"Oh day and night, but this is wondrous strange!" Those words from Hamlet kept coursing through my mind as I read this marvelous collection. Machen taps into a deep Gnostic tradition in this work, positing these mysterious tales in deliberate counter-point to the industrial rationalism of his (and our) day. It's quite a heady reading experience and so unlike the typical realistic tapestry upon which most writers work. I felt like I was being led by the hand into magical realms that were both str...

Highly recommended for Lovecraft fans, the White People is not some sort of supremacist fiction if any are frightened by the name. At first I really enjoyed the collection, stories 1 and 2 read like Lovecraft + good characterization, however as the stories continued things seemed to meander somewhat. While there were some powerful individual scenes and intriguing premises overall the stories were difficult for me to get attached to and I found myself longing to finish each story to get them out

Arthur Machen wrote a quality novella called The Great God Pan. That story succeeds, not so much because of what it says but because of what it does not say. It is a book of understatement and the most important elements of the narrative are hinted at without explicitly being described. Unfortunately, it is possible that some critics in Machen’s time said The Great God Pan was weak for not saying enough. Maybe that is how we ended up with the sloppy mess of short stories included in The White Pe...

Machen, unusually for a weird fiction author of his era, could really write. I know he influenced Lovecraft and CA Smith, among others, but he is a titan in comparison to those writers when it comes to style. The two "flagship" stories in this collection, the eponymous "The White People" and "A Fragment of Life", are really exceptionally good, worth the price of admission alone. I'd read "The White People" itself long ago and it seems to have only got better in the mean time - it's no exaggerati...

Oh Mr Machen, I can see why Mr Lovecraft showered you with so much praise, your stories are truly some of the best when it comes to underlying, unspeakable horror that the human race finds abhorrent. I mean I find it wonderful but then I am mad. This is a fabulous collection of stories that shows off the true originator of folk horror to his best, the only story that is missing (and I would urge you to seek out) is The Great God Pan which is creepy and properly not nice. All of the folk horror s...

In some ways the stories collected here haven't dated very well, in others they will never date.The humour has lost any edge it may have once had; the side issues aren't usually particularly interesting (discussions on tobacco, the cost of various items of furniture); presentation is often clunky and even a little off-putting.But these issues are only the rock in which the jewels are embedded: you have to work to get at them, but they are worth it.Machen is at his best with description and sugge...

I read some of the classic Machen stories decades ago, and have been playing with the idea of revisiting them. I'm not sure this is a good time, or how many of these I'll get through; I remember being bored to tears as a teen by "The Terror", for instance. But hey..."The Inmost Light" certainly sets a leeeeeeisurely pace. Interesting concept, and I do appreciate Machen not spelling out everything at the end. It's quite clear how one should interpret Dr. Black's experiment with the opal. Joshi is...

I read two thirds of this intriguing collection of stories before returning it to the book shelf. There's no doubt about it: Arthur Machen was an intriguing author, with a lot of very strange ideas that definitely earn the title of 'weird stories'.I think one reason why I didn't stick it out to the end was that, despite the huge amount of variation between the stories (length, context, style) they all seemed to have very similar thematic undertones, i.e. that there is a world beyond this one occ...

Arthur Machen is a writer I have known about for ages, mostly due to the high praise he got from H.P. Lovecraft. Now my first reading of Machen was a highly enjoyable one, and I really liked the tales in this collection. His anti-materialistic views and reverence of nature make for a great backdrop to his tales and I loved that his stories are filled with stunningly beautiful imagery and strangely hidden terrors. The thing I liked best about his stories was the use of old folk tales and legends

Penguin has done a great service in publishing this splendid selection of writings by Welsh author Arthur Machen (1863-1947), which includes a most insightful introductory essay by S. T. Joshi along with a Forward by Guillermo Del Toro. A listing of the tales in this collection runs as follows: The Inmost Light, Novel of the Black Seal, Novel of the White Powder, The Red Hand, The White People, A Fragment of Life, The Bowmen, The Soldiers' Rest, The Great Return, Out of the Earth, The Terror. Ra...

“There are sacraments of evil as well as of good about us, and we live and move to my belief in an unknown world, a place where there are caves and shadows and dwellers in twilight. It is possible that man may sometimes return on the track of evolution, and it is my belief that an awful lore is not yet dead.”― Arthur MachenChristian mystic, member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and a master writer of the weird tale. Arthur Machen was all three, with an interesting evolution as a write

The Inmost Light [3/5], Novel of the Black Seal [4/5], Novel of the White Powder [3/5], The Red Hand [2/5], The White People [4/5], A Fragment of Life [1/5], The Bowmen [2/5], The Soldier's Rest [2/5], The Great Return [3/5], Out of the Earth [3/5], The Terror [4/5]I don't think i'm a fan of Machen. He tries so hard to be 'real' his stories usually wander around aimlessly or stop just before what should be the most dramatic moment leaving you hanging.Of these the best are 'The White People' beca...

After being quite disappointed with The Great God Pan, I felt a certain obligation to give Machen another shot, given all the Lovecraft comparisons he had received. And with this collection, I was pretty legitimately impressed. Time and time again, the Victorian man of science gets his ass handed to him by darker, weirder forces than he could have imagined, all rooted in the pagan past that, in Machen's time, certainly still lurked in the wilder corners of the British Isles. Not every story was

Dry and boring.Have you ever sat down and read a book and when you're done sit there and ask yourself "WTF did I just read?" This is definitely one of those books. I mean I can't even really write a description of what this book was about because I didn't seem to understand it. And there is no description on the back of the book in which to copy for you. The text is just so very hard to follow. It's written in an old-fashioned sort of way but not even in an Old English type of way. I'm sorry but...