A Must-Have Collection of Horror Classics
CGS Associate Professor of Rhetoric Aaron Worth has edited a new critical edition of horror classics by Arthur Machen: The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories (Oxford University Press, 2018). Machen, a nineteenth century horror writer, has influenced storytellers like H. P. Lovecraft and Oscar-nominated director Guillermo Del Toro. Publishers Weekly gave the book a starred review and deemed it “a must-have collection of landmark tales of horror.” For more on Aaron Worth’s new book, listen to his interview with Phil Rickman on BBC Radio Wales and read a review in the Times Literary Supplement. TLS reviewer Roz Kaveney says, “One of the impressive things about Machen is that, in his best work, he subverted genre tropes that were only just being created.”
CGS: What was your first introduction to Arthur Machen and why did his writing interest you?
Aaron Worth: I probably first saw his name in H. P. Lovecraft’s essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (he was one of Lovecraft’s big influences). Certainly I remember reading Machen for the first time: I was in high school, and the Concord Free Public Library had a copy (since stolen, I believe) of Philip Van Doren Stern’s great, early collection of Machen, “Tales of Horror and the Supernatural.” Back then I was more interested in the more egregiously horrific stories, the more “Lovecrafty” ones—like “The Great God Pan” and “The Novel of the White Powder,” which both feature bodies dissolving into melty black goo. Actually, I still like those.
What sets Machen apart from other Victorian writers and/or other horror writers?
Machen’s relation to his late-Victorian contemporaries is interesting. He could be very imitative—mimicking Robert Louis Stevenson’s style, for instance, and borrowing liberally from Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories—but the end product is something quite original, quite distinctive. One aspect of Machen’s writing that I always return to is its insistence on the undying importance of ritual, ceremony, and mystery to human beings, even in the modern age.
What is your favorite of Machen’s works?
I’m not sure about a favorite, but I’m very fond of the lesser-known prose poems he wrote in the 1890s, which were eventually published in book form as “Ornaments in Jade.” They are beautifully written, and hauntingly ambiguous.
What is new and different about this edition you’ve edited?
The big thing I wanted to do was to include the complete novel “The Three Impostors”—which has almost always had selected episodes cut out of it—along with the classic stories “The Great God Pan” and “The White People,” in a single critical edition. I was also able to include a number of the “Ornaments in Jade” mentioned above, which have not received their due in collections of Machen, along with some of his underrated stories from the 1930s. Machen’s writing career spanned over fifty years!
You write horror fiction yourself — most recently short stories in Cemetery Dance and Alliterate. Has Machen influenced or shaped your own work?
Probably—if nothing else, most of my stories seem to be set in the 1890s—but I haven’t really thought about it. I’m one of those folks with a superstitious aversion to thinking too much about the sources of his own inspiration!
The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories is part of the Oxford World Classics Hardback Collection. It will be available from Oxford University Press in March, 2018.