Overview

Arthur Machen (1863-1947), born Arthur Llewellyn Jones, was a prolific Welsh mystic and author whose supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction shaped the spiritual unease of the fin de siècle. Framed by a fireside chat on the nature of true evil, Machen's ""The White People"" is a liturgy of lost innocence and occult initiation, spiraling inward through a reading of a child's green-bound diary - where fairy stories become rites and the woods teem with a nurse's whispered catechisms. The nurse, a shadowy midwife of mystery, ushers the girl into a world where pagan ecstasies masquerade as play and spiritual trespass is cloaked in the language of wonder. Machen's horror lies not in what is seen, but in what is sanctified: a sensed labyrinth where purity becomes peril, theology inverts, and the sacred is subtly profaned. As the girl writes toward a supreme revelation, the mystery consumes - and what remains is a shadow that was never hers alone.

Full Product Details

9798900750163

Table of Contents

Reviews

""A masterpiece of indirection, a Lovecraft plot told by James Joyce."" -S.T. Joshi, The Weird Tale ""This document is probably the finest single supernatural story of the century, perhaps in the literature."" -E.F. Bleiler, The Guide to Supernatural Fiction ""If I were to list the greatest supernatural short stories of all time, I would start with Arthur Machen's 'The White People, ' about a young girl's unknowing initiation into an ancient, otherworldly cult."" -Michael Dirda, The Washington Post ""Machen's gift has aways been exceptional, both as to the imagination behind all his writing and his capable handling of English prose."" -Evening Standard ""Lovers of the occult and the horrible will find much to their liking."" -Boston Evening Transcript ""Machen's narrative, a triumph of skilful selectiveness and restraint, accumulates enormous power as it flows on in a stream of innocent childish prattle . . . a masterpiece of fantastic writing, with almost unlimited power in the intimation of potent hideousness and cosmic aberration."" -H.P. Lovecraft ""There is a great deal that is clever in Mr. Arthur Machen's book and not a little that is creepy. He has the true art of the storyteller."" -The Newcastle Daily Chronicle ""It is an amazing brew that Mr. Machen has mixed. Take all the pseudo-science of the ancients, all the excesses of the frantic heathen, all the monkish superstitions, all the notions of the spiritualists, the theosophists, and the cults that lie back of their cult, and stir them together with a long, long spoon, savoring the modern reverence for the scientific and enriching with a manner that Joseph Conrad or Louis Stevenson might admire."" -Elia W. Peattie, The Chicago Daily Tribune

Author Information

Tab Content 6

Countries Available