The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 5: To Sing Extraordinary Songs

Considering that what passes for an idea around here is doing two days about vampires and then two days about zombies, it’s necessary for me to every so often indulge in a kind of palate cleanser. I do not want this October to progress into two days about wolfmans and then two days about Frankensteins and then two days about weremummies, and so on until we’re all curled up on the kitchen floor, probably dead. The standard horror tropes and subgenres and monsters can be wonderful and entertaining, stories based around them can be brilliant, but unless you hit some kind of freakish lucky streak in your reading, they can also very quickly become to-your-bones wearying. Fortunately, in my preparations for this project every year, I tend to overspend, and as a result I have a mountain of brand new horror anthologies – and old ones, too -- into which I plan to dive. But before I do that, I feel the need to make an abrupt tonal shift away from the last four days, and read something I had every reason to believe would be superb: Arthur Machen’s “The White People”.

Arthur Machen is the source of some shame for me. I wrote about him once before, in the first post of my 2009 series, and about two weeks later mentioned him again in my post about T.E.D. Klein's story "The Events at Poroth Farm". In that story, the narrator is a horror scholar who spends his downtime reading classic horror in preparation for large project, and of Machens' "The White People" he says:

Just before dinner, in need of a break, read a story by Arthur Machen. Welsh writer, turn of the century, though think the story's set somewhere in England: old house in the hills, dark woods with secret paths and hidden streams. God, what an experience! I was a little confused by the framing device and all its high-flown talk of "cosmic evil," but the sections from the young girl's notebook were...staggering. That air of paganism, the malevolent little faces peeping from the shadows, and those rites she can't dare talk about...It's called "The White People," and it must be the most presuasive horror tale ever written.

The reason for my shame, as I mentioned in passing in the Klein post, is that for all my supposed love of horror fiction, I had not, at that time, read "The White People" or very much Machen at all. After yesterday, I have now read two whole stories by him. So where, exactly, do I get off bitching about the shoddiness of so much in the genre if I'm not even reading all that much of the really good stuff? It's not like it's not up there on my bookshelves. This is a danger, for me anyway, with a project like this. Every year, between Octobers, I might consider reading something like "The White People" only to decide "Ah, I'll save it for the project." And I will in fact do that, but in the year between The Kind of Face You Slashes, my knowledge of the genre will not have increased too terribly much. It's like I've gotten to the point where I almost consider reading horror fiction off-season as a busman's holiday, and as Mr. Burns once said "That shouldn't be."

And make no mistake: "The White People" is terrific. It is, in fact, everything I claim to want from the genre, or near enough. The framing device, the one Klein's narrator was confused by, and it is sort of odd, consists of a pair of conversations between two men: Ambrose, an eccentric recluse and expert on the occult, a man with very curious notions about the true nature of good, evil, saintliness, and sin; and Cotgrave, a man, it is implied, with an interest in crackpots, hence his introduction to Ambrose. Cotgrave's interest in Ambrose eventually goes beyond a snarky clinical interest and becomes one of actual interest in Amrbose's ideas. Those ideas can be summed up in this passage:

"There is, no doubt, an analogy between [true evil and that which we call evil]; a resemblance such as enables us to use, quite legitimately, such terms as the 'foot of the mountain' and the 'leg of the table.' And, sometimes, of course, the two speak, as it were, in the same language. The rough miner, or 'puddler,' the untrained, undeveloped 'tiger-man', heated by a quart or two above his usual measure, comes home and kicks his irritating and injudicious wife to death. He is a murderer. And Gilles de Raiz was a murderer. But you see the gulf that separates the two? The 'word,' if I may so speak, is accidentally the same in each case, but the 'meaning' is utterly different. It is falgrant 'Hobson Jobson' to confuse the two, or rather, it is as if one supposed that Juggernaut and the Argonauts had something to do etymologically with one another. And no doubt the same weak likeness, or analogy, runs between all the 'social' sins and the real spiritual sings, and in some cases, perhaps, the lesser may be the 'schoolmasters' to lead one on to the greater..."

First of all, obviously I need to start dropping "flagrant 'Hobson Jobson'" into my everyday speech, but second you must understand that Ambrose is not merely saying that what we consider evil is the killing of one person, while true evil is the killing of several -- de Raiz was (allegedly!) a mass murderer, but he was also (allegedly!) someone who did more than dabble in the Occult, and according to Ambrose true sin is an attempt to achieve saintliness -- and not necessarily of the Christian variety, but of the otherworldly and spiritual anyway -- through occult methods. Evil "is the infernal miracle as holiness is the supernal," he says.

With that in mind, and motivated by a desire to prove to Cotgrave that he is not simply mad, Ambrose lends the young man a book, a small green book, the contents of which make up the bulk of "The White People." Those contents are the nearly feverish, but not necessarily insane, ramblings of an unnamed girl, aged sixteen at the time of her writing, and her slow and gently sinister introduction to the occult world by her nurse. It is difficult to summarize this section, and if you already consider yourself a potential reader of "The White People" you may not want me to try, but over about thirty pages of dialogue-less and nearly paragraph-less prose, the girl speaks of great wonders hidden in dark woods, and of "something wonderful" she thinks she might have seen there, something that has fueled her writing because to see it again would prove that everything her nurse had told her in her early childhood was true, and that the memory she has of seeing the white people in the stream is a true one:

...I sat quite still and watched, and out of the water and out of the wood came two wonderful white people, and they began to play and dance and sing. They were a kind of creamy white like the old ivory figure in the drawing-room...They played together, and danced round and round the pool, and they sang a song till I fell asleep. Nurse woke me up when she came back, and she was looking something like the lady had looked, so I told her all about it, and asked her why she looked like that. At first she cried, and then she looked very frightened, and turned quite pale.
What's so unusual about "The White People" is that Machen uses the imagery of fairy tales, of actual fairies and worlds of people hidden inside a forest, basically unaltered, to bring across his horror. There are no long teeth or splatters of blood, but there is lots of singing and dancing, lots of strange rituals, the girl mentions speaking "the words" or making gestures with her hands, symbols in the air, the specifics of which she refuses to expound upon, and it is all so secret, and so apart from what we perceive as reality, that a surprising amount of dread builds as the story moves along relentlessly. Not only is the imagery like a fairy tale, the prose comes to mirror it, too, as the girl recounts stories her nurse told her (stories that being "Once on a time" or "In the time of the fairies"), stories that anyone might have heard as a child, but which Machen makes us believe might contain the true history of our planet:

And soon it was quite dark, and the sky was black, without a single star shining in it, and the stag went away into the darkness. And though the man had brought his gun with him he never shot the stag...And they went through the enormous woods, and they swam across rivers, and they waded through black marshes where the ground bubbled, and the air was full of will-o'-the-wisps...

Portions of "The White People" take on the form of a child telling a tale, transtioning almost every event and thought with "and" or "then", and in fact that is what much of "The White People" actually is, but instead of wonder or beauty and thrilling adventure, and despite the girl often referring to things as "wonderful" and "beautiful", somehow we know that enormous, unknowable evil, evil as a root of existence, like water or the human mind, is the thread that connects everything.

This is what the opening conversation between Ambrose and Cotgrave accomplishes, among other things -- it somehow makes what follows horrible, instead of merely curious, with hints of interesting shadows. It makes the fairy world terrifying almost by simply stating up front that the reader should find it so.

The epilogue to "The White People" finds Ambrose and Cotgrave together again, the latter returning the book, and we learn more about the girl's life subsequent to what is recounted in the book. I won't say what, although there is some level of safe assumption involved here, but the kicker is an ambiguous phrase Ambrose uses to describe the girl's current known status that is really compelling and insinuating and more than likely awful, if we knew what she knew, which we don't, and thank God for that.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 28: Tell Me Tales of Inconceivable Fear and Unimaginable Love

Clark Ashton Smith began his literary career as a poet, and despite devoting much of his writing life to horror and fantasy fiction, it would have to be said that he remained so by inclination. His mentor was a man named George Sterling, who, when Smith first turned his attention to fantastic stories, applauded his efforts, but said:
.
I don't advise you to devote much time to such things...the mind of man begins to smile at anything that is inherently absurd and outdated. Your faculties are far too fine to be wasted on such vacua...
.
...You have squeezed every drop from the weird (and what drop!) and should touch on it only infrequently, as I on the stars. The swine don't want pearls: they want corn; and it is foolish to hope to change their tastes.
.
Horror fans! We never get an ounce of credit! But, okay, I can't blame him.
.
For the above chunk of background, I borrowed liberally from the story notes written by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, editors of the new five-volume edition of Clark Ashton Smith's collected stories. These are truly lovely volumes put out by Night Shade Books, and have provided me with my first taste of the fiction of Smith, about whom Gene Wolfe has said:
.
Let us pause briefly to notice that although Lovecraft has had many imitators (he is in fact quite easy to imitate) and [Robert E.] Howard more than a few, no one imitates Smith. There could be only one writer of Clark Ashton Smith stories, and we have had him.
.
So it would seem. Having now read some of Smith's work, even if only the tiniest fraction, it seems very easy to not only trace certain influences, but also more or less coincidental similarities to contemporaries like Lovecraft, Smith's fiction is very much on its own, and the primary reason would be his style. I'll admit right off the bat that I already feel like I'm talking out of my ass, given how little I've read -- the truth is I would have read more, but time was unusually restricted today (I particularly regret not being able to fit in the stories "The Abominations of Yondo" and -- especially, because the title is so striking -- "A Murder in the Fourth Dimension"). Even so, I was immediately struck by Smith's writing, and instantly grateful to Connors, Hilger and Night Shade for refusing to let Smith sink, forgotten, into history, as so many other genre writers, good and bad, already have.
.
All the fiction I read today comes from The End of the Story, volume one of this collection, and the main story I read is, indeed, called "The End of the Story" -- a rather curious and interesting title, it now occurs to me -- which, as a piece of plot-work, is very conventional. The reader is told right away that...
.
The following narrative was found among the papers of Christophe Morand, a young law-student of Tours, after his unaccountable disappearance during a visit at his father's home near Moulins, in November, 1789...
.
Morand's tale concerns his attempted journey home to visit his father. He is waylaid by a storm, and forced to seek shelter at a nearby monastery in the (fictional) region of Averoigne. There he meets a highly gregarious monk named Hilaire, who instantly befriends Morand, offers him food, a bed, and access to the monastery's vast library, which includes "the finest works of heathendom and Christendom, even...certain unique writings that survived the holocaust of Alexandria."
.
Not only that, but Hilaire offers Morand -- a young scholar and lawyer -- the opportunity to read "an unknown dialogue of Plato", "two lost tales of Miletus", and so on. There is also a strange little six-page manuscript that immediately sparks Morand's interest, but about which Hilaire says:
.
"There is a curse on the pages that you hold in you hand...Christophe, there are things beyond your understanding, things that it were not for you to know. The might of Satan is manifestable in devious modes, in diverse manners; there are other temptations than those of the world and the flesh, there are evils no less subtle than irresistible, there are hidden heresies, and necromancies other than those which sorcerers practice."
.
He further implores Morand not to read the manuscript -- comes just short of forbidding him, in fact -- which, of course, makes it far more likely that Morand will read it, which he does.
.
What he reads is a short account of the mysterious fate of Gerard, Comte de Venteillon, who, on the eve of his marriage, disappeared -- a point that puts me in mind of Shirley Jackson's "The Daemon Lover". The gist is, in the forest near his home, Gerard meets a "half-human creature with hoofs and horns". Appalled by the image, as a Christian, Gerard demands that the creature speak for itself...
.
Laughing wildly in the twilight, the bizarre being capered before him, and cried:
.
"I am a satyr, and your Christ is less to me than the weeds that grow in your kitchen-middens...
.
"Stay, Gerard de Venteillon, and I will tell you a secret, knowing which, you will forget the worship of Christ, and forget your beautiful bride of tomorrow, and turn your back on the world and on the very sun itself with no reluctance and no regret."
.
The satyr does tell him the secret, and Gerard does turn his back on everything, making his way not towards his bride but to the mysterious ruins of the Chateau des Faussesflammes (literally "House of False Flames"). These ruins, Morand believes (correctly), might well be the same ruins he's noticed on a hill near the monastery. And, of course, he's drawn to them himself.
.
The evil in this story is as ancient as that found in Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan", and, of course, it is quite intriguing how Machen's story hangs over so much horror fiction that came after, particularly the fiction I've read this month. Not only are there mysterious satyrs in Smith's forest, but Pan is mentioned in Laird Barron's "The Imago Sequence" ("The panpipes went wild") -- sorry I forgot to mention that one -- Machen himself was referred to in Mark Samuels's "The White Hands", and there is yet more to come. But Smith's belief and reliance on the ancient past for his source of evil seems somehow more genuine -- and don't forget, I really liked all those other stories. Perhaps this is due to Smith's vocabulary. Here, Morand reflects on his desire to visit the ruins near the monastery, despite the warnings that Hilaire has just given him:
.
Before he had finished speaking, a resolve had sprung to life full-born in my mind: I felt that I must go to the Chateau des Faussesflammes and learn for myself, if possible, all that could be learned. The impulse was immediate, overwhelming, ineluctable; and even if I had so desired, I could no more have fought against it than if I had so desired, I could no more have fought against it than if I had been the victim of some sorcerer's invultuation.
.
This language sounds like it was itself drawn from some ancient spellbook. I mean, "invultuation"? But it works. The language drew me back centuries, or more, to the time of the evil which Morand will soon face (though he won't quite see it as evil).
.
In another story I read, "The Epiphany of Death" (another title more intriguing after you've read the story than before), Theolus, the narrator discusses his strange relationship with a man named Tomeron. Tomeron thinks very highly of Theolus, but, while fascinated by him, Theolus's opinion of him is somewhat different:
.
Though he fascinated him at all times, there were occasions when my interest was not unalloyed with an actual sense of repulsion. At whiles, his pallor was too cadaverous, too suggestive of fungi that have grown in the dark, or of leprous bones by moonlight; and the stoop of his shoulders conveyed to my brain the idea that they bore a burden of centuries through which no man could conceivably have lived.
.
Later, the two enter a tomb where...
.
The air was increasingly dank, chill and miasmal; and mephitic shadows crouched or swayed before our torches in every niche and corner.
.
I didn't even know what "mephitic" meant until about five minutes ago, but I instantly knew I loved it. And it's such a crazy word, by the way, that even the definition includes the word "noisome".
.
I won't describe "The Epiphany of Death" beyond that -- it's a very short story that lives off its own language. If you're as taken with the examples I've provided above, then you probably already know that you want to read it. And, actually, the only other story, if it can be referred to as such, that I read today was a half-page piece of work called "To the Daemon" (there's that word, or rather that spelling, again). It's from there that I pulled the quote I used as the title for this post. One interesting detail about "To the Daemon", and its place in The End of the Story is that it's the only story in the book that doesn't get its own story notes from Connors and Hilger. It's almost as though they don't know where it came from -- perhaps it was found, old and dried out, in an old desk that belonged to Smith, the details of its discovery not unlike Morand's uncovering of the manuscript that sends him to the House of False Flames. "To the Daemon" begins:
.
Tell me many tales, O benign maleficent daemon, but tell me none that I have ever heard or have even dreamt of otherwise than obscurely or infrequently.
.
Perhaps it's a manifesto.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 13: We Are Not Saved

T. E. D. Klein is a curious figure in modern horror fiction. Considered one of the main talents of the 1980s, Klein only published two books that entire decade: a collection of novellas called Dark Gods and a novel called The Ceremonies. His reputation lies almost entirely on those two books, as well as a scattered series of short stories and novellas published in the decades since, most of which were eventually collected in an already rare book, after just two years, called Reassuring Tales.

I read Dark Gods a while back, and while I occasionally struggled with Klein's strained dialogue, he was very clearly a unique talent -- I remember being especially taken with "Neidelman's God" and "Children of the Kingdom" -- particularly coming along when he did. Had Klein emerged ten or fifteen years earlier, he would not seem quite so unusual, but hitting the scene in the 1980s, in the middle of the horror boom that allowed for more cheap trash to be published in the genre than anyone could ever possibly want to read, Klein's work seems like a last gasp of classicism in the genre. As I've tried to show this month, other modern writers have followed the same path as Klein, but finding their work takes real effort and, sometimes, a great deal of cash. Klein, on the other hand, existed in an insane market where anything called horror was thought of as a potential moneymaker. That boom almost killed the genre, but also allowed writers like Klein to exist.

One of Klein's best known stories is called "The Events at Poroth Farm" (not collected until Reassuring Tales, it can be more easily, and cheaply, found in editor S. T. Joshi's anthology American Supernatural Tales). Klein would expand the themes of this story into his long novel The Ceremonies, which I haven't read, but I was told by a highly reliable source, before I sat down to read "Poroth Farm", that the two works can be read as completely separate stories. Having now read "The Events at Poroth Farm", I believe that, had I the time (I don't), I would probably dive right into The Ceremonies, to see what else Klein can do with this material. The story is just that good.

At fifty pages, "The Events at Poroth Farm" is surprisingly simple, at least as a narrative. It is told largely in the form of a journal kept by Jeremy, a scholar of Gothic literature and other types of classic horror fiction, who has rented the guest house on a farm run by Mennonite couple named Sarr and Deborah Poroth. Jeremy has chosen to stay in this secluded area because he has a great deal of reading to do in preparation for the class in Gothic literature he will be teaching. Many of the journal entries begin, or at some point make reference to, the fiction Jeremy is devouring: Robert W. Chambers's The King in Yellow, Melmoth the Wanderer, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Algernon Blackwood's "Ancient Sorceries", Arthur Machen's "The White People" (which Jeremy says is "the most persuasive horror tale ever written"), and so on. This aspect of the story has the effect of impressing the reader with Klein's knowledge of the field, shaming the reader for not having read more, and adding a subtle chill to the sections where nothing much is happening. You're never fooled into thinking this is some other kind of story.

The journal tracks Jeremy's daily activity and relationship with the Poroths. Though a little looser than others in their Mennonite sect (they own a television, for instance), the Poroths are devout, a fact which nevertheless doesn't bother Jeremy, who is himself a skeptic. The three of them eat dinner together every night, talk, occasionally play games. Deborah is very outgoing, while Sarr is more shy and reserved in a way that Jeremy -- who Sarr does like, partly because his name is derived from "Jeremiah" -- seems to consider more in keeping with traditional Mennonite behavior. One other mild barrier in their relationship is the Poroth's seven cats, whom the couple dote on, but which Jeremy is allergic to.

One night, while out walking, Jeremy finds one of the cats, Bwada, dead in the grass:

She couldn't have been dead for long, since I'd seen her only a few hours before, but she was already stiff. There was foam around her jaws. I couldn't tell what happened to her until I turned over with a stick and saw, on the side that had lain against the ground, a gaping red hole that opened like some new orifice. The skin around it was folded back in little triangular flaps, exposing the pink flesh beneath. I back off in disgust, but I could see even from several feet away that the hole had been made from the inside.

Jeremy holds off on telling the Poroths, because Bwada was a favorite of Sarr's, and he, Jeremy -- who is something of a coward -- doesn't relish the idea of causing them, and then having to deal with their, grief. Later that night, however, Bwada walks in the front door. Considerably the worse for wear, it would seem, because he moves very slowly and clumsily, and never blinks. As the days go by, Bwada will also become increasingly vicious, not just towards its fellow cats, but to Jeremy and the Poroth's, as well.

This is a story in which nothing is seen very clearly, and the sounds heard in the night could have been made by any number of things. Jeremy has even rationalized Bwada's status as a living, as opposed to dead, cat. Bwada's death, or not, and ensuing rabid behavior, is, on the surface really the most dramatic and directly strange thing about this story for most of its length. Otherwise, the unease is built with extraordinary subtlety, out of the mundane: the dinners that Deborah cooks, which Jeremy generally thinks are delicious, become slightly less appealing; Jeremy finds himself drawn more towards the Poroths' TV, watching their "godawful" shows with them, and feeling embarrassed for doing so; and the Poroths' religious practices begin to make Jeremy feel a bit more uncomfortable than they initially did.

Jeremy also becomes more suspicious of the Poroths, and while his paranoia at first would seem to be justified, the reader clues in than the Mennonite couple is as faultless, and as harassed by strange encounters and unhappy thoughts as Jeremy. The separation of these characters, and the fact that everything is seen through Jeremy's eyes, highlights the quiet, gradual build of the horror. We don't really know what they're going through, and sometimes sense that Jeremy alone is hearing strange sounds at night, and even behaving in ways he can't quite explain. At one point, after reading Machen's story "The White People", Jeremy is walking from his room to the Poroths' house for dinner. He finds himself stopped by a tree in their yard, which he inexplicably climbs.

[I] stood upright on the great heavy branch near the middle, making strange gestures and faces that no one could see. Can't see exactly what it was I did, or why. It was getting dark -- fireflies below me and a mist rising off the field. I must have looked like a madman's shadow as I made signs to the woods and the moon.

Later, Jeremy will blame all of their misfortunes, his and the Poroths', on that moment of odd ritual, but whose to say what the Poroths have been doing, despite themselves, when Jeremy is not around? They're all in this together, but none of them realize it until it's too late.

The Poroths aren't Mennonites by accident, though their specific sect, or even their specific beliefs, are not at issue here. What matters is how old their beliefs are, how far back their religions extends, and how little good it does anyone. Nor is Jeremy's atheism much help to anybody. In Klein's story, as in Lovecraft and Machen and Blackwood and so many others, there is an evil far more powerful and far more ancient than any line of religious thought, pro or con, can stand against. The Poroths believe in another world, and in good and evil, and the power of prayer. Jeremy believes none of that, fancies himself more rational -- though his rationality also seems linked to his refusal to act on anything. Sarr Poroth, at least, is willing to try to hunt down his beloved, rabid -- evil, Sarr would say -- cat, while Jeremy can only bring himself to go along for the ride and, occasionally, go through the motions at burials.

None of it's any good, however. The events at Poroth farm are the cause of something they can't see, communicate with, or understand. Jeremy and the Poroths are only human, and, as such, completely powerless. They never knew what hit them.

--------------------------------------

Sorry for the brevity tonight. Klein's story deserves better, but a cold, and cold medicine, has rendered me surly and tired. I'll be back on track tomorrow. Hopefully.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 1: On the Brink of a Strange World

Along with M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, H. P. Lovecraft and others, Arthur Machen helped to carry the tradition of the ghost story from the 19th century into the 20th, and expand that subgenre of horror into the much broader field of “weird fiction”. Defining what weird fiction is exactly is difficult, as it seems initially to have been simply an early version of the frankly more boring phrase “horror fiction”, but the phrase has survived, to some degree, until the present day, and is distinguished from “horror fiction”, in my experience, by its focus on ancient and cosmic terrors that can’t be easily labeled. Even Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones, which have names and certain common physical characteristics, by which I mean tentacles, represent something greater than their individual members – Yog-Sothoth is bad enough simply because he’s Yog-Sothoth, but when you remember that he also functions as “the Gate” and comes from outer space, the mysterious black horror of it all is liable to make you choke on terror and then jump out a window.

Arthur Machen’s most famous story is intriguingly titled The Great God Pan, and it follows a variety of characters as they find clues, catch glimpses of, and investigate the possible sources of a world, and an evil, beyond what we consider reality. The first set of these characters is made up of Dr. Raymond, a scientist preparing a horrible experiment which he believes will prove the existence of this other world beyond the veil of our own; Clarke, Raymond’s friend and reluctant witness to the experiment; and Mary, Raymond’s guinea pig. Mary’s true last name is never revealed, but she has taken the surname “Raymond” as her own. As Dr. Raymond explains, in response to Clarke’s concerned mutterings: “As you know, I rescued Mary from the gutter, and from almost certain starvation, when she was a child; I think her life is mine to use as I see fit.”

The experiment itself is never fully described, but Raymond does say that it includes a tiny incision in Mary’s brain. He believes that if this experiment, and chiefly the incision, is successful, Mary will be able to see beyond our world, which Raymond considers nothing more than a mask over true reality, into the realm of true existence. As he explains to Clarke:

There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision, beyond these “chases in Arras, dreams in a career,” beyond them all as beyond a veil. I do not know whether any human being has ever lifted that veil; but I do know, Clarke, that you and I shall see it lifted this very night from before another’s eyes. You may think all this strange nonsense; it may be strange, but it is true, and the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan.

The experiment is both a success and a failure. Raymond is convinced that Mary has seen the Great God Pan, but as a result of that vision she has been rendered a grinning, vacant idiot. Deeply disturbed by this outcome, as well as by his own strange dream, which he experienced during a drowsiness brought on by the fumes of Dr. Raymond’s mysterious preparations, Clarke retreats not only to his own home, but away from one of his primary interests, which is studying and collecting supposedly true stories relating to the occult and the darkly supernatural. He keeps this collection of newspaper clippings, notes from personal conversations, and the like in a file which he calls “Memoirs to Prove the Existence of the Devil.” But, while his wish is to retreat from this part of his life, he is, over the years that have passed since Raymond’s experiment, drawn back to it, and among his collection he finds a story that was told to him by a friend involving two girls, a Helen V. and a Rachel M. (“since deceased”) as well as a young boy named Trevor W., who went mad after seeing what young Helen V. was doing in the forest with a “strange naked man”, whom afterward Trevor seems to still see in visions, and who he anxiously refers to as “the man in the wood.”

Interestingly, the part of England in which the story of Helen V. took place, which is never named, has a history that stretches back to the days of ancient Roman conquest. The forest where Trevor sees the man in the wood is just off “Roman Road”, and in the house where poor Trevor faces his final breakdown, a house in which Trevor’s father needed to conduct some business, there was a stone head “of grotesque appearance” which had been excavated on the grounds during extensive remodeling. Experts had pegged the head as being carved during the Roman period, and, according to archeologists who’d studied it, the face had features resembling those “of a faun or satyr.” Which is, of course, what the god Pan was. He was also a Roman god, so when you take those facts and add them to the “strange naked man” Trevor claims to have seen in the forest, and you have to think that the phrase Dr. Raymond used, “seeing the god Pan”, wasn’t quite as metaphorical in nature as it appeared.

All of the above is related in the first fifteen pages of a fifty-plus page story – we go on to learn of strange murders, stranger suicides, and moral corruption at all levels of London society, as tracked by a pair of English gentlemen named Villiers (who knows Clarke) and Austin. We also learn more about poor Mary Raymond, and what has become of her. How this all ties into Raymond’s experiments and the story of Helen V. is as clear as it needs to be, without offering, or needing, a strong explanation. Such was the nature, and the power of the classic weird story – though Villiers and Austin learn much that is horrifying beyond reason about the lives and histories of the people they investigate, neither is willing to actually speak of these things out loud. Many people claim that this method of withholding the worst of the horrors has the result of forcing the readers to use their imaginations, to create the horrors for themselves, but I find that my own imagination – which can run to the dark and nasty if the situation calls for it – is often not up to the task. If Villiers refuses to speak of what he’s learned, then maybe, I think, what he’s learned is beyond my capacity to imagine. If he can’t even say it, maybe I can’t even think it, and the true depths of this ancient evil begins to be understood, in the same way that I understand that the universe is really, really huge.

Among the more interesting aspects of this more narrative-driven section of the story are the occasional references to the Jack the Ripper murders. For instance, the bulk of the story that concerns Villiers and his investigations centers around a rash of bizarre, inexplicable, yet apparently connected suicides perpetrated by several members of the upper class. In describing the terror and confusion that follow these deaths, Machen writes:

The police had been forced to confess themselves powerless to arrest or to explain the sordid murders of Whitechapel; but before the horrible suicides of Piccadilly and Mayfair they were dumbfounded, for not even the ferocity which did duty as an explanation of the crimes of the East End, could be of service in the West.

This passage puts me in mind of the famous line written by an English journalist, writing for the Southern Guardian (and unnamed, as far as I can tell) in the midst of the Ripper murders: “We are face to face with some mysterious and awful product of modern civilization.” Machen seems to be at once following a similar line of thought and reversing its direction, as well as denying its bleak optimism. The context of the line from the Southern Guardian was a plea by the writer to have the brain of Jack the Ripper studied so as to better understand how and why these vicious murders, committed free of any readily understandable motive, could have happened. The fact that the Ripper was never caught knocks down the most obvious of the journalist’s two optimistic goals, and Machen knocks down, in the philosophical sense, the other. Unexplainable evil cannot be rendered explainable simply by understanding its place in history. The evil of The Great God Pan is being felt in England in 1890 (when the story was first published, just two years after the Ripper murders ended), but its source is at least thousands of years old. Machen had the hindsight that the writer for the Southern Guardian didn’t have, and the perspective afforded by the knowledge that Jack the Ripper was actually never caught. Two years on, it feels as though the hope of understanding why someone would disembowel, decorate and make off with organs from Whitechapel prostitutes seemed hopelessly naïve to Machen. Unless you’re the one with the knife, you will never truly understand it, and trying to do so might just drive you mad.

As is my nature, I’ve focused more on any passing reference to Jack the Ripper (more on him another day) I can get my hands on than on what Machen’s story is more directly about, which, apart from the potential cosmic abomination that the natural world as we know it is just a thin shield against, but also encroaching, amoral, Earthly decadence. The Great God Pan is one of the key pieces of decadent literature, standing just inside the shadow of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. In both stories, the decadence that our protagonists either witness or take part in is never explicitly described, but they, or others, are often seen stumbling away from the aftermath as gibbering madmen, determined to end their own lives, or fully turned onto the black path themselves. Not to bring him up again, but if simply being present for the most vile of debauches is what it takes to crave your own brand, what in the world could Jack the Ripper have seen?