I commented elsewhere on Machen. He essentially has one basic plot which he uses in all his 'horror' work. If he only used it once it'd be okay. But it grows wearisome with repetition. ( )

This volume contains Machen's first published story, the notorious yellow-nineties fright "The Great God Pan," accompanied by "The Inmost Light" with which it was published in its original book form, as well as the short story "The Shining Pyramid" and the full novel The Three Impostors. This last is often cannibalized for its fine component stories, such as "The Novel of the Black Seal." Overall, the whole collection is a pleasure to read for those whose tastes run to the uncanny and the quietly twisted.

"The Great God Pan" is indispensable for its influence on later writers, including Lovecraft ("The Dunwich Horror"), King ("N"), and Straub (Ghost Story), and -- as is actually fairly typical of 19th-century horror literature (think of Frankenstein or The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde) -- it uses a science-fictional innovation to touch off a series of frightful events. In this case, it is brain surgery. "The great god Pan is dead!" has been supposed by centuries of Plutarch's readers to have meant that the resurrection of Christ was the death-knell of Hellenistic paganism. The identity of horned Pan with the Christian devil is nearly explicit in Machen's story, with the additional wrinkle that this inhuman evil is a reality against which we are shielded by a little bit of neuroanatomy!

There are two interesting observations to be made about name of the outre femme fatale Helen Vaughan. Helena was the name of the partner of the seminal Gnostic sorcerer/heresiarch Simon Magus, so Helen is a fittingly allusive name for what is really a sort of antichrist figure who reverses the action of Christian salvation. To have her mother -- raped by Pan/Satan -- named "Mary" is a nice touch. Vaughan seems to have been a name that Machen liked. He uses it again for an unrelated male character in "The Shining Pyramid," where its Welsh provenance ties in to the setting. It is evocative of the 17th-century Rosicrucian alchemist Thomas Vaughan, and in his invention of Helen Vaughan, Machen may have been a contributor to the later character Diana Vaughan, the high priestess of the alleged Luciferian sex-and-black-magic cult of the Palladium that controlled worldwide Freemasonry, all manner of occult societies, and even major non-Christian religions, according to the conspiracy-monger Leo Taxil. It is entirely in keeping with the perversity of Taxil's enterprise that he would take the name Vaughan from Machen's fiction.

There is a decided vein of misogyny running through the stories in this book, paired with a horror of sex that is positively stunning. Despite these Victorian failings, Machen really delivers a sense of the supernatural, expressing the philosophical position that he puts in the mouth of one of his characters: "I have told you I was of sceptical habit; but though I understood little or nothing, I began to dread, vainly proposing to myself the iterated dogmas of science that all life is material, and that in the system of things there is no undiscovered land, even beyond the remotest stars, where the supernatural can find a footing. Yet there struck in on this the thought that matter is as really awful and unknown as spirit, that science itself but dallies on the threshold, scarcely gaining more than a glimpse of the wonders of the inner place." (154-155)

Many of the characters are medical doctors or authors. The former help to brighten the line between the quotidian and the monstrous, while the latter serve as speakers and foils for Machen's aesthetic agenda. "[P]erhaps you are aware that no Carthusian monk can emulate the cloistral seclusion in which a realistic novelist secludes himself. It is his way of observing human nature," (195) jibes the writer Dyson, a continuing protagonist of several of the stories in this volume.

Machen (like Dyson) was certainly no realist. His fiction is abundantly open to the charge that the plots rest on coincidental events of such improbability as to remove them entirely from the believable. And yet, they hold together if the reader is led to infer some fatalistic, supernatural influence driving the experiences of the protagonists. "The whole universe, my friend, is a tremendous sacrament; a mystic, ineffable force and energy, veiled by an outward form of matter; and man, and the sun and the other stars, and the flower of the grass, and the crystal in the test-tube, are each and every one as spiritual, as material, and subject to an inner working." (209)

I bought THE THREE IMPOSTERS AND OTHER STORIES because Jorge Luis Borges put it in his 75-title list: "Prologues to A Personal Library." (SELECTED NON-FICTIONS, Penguin, 2000). So far, I have finished only the title novella. It was published in 1895 in UK, so the diction has its moments of old world British punctilio, but these are certainly no worse than anything found in other prominent Victorian writers. For the most part the narrative is beautifully compressed and the action brisk. I generally do not read mysteries or stories of the occult unless they are by Edgar Allan Poe and one or two others, and reading THE THREE IMPOSTERS I was reminded why. For all its delights there is a weakness in the middle of the book that I found rankling. It appears in the chapter titled "Novel of the Black Seal." Despite the otherwise vivid writing there is a tendency here to display horror not through the depiction of the horrible, but by a rising hysteria and frenzy among the main characters. The reader is left wondering why everyone's so frightened. It's this one section then, the longest in the book, in which the narrative fails. A second annoying habit in this section is a relentless withholding of information. Now this is something that all writers of fiction do to keep up guessing what will happen next. But Machen is so chintzy with even the smallest particle of rationale that it's a little maddening. Whenever the text calls for him to come clean, he squirms out of doing so through some cheap device or other. This is trickery, and bad writing. But mixed with these are fine moments, especially Machen's clarity of voice and vivid detail, that satisfy deeply. So recommended with reservations. ( )