The Great God Pan

As Halloween approaches, I thought I'd go vaguely thematic and expand my reading within the classic horror canon. Something that shouldn't take too long, as a lot of the new collection I have since acquired clocks in at well under 100 pages - including Arthur Machen's 1894 novella The Great God Pan. And as Stephen King has described it as "maybe the best horror story in the English language", the top of the pile seemed like a good place to start.

Machen wrote the story in parts through the 1890s, which perhaps explains its rather disjointed structure - jumping forward years at a time following a brilliant opening scene where an eccentric - dare I say it, mad - gentleman scientist performs an experiment on one of his servants that allows her to witness the spirit world before rendering her insensible. This first chapter sold the book to me with its melodramatic gothic tone; which is a shame because the rest of the novella, written after the opening had already been published, didn't really follow on. Instead we are treated to a series of episodes, firstly detailing the scientist's companion Clarke's obsession with the Devil, then a meeting between Clarke's friend Villiers and an old acquaintance who has been ruined by a marriage to a woman who he claims destroyed his soul. It is this latter thread that fills the remainder of the 70-odd pages, as it emerges that this woman has made quite an impression on everyone who has met her. Then, as various young aristocrats are found dead by their own hand, Clarke and Villiers start to join the dots and realise that this woman may not even be a woman at all...

The ending does do a reasonable job of rounding everything up, and I found Machen's writing style extremely entertaining: overflowing with Victorian poeticism without tipping over into the hyperbole that makes the likes of Dickens such a chore to read for me, and ultimately bordering on genius after the state of The '86 Fix. But overall I felt The Great God Pan had too much of a tendency to drift from the points it was trying to make, falling for the classic horror writing trap of "this thing was so horrific words cannot describe it" but then knocking down even the idea of this otherness with a pair of omnipotent protagonists who deduce and then solve all the problems presented to them without a second thought.

All in all, though, this was a fun little book that delved into some genuinely esoteric themes. And most of all I found it an almost comforting throwback to a bygone age, of a London society where everyone knew each other's affairs and where the biggest fear really was the Devil and his ability to tempt the innocent. A very English Devil too - as per the Bible, but with his roots much further back in the pagan tradition. No jump scares or gore, but The Great God Pan did manage to deliver the chills in its own way.

4/5

This caused just as much of a stir in the late 1800s, and for much the same reasons.