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Arthur Machen at his most rational. While he spins an intriguing mystery with The Terror, it ultimately falls flat of my expectations of a Machen story.Unexplainable deaths descend across the British Isles, especially concentrated on the rural countryside. Could it be the work of rogue serial killers, or perhaps the doing of a secret subterranean German invasion? Machen's use of war-time paranoia is admirable, but over the course of this short novel these possibilities are systematically deemed
This was a fun story about mysterious goings-on in the English countryside during WWI. The Terror is explained (to an extent) in the end, but the atmosphere really comes from strange things going on here and there that don't quite seem to fit together: a glowing tree, a strange, mournful scream in the night, people jumping off cliffs, people falling down dead, explosions, shipwrecks. It's so nebulous that people stop talking about it and just live with uneasiness. Though of course when they do t...
I really loved this. I was hooked from the first page and had no idea how it was going to end. In fact, the plot twist and culmination was fantastic. I found a first edition in a charity shop. A quick read and really enjoyed.
Compelling, suspenseful, and constantly keeping you guessing. I was always on the edge of my seat and it was hard to put down. While reading it we were getting clues that made me think that the supernatural was involved and was excited to see what the mystery killer was. *SPOILER ALERT (I am literally saying the end of the book)* Unfortunately, the ending was a bit of a disappointment, since the killer was dun.....dun.....dun......... nature. Since the animals and bugs were attacking because the...
Machen really was a good writer. I enjoyed this story and think it is one of the best of his that I have read so far.
Boring. Was very hard to read, at least to me.
This short novel may not be Machen's best work, but it is his only serious—albeit indirect—attempt to address the effects of the international trauma which I believe precipitated his literary decline: the cumulative horror of the trenches of World War I.“The Coming of the Terror,” a short story first published in 1917 Century Magazine—later reprinted in the second volume of Joshi's collection, The White People--is an abridged form of the same tale, but I consider the original novel—four times th...
3.5 stars.Most essential Machen work is from the 1890s, but The Terror is his most fully developed horror tale from his later career and of interest for those of us who prefer his darker fiction. This often waffling novella is meandering and less focused than his dark folk masterpieces The Hill of Dreams, The Great God Pan, The Three Impostors, Ornaments in Jade and The White People, but also gleefully manic and quite inspired in parts, developing an atmosphere of magical mystery and dread aroun...
A great little tale of supernatural fear that never quite has a full reveal, this is my first stumble into Machen in over a decade- and his work holds up! I think there’s a wonderful mystery and sense of claustrophobia in the small English village, and the deaths are gratuitously described enough to ensure that the reader gives a shudder. There’s also a discourse about man’s duty to the earth and the fear of the known enemy rather than the unknown. It’s easier to assign blame to something that w...
Suspenseful novella about strange deaths in England during World War 1. Are these deaths somehow connected, and could the Germans have something to do with it? The ending was a bit laughable, when you find out the explanation. It completely ruined the story for me.
Terror spreads during WWI, not in the trenches but back in dear old Blighty.An aeroplane accident, rumours of deaths in a munitions factory where the victims looked 'as if they had been bitten to pieces', and a series of grisly murders on the Welsh coast soon start to spread elsewhere in the British Isles. Horses stampede, bees attack in swarms, sheep dogs behave like wolvesNews spreads by rumour due to government censorship of the press, inquests into the deaths are smothered. Could the terror
Mysterious supernaturally tinged catastrophe and impending disaster signified by upending the presumed human / beast order of things. Horses of the apocalypse included. A descent into madness brought upon ourselves, in sync with WW1 paranoia and instability (prod.1917). Machen’s interest in what he terms ‘ecstacy’, ‘...the sense of the unknown...’ in evidence here, and psychogeography, the .....’interconnection between landscape and the mind’ (Wiki.)... the glowing lights that ‘melt away’ on app...
A bit of a page-turner - I was very eager to find out what was going on. Once I found out, though, it was a disappointment.
