September meetup - Arthur Machen: "The Great God Pan" and other stories
Details
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Arthur Machen (1863 - 1947) was a Welsh author and mystic of the 1890s and early 20th century. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction and has been recognized as a key contributor to the glittering age of British Decadence. His novella "The Great God Pan" has garnered a reputation as a classic of horror (Stephen King has called it "Maybe the best [horror story] in the English language"). Contemporary admirers included Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Aleister Crowley, and Machen went on to exercise immense influence among figures as diverse as H.P. Lovecraft, Alan Moore, and Guillermo Del Toro.
This month we will read three short works by Machen:
"The Great God Pan"
"The Novel of the Black Seal"
"The White People"
"The Great God Pan" -- A doctor performs an experiment on a young woman that goes horribly wrong, and a series of increasingly strange events follow.
Free online text: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/389/pg389-images.html
Free audiobook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GW2q07Z8qeo
"The Novel of the Black Seal" -- An account of a hidden society of malevolent 'Little People', the survivors of ancient days.
Free online text: https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601861h.html
Free audiobook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmcWZ4fx7a8
"The White People" -- Two men discuss the nature of evil. One of them produces the diary of a dead girl, which describes in vivid detail her slow entry into an ancient world of ritualistic magic.
Free online text: https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601371h.html
Free audiobook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiIC1RwGT2s
For Bonus Book Club Points, ambitious readers may read any other stories or novels by Machen.