The Great God Pan And The Hill Of Dreams

I had trouble understanding the hype around The Great God Pan and the reverence the old horror / weird fiction masters like Lovecraft have for it, but The Hill of Dreams was a beautiful coming of age story, which brought Machen's Monmouthshire world to life vividly for me.

Excellent novellas, sub-par edition. The cover is horribly pixelated - there are so many high-res images of Pan available online, and the cover looks like a 64 kb jpeg. Embarrassing. It was the cheapest option available, however; one gets that for which one pays. There are some minor errors in the text, as well.I bought the book for the Great God Pan, but, since it's novella length, most editions come with other stories included. The story is a masterpiece, best experienced with a little bit of context - it was released during the Yellow Nineties, part of a literary movement in England that produced horror stories in spite of Victorian obscenity laws. Adult-oriented material was restricted under yellow paper wrapping in the bookstores - hence, the Yellow Nineties.In Pan, most of the disturbing material is implied, and left to the interpretation of the audience to deduce what 'happened.' The arrangement of the chapters ('fragments'), which jump around in time and space, makes this task slightly more difficult for the reader. The beauty of the natural world is contrasted with the impartiality/malevolence of its masters; the classical figure of male generative power / primal nature, Pan, becomes the metaphor for enlightenment ("Seeing the Great God Pan"), and terror befalls the feeble human minds who master his secrets. The darker side of Greek myth and Roman history pervade the recesses of Victorian society, and the bodies begin to pile up - mysteriously, on their own accord.The story heavily influenced generations of horror authors to come, although it's now fallen into relative obscurity.

In reading a survey of decadent literature, I encountered the name of The Hill of Dreams, which I had never heard of. It is not an easy read. Some of the paragraphs are as thick and dense as Proust. Because "dreams" is in the title, we have to be aware that much of what the narrator is telling us is probably a dream. We follow Lucian in his desire to be a writer, to make something of himself as he grows up in his little town in Wales and yearns for a career in London. What really happens versus what he might be fantasizing is sometimes hard to tell. To see a paragraph of marathon length (pages 136-39) can be quite intimidating, but if you force yourself to plow through it, you will be rewarded. Some of the more nightmarish imagery is decadent, I'll agree. The book begins with a short story, The Great God Pan. It is part mystery, part Gothic story-within-a-story. It was a lot easier to read than The Hill of Dreams, which I will agree needs to be read by anyone interested in the decadent literature of the Edwardian era.Arthur Machen is not that well-known, but he deserves to be.

While the prose was thick at times, the uneasiness and creeping horror of this series still haunts me. This type of "sunlit horror" is achieved in very few books. The Haunting of Hill House and Turn of the Screw are the notable exceptions. The description of the incident in the Roman Hill Fort shows what the subtle and indirect Victorian prose, when left to the reader's imagination, can create on the page. It was disturbing to readers in his time, and I find it still disturbing. Quite different from modern "porn-horror".

I was particularly surprised by The Hill of Dreams, which I knew nothing about. While I think it is a masterpiece, I have to recognize that it will mainly appeal to writers and those obsessed with literature as art. While The Great God Pan is indeed a frightening little story, The Hill of Dreams is more about literary obsession. Read it if you are an author yourself. You will definitely relate to the obsession of Lucian.

The product arrived as advertised. No issues there. Unfortunately, I was less enthusiastic about the story itself. But that isn't the issue here.

I seldom read fiction, but I found "The Great God Pan" riveting. The premise was interesting and there was a wonderful build-up of tension. I could not put the novella down before I finished it.

Read slowly and get lost in the story. Maybe have to read a couple of times to grasp the change and cadence of the language but a lot of fun.

'The Great God Pan', probably the best known of Machen's 'weird' stories, is a classic tale of horror, one that you just have to read. 'The Hill of Dreams' is a very different type of story. Of novella length, it is an extremely emotional tale about the youth and development of a genuine outsider, and his attempt to become a great author. It is clearly a very deeply-felt piece of work, with considerable autobiographical input, and it contains some very powerful and imaginative writing.This particular edition is very minimalist, in that it contains no introduction, and virtually no notes, which is fine, but some might prefer to seek a version that provides a bit of extra information. As with other works by Machen, there are some typos and spelling errors. I think this is because the works are taken from old printings; this is no big deal, but maybe a properly edited version will appear one day.

"The Great God Pan" - echoes of "Frankenstein" and "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" written through a filter of 1890's decadence and aestheticism. It's an early story by Machen and a little disjointed. Too much reliance in reporting actions "off-stage" yet it has its eeffective moments and you can certainly see the influence on HP Lovecraft all the way through to "Rosemary's Baby"."The Hill Of Dreams" is the far greater story, albeit too long and in need of judicious editing. What struck me was was its affinity with Knut Hamsun's "Hunger" and the works of Hermann Hesse - a novel of alienation and being the Outsider. Lucian Taylor's fate - a dreamer of high ideals finally brought low by poverty, an inability to manage in the everyday world, isolation leading to mental breakdown and death. Machen's descriptions of the "hell" of dismal and decaying streets of late Victorian London are superb - quite expressionistic - and brought to mind the contemporary paintings of Walter Sickert. The final pages are very moving.

This book presents Machen's first horror tale and first novel."The Great God Pan" is one of Machen's best horror tales and was the first work to bring him to the (unfavourable) attention of critics and public in 1894. It shocked victorian readers for its decadent themes and sexual connotations, although a modern reader cannot help feeling that the author is indeed too reticent in describing the events. The subject of the tale is about the existence of a wild and essentially evil entity, personified by the Greek God Pan, and the horrible consequences caused when the doors that normally keep it on a sphere separate from human existence are burst open. The tale is permeated by an intense undertone of horror."The Hill of Dreams" is a semi-biographical novel, written in 1896-7 and published in 1907. It represented a change of style and content to everything Machen had written until that moment and a successful attempt in establishing his own personal style. It relates the struggles of a lonely visionary boy, Lucian Taylor, against the social conventions of the Welsh countryside where he's from and, afterwards, against the odds of making a professional career as a man of letters in London. The story was conceived by Machen as a Robinson Crusoe's adventure of the soul, and is a profound transfiguration of reality through the lens of Lucian's mind (and ultimately the author's own). The ending is surprising and allusive, leading to the re-interpretation of all the previous chapters in a different light. Overall, the novel is to be praised for its remarkable originality and personal character, although the reading is somewhat heavy and tortous at times and the original core of the novel has been rather unbalanced by the overgrowth of subsidiary themes. A handful of scenes and ideas are very effective and evocative, showing the author at his best, and the finale is superb in its reticent character.

Despite reviews and various other critiques of his work, Machen is not weird. In fact both these stories are pretty boring. And this particular publication is full of strange editing errors. If you must read these, choose a different version.

book by Machen and of interest to all who know or have visited caerleon