of the White Dust), which greatly influenced the master of supernatural horror, HP Lovecraft.
The hill of dreams
Like a new Dorian Gray, Lucian seeks to make a space for himself in a great city full of opportunities, lights and shadows. Among the temptations that claim him for themselves, the most seductive shadows offer him a magnetic doom that in his former bucolic world was only in the blind misty nights.
The Hill of Dreams (1907) tells the life of Lucian, a young Welsh dreamer who emigrates to London, where he lives badly. «The young hero ?? Lovecraft commented ?? he is sensitive to the magic of that ancient Welsh environment, which is the author's own, and leads a dream life in the Roman city of Isca Silurum, now reduced to the village of Caerleon-on-Usk, dotted with archaeological remains ». «It is without a doubt a masterpiece… How vivid is that waking dream in Rome! … Machen is a titan… surely the greatest living author », an excited HPL went on to affirm.
Terror and other tales of the strange
The horror narrative ended up discovering in the anomalies and contrasts a space to awaken opposite sensations.
A fan of magic and alchemy, Machen joined the esoteric order of the Golden Dawn in 1900, and ten years later became part of the editorial staff of the Evening News newspaper, where he published numerous collaborations on antiquities, folklore, historical crimes, and many other topics. He published most of his stories in different magazines, and later compiled them in anthologies such as "The House of Souls" (1906), "The Angels of Mons" (1915), "The Shining Pyramid" (1923) and others.
This volume brings together a short novel ("El terror", 1917) and twenty-two tales of the fantasy genre, most of them starring heroes obsessed by their guilty conscience and convinced of their supernatural origins. From the thematic variety of this selection there are good examples of stories such as "The Red Hand", in which ancient runes and magic go hand in hand; "The sacred things", which takes place on the Welsh coasts; "Psychology", which resurrects the theme of Jekyll and Hyde; and "The custody", "The dazzling light" and "Munitions of war", set in the First World War, as well as "Terror", a narrative in which Machen raises an authentic conspiracy theory related to development The function of the first great European war was to suggest something greater and more terrible that was never revealed. '
