Product Description

Born in Wales in 1863, Machen was a London journalist for much of his life.Among his fiction, he may be best known for the allusive, haunting title story of this book, &"The White People", which H.P. Lovecraft thought to be the second greatest horror story ever written (after Blackwood's "The Wilows"). This wide ranging collection also includes the crystalline novelette "A Fragment of Life", & "The Angel of Mons" (a story so widely reported that it was imagined true by millions in the grim initial days of the Great War), and "The Great Return" telling of the stately visions which graced the Welsh village of Llantristant for a time. Four more tales and the poetical "Ornaments in Jade" are all finely told. This is the second Machen volume edited by S. T. Joshi and published by Chaosium. The first volume was The Three Impostors.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #165837 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 292 pages

Customer Reviews

Another excellent collection of weird stories from this Welsh master
This is the second book in the series of three from Chaosium where S. T. Joshi has edited a collection of what he finds to be Arthur Machen's best and most memorable weird tales. I was very much looking forward to reading this, since I for years had heard of Lovecraft's judging Machen's tale "The White People" to be the second best weird tale in existence (after Blackwood's "The Willows"). I was certainly not disappointed!

The introduction by Joshi is as always interesting and informative. The book starts out with another tale from his cycle about the "Little People"; "The Red Hand". A fine detective tale with a major twist, a splendid tale which is also quite creepy. Then comes the pleasant surprise of a cycle of prose-poems known as "Ornaments in Jade". These short "stories" were very much to my taste, and they all have a kind of dreamy and vaguely creepy character.

The title tale "The White People" appears, which is a bit of a strange tale. It's told like little scraps from a young girl's diary, and chronicles her initiatory upbringing by a peculiar nanny, and small experiences from her young life. Another very creepy tale. The prose is, as in everything I've read by Machen, exquisite, and he really had me believing it was a genuine diary. The pages fly by, and I heartily concur with Lovecraft's judgment that it is a marvellous tale, even though I'd say a lot of Lovecraft's own writing is just as fine.

The rest of the book consists of the fine but mundane tale about the famous "Bowmen", that millions believed was a genuine field report from WW1 about angels on the battlefield. Apart from this the rest of the tales are fine material, but all of the marred in some way by Machen's rather conventional Catholic Christianity, which to me personally really ruins the endings of quite a few of his tales.

That being said, this volume does contain some of the best weird tales I've ever read, and I heartily recommend it.

A Refreshing Change
I often find myself drawn to the explicit- gore and carnage, ala Bentley Little and Richard Laymon, so the sublety of Machen's writing was quite a departure for me. The style is quite beautiful- this is a talented writer whose prose will sweep you away with its pure visual beauty.

You will not grasp the entire sequence of events first in these tales, you may have to read them a second time, but that is a pleasure given the author's pleasing style. Perhaps it is time to take a break from the overt that is so prevalent in books and films today, and return to a kinder, gentler time where what is not said can be even more horrifying than what is thrown in your face. This is Machen.

Too Dry, Too Mundane
Other reviews are longer and more in-depth. This is meant as a quickie.

Too many of these stories are short (three pages) and rather limp. I prefer stories that are either longer (more development) or harder-hitting (with action/horror/experimental text/uniqueness/something!).

And unlike the first volume in this series, the language is dry. When combined with the more mundane subject matter, this book does not merit the four stars I gave "The Three Impostors".

Worth three stars out of five.