The White People and Other Weird Stories Read Free

upon myth and folklore in its exhibition of ghosts, vampires, werewolves, haunted houses, and other such elements, it can only do so at a time when these elements are generally believed to defy what are commonly understood to be the laws of nature; for only in this manner can they constitute the imaginative liberation that many writers and readers seek. At the same time, the best weird writers understood that supernatural motifs could serve as metaphors for the expression of truths about the human condition (the vampire as social outsider, for example) in a more vivid and pungent manner than in conventional mimetic realism.
    Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was a seminal figure in supernatural literature. He recognized that the novel was a poor vehicle for the conveyance of such a fleeting emotion as terror, and so he restricted the weird to the intensity of the short story; he also had a keen understanding of the psychology of fear, so that he was able to meld supernatural and psychological horror in a particularly potent manner. Subsequent to Poe, the most viable weird literature was embodied in short stories, and Machen, whose admiration of Poe was high, followed him in this regard.
    The later nineteenth century was a tremendously fertile period for weird writing, especially in England: Such writers as Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (“Green Tea,” “Carmilla”), Nathaniel Hawthorne (“Rappaccini’s Daughter”), Ambrose Bierce (“The Death of Halpin Frayser”), Rudyard Kipling (“The Mark of the Beast”), Robert Louis Stevenson ( The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ), Bram Stoker ( Dracula ), and a legion of ghost story writers made the supernatural a highly visible component of the literature of the period. Indeed, Machen was a harbinger of a kind of golden age of weird writing that encompassed such figures as Lord Dunsany (1878–1957), Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951), M. R. James (1862–1936), Walter de la Mare (1873–1956), and, a little later, H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937). Dunsany was predominantly a writer of fantasy—a literary mode where the author invents an entire world or cosmos out of his or her imagination, a mode whose best-known example today is J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954–55)—but the others worked chiefly in the supernatural. Machen, therefore, was working in a recognized literary genre when he produced his earliest tales.
    In “The Great God Pan” we are asked to believe that a scientific experiment performed upon a young woman of seventeen results in her “seeing” the Great God Pan; she instantly loses her mind and becomes an idiot. Some years thereafter a strange woman named Helen Vaughan plagues London society, causing a rash of suicides and destroying the lives of several prominent men about town. In the end we learn that Helen is in fact the daughter of the young woman, born nine months after the fateful experiment.
    Another scientific experiment is at the focus of “The Inmost Light,” written in 1892 and first published in 1894. Here we find that a doctor has persuaded his own wife to allow him to extract her soul and place it in a gem—the “inmost light” in that gem is her soul. The result is that the woman continues to live, but presents—like Helen Vaughan—a visage of mingled beauty and horror. One man who sees her in a window thinks of her as a “satyr.” To one of Machen’s conventional religiosity, a person without a (Christian) soul can only appear as a figure of pagan antiquity.
    â€œThe Shining Pyramid” (1895), although not included here, is worth discussing as one of Machen’s first expositions of what might be called his “Little People mythology.” Although it features a spectacularly potent scene in which the stunted, primitive denizens of Britain—now dwelling in caves, having been driven out by