Fantastic and Horrific Stories by Arthur Machen

Fantastic and Horrific Stories by Arthur Machen

Mint Editions is a print-on-demand imprint that sells hardcovers of classic (i.e., out-of-copyright) literature. They offered a number of recent releases through LibraryThing's EarlyReviewer program last fall, and I requested collections of late-nineteenth-century speculative fiction by H. P. Lovecraft, Bram Stoker, and George S. Schuyler. The one I ended up winning was by Arthur Machen (1863-1947), an early horror writer cited as an influence on Lovecraft.

Collection published: 2021
Contents originally published: 1894-1921
Acquired: September 2022
Read: October 2022

The book is visually attractive on the outside, but as a high-quality reprint edition, has little to offer. There is no critical or contextual material bar a half-page note about the author; the copyright page indicates the original publication of the materials spans 1894 to 1921, but the book does not give specific dates for specific texts. The table of contents is laid out kind of weird; I would think the titles of stories from collections would somehow be set off from the titles of the collections. These may seem like petty complaints, but these are all stories I can read for free on Project Gutenberg, whereas this edition goes for $26 on Amazon. If you are going to charge that much, I need more than a nice piece of stock art on the cover; Penguin Classics sells a paperback of some Machen stories for $18, and though I haven't seen it, it comes with a foreword, a critical introduction, and notes by a prominent scholar. Mint needs to offer more than it is offering to compete with that. My copy was free... but yours won't be.

As for the stories themselves, they are largely fine. Despite the fact that I am a Victorianist who works on science fiction and fantasy, Victorian horror is kind of hit-and-miss for me. I think Dracula, for example, really holds up. On the other hand, I have found Le Fanu's work pretty spotty. I can see why other people might enjoy it, but I found Machen toward the same end of the spectrum as Le Fanu's weaker work. Stories like "The Great God Pan" are very much a slow burn that communicate horror through implication... so much implication that I finished "The Great God Pan" not quite sure what its villainess had actually done except maybe have extramarital sex. "The Hill of Dreams" started well, with a distinctive narrator and some lush descriptions... but that's basically all one gets for over a hundred rambling pages. It felt to me like nothing actually happened, and I eventually lost interest.

I found "The Shining Pyramid" a bit more successful: a story with creepy signs that defy interpretation, like something out of Poe. "The Terror" was interesting to me, though I don't know if it would be to other people. I've spent some time researching pre–Great War future war fiction, the kind of stuff by George Griffith where people are worried about invading Europeans with dastardly weapons, and I felt like Machen was trying to merge that kind of story with his own sensibilities as a writer. The problem was that it was pretty boring.

There are people who swear up and down by Machen. I am sympathetic to them: I enjoy reading a lot of early speculative fiction. But this sampler of Machen's entirely failed to interest me as a source of pleasure reading or as a scholar of the period.