Friday, November 12, 2004

Something a Little Different

Now and then a guy (well, this guy) needs to read something that's not like anything else he's been reading for a while. And when my bookshelves collapsed, I located several books that filled the bill.

One of them was Volume One of Tales of Horror and the Supernatural by Arthur Machen. "The God Pan" is the first story (or novella) in the book, and it was just what I was looking for. One character in the story mentions that it's like a set of Chinese boxes, one inside the other, and that's exactly what it is. In fact, the "story" is really a number of stories that seem at first to have only tenuous connections, but as you read farther you begin to see that there's a connection, sure enough. The horror is subtle, not the gross-out kind. Machen isn't one of those writers who spell things. He gives a few details, then leaves the rest up to the reader's imagination. It's a technique that works very well in "The God Pan." And also in "The Inmost Light." These are two of Machen's most famous works, and they certainly worked for me.

Machen isn't exactly a househould name these days, and one of the entertaining things (to me) about reading stories like these is that you can easily imagine that nobody else in the whole country is reading them or has even thought of them in years.

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