Between Two Worlds
The Weird Tales of Arthur Machen
Wordsworth Editions has just revived their Mystery & Supernatural series after being moribund for a few years. The new book is Arthur Machen's Between Two Worlds which just came out a couple months ago.
Arthur Machen (1863-1947) was a Welsh writer of weird fiction that was very influential. You see his ideas all over H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. H. P. Lovecraft wrote of Machen:
“Of living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few if any can hope to equal the versatile Arthur Machen.”
Machen was a writer associated with the 1890s though he produced into the 1930s. He knew Oscar Wilde.
A problem has been getting a good collection of Machen's fiction. The local library had Tales of Horror and the Supernatural (1948) which I read. Pinnacle Books had a trade paperback edition of that collection in 1983. Chaosium had three collections edited by Sunand Tryambak Joshi about 20 years ago. There is a Penguin collection also edited by Joshi available. The odd part is Joshi has trashed Machen in surveys of weird fiction. The Penguin collection also leaves out a fair amount of weird Machen. Tales of Horror and the Supernatural leaves out some good stories.
Between Two Worlds is 592 pages. Dimensions are 7.75 x 5 inches. Wordsworth has shrunk their trade paperbacks a little in height and length. Cost is $9.99.
There is a fine introduction on Machen by Stephen Carver. He covers Machen's life and influence on later writers.
Contents:
Strange Story of a Red Jar
The Autophone
A Double Return
The Lost Club
The Great God Pan
The Inmost Light
The Shining Pyramid
Novel of the Black Seal
Novel of the Iron Maid
Novel of the White Powder
The Red Hand
The White People
The Bowmen
The Soldiers’ Rest
The Monstrance
The Great Return
Out of the Earth
The Terror
The Happy Children
Ornaments in Jade:
-The Rose Garden
-The Turanians
-The Idealist
-Witchcraft
-The Ceremony
-Psychology
-Torture
-Midsummer
-Nature
-The Holy Things
Opening the Door
The Bright Boy
The Children of the Pool
The Exalted Omega
Out of the Picture
Change
The Cosy Room
N
The Dover Road
Ritual
Appendix: Introduction to The Bowmen
As you can see, this collects all the Machen you will need. The book is also Joshi free. You will find the idea of dwarf troglodytes that Robert E. Howard made use of in stories including “Children of the Dark,” “Worms of the Earth,” and “People of the Dark.”
Wordsworth Editions are a great, inexpensive way to build a library of early weird and horror fiction. You can get H. P. Lovecraft in four volumes, M. R. James, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Poe, and various Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories. I highly recommend the E. F. Benson volume Night Terrors. Benson has become one of my favorite weird writers since it was given as a gift to me. I have been told the next Wordsworth volume will a collection of Algernon Blackwood.
Thanks for the review. I have a copy of the 1948 edition of Tales of Horror and the Supernatural. I had not heard of E.F. Benson and am now interested in checking him out, based on your recommendation.
I have a copy of Joshi’s two-volume Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction. Your review prompted me to take that off the shelf and check out Joshi’s write-ups of Machen and Benson. Joshi, a leftist and militant atheist, trashes Machen over his worldview. He doesn’t like Machen’s Christian beliefs, his mysticism, or his Victorian attitudes towards illicit sex.
Joshi is actually quite complementary towards Benson. He rates Benson second only to M.R. James as the greatest ghost story writer of the early Twentieth Century. He rates “The Man Who Went Too Far” as Benson’s best story. Like his jabs at Machen, Joshi also takes a few potshots at Benson over his spiritual beliefs.
If Wordsworth has a newsletter or something like that, I'm looking into it. I'm a fan of Machen and Blackwood (as well as Lovecraft, James and Bierce) at least in part due to what Joshi has written about them.
The fact that Joshi has written extensively also about atheism, agnosticism and human rights has made me clear about why he might resent overt religion in other authors' works.
A good "Joshi-free" collection is the "The Great God Pan and Other Stories", published by Oxford University Press in 2018.