The beauty of Helen Vaughan is not described in any detail, it is the effect of her beauty, its soul-corrupting voluptuousness, on others that is of interest to Machen. Only, in Machen’s case, the book speaks to Victorian anxieties about the sexual agency of women rather than the decadence of aesthetes.
Like Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Machen’s novella elides intense sexual allure with a secret undisclosed evil that lurks beneath the shimmering surface of physical beauty. Lovecraft described as a ‘cumulative suspense… with which every paragraph abounds’.Īt the heart of The Great God Pan is the mysterious figure of Helen Vaughan and the unholy fascination she exerts over the young, rich men of fin-de-siècle London. James – Machen does not shock his readers with gory descriptions of bloody violence, nor terrify with evocations of scary monsters red in tooth and claw but rather he works his dark magic by affecting a creeping sense of dread, with what his admirer H.P. Like his fellow masters of the supernatural – Edgar Allan Poe and M.R. As we continue our search for the Greatest Welsh Novel, Phil Morris nominates the classic horror/fantasy novella The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen.Īrthur Machen’s The Great God Pan opens with a mad scientist, Dr Raymond, performing a botched experiment in late-Victorian brain surgery on a young woman, Mary, who is rendered insane after being granted a momentary glimpse into the noumenal universe that exists beyond our own world of surface, though illusory, realities – and then it gets even stranger.
0 kommentar(er)
