Tales of Horror and the Supernatural

✍ Scribed by Machen, Arthur

• Book ID: 109153555
• Publisher: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks08/0800651.txt
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 317 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

Overview: The stories in this volume concern the interpenetration between the material world and ‘the world on the other side of the dark curtain’. Drawn from the beginning and the end of Arthur Machen’s literary career, all these works reflect the author’s absorption with the wondrous, the uncanny and the unknown. If the reader so desires, these tales can be regarded as nothing more than bizarre and baroque entertainments—supernatural thrillers to set the pulse racing on nights by the winter fireside—but all possess a philosophical dimension and a genuine artistic creed. Sensational as some of them are, the best of Machen’s fantasy stories transcend the humble genre of the shocker and aspire to high art. Their uniqueness in literature led Vincent Starrett, Machen’s earliest champion, to acclaim him ‘a novelist of the soul’, an explorer of heights and depths undreamed of by writers of greater renown.