MacHen, Arthur

The Three Impostors and Other Stories: Vol. 1 of the Best Weird Tales of Arthur Machen (Call of Cthulhu Fiction)

Some of the finest horror stories ever written. Arthur Machen had a profound impact upon H.P. Lovecraft and the group of stories that would later become known as the Cthulhu Mythos. This first volume of Chaosium's Arthur Machen collection begins with the chilling "The Three Impostors" in its complete form, including the rarely seen sections "The Decorative Imagination" and "The Novel of the Iron Maid." Rounding out the first volume are "The Great God Pan," "The Inmost Light," and "The Shining Pyramid," all are excellent tales. Introduction by S.T. Joshi.

This book is part of an expanding collection of Cthulhu Mythos horror fiction and related topics. Call of Cthulhu fiction focuses on single entities, concepts, or authors significant to readers and fans of H.P. Lovecraft.

The White People and Other Stories: Vol. 2 of the Best Weird Tales of Arthur Machen (Call of Cthulhu Fiction)

Born in Wales in 1863, Machen was a London journalist for much of his life.Among his fiction, he may be best known for the allusive, haunting title story of this book, &"The White People", which H.P. Lovecraft thought to be the second greatest horror story ever written (after Blackwood's "The Wilows"). This wide ranging collection also includes the crystalline novelette "A Fragment of Life", & "The Angel of Mons" (a story so widely reported that it was imagined true by millions in the grim initial days of the Great War), and "The Great Return" telling of the stately visions which graced the Welsh village of Llantristant for a time. Four more tales and the poetical "Ornaments in Jade" are all finely told. This is the second Machen volume edited by S. T. Joshi and published by Chaosium. The first volume was The Three Impostors.

The Great God Pan and The Hill of Dreams

The Terror and Other Stories: Vol. 3 of The Best Weird Tales of Arthur Machen (Call of Cthulhu Fiction)

Arthur Machen - The Hill of Dreams, & The House of Souls

Two full-length novels combined in one book.

About the Author
Arthur Machen (1863-1947) was a Welsh journalist, novelist, and short story writer. He is best known for his supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. He translated several books from French including Memoirs of Casanova. His lively English style generated demand of his translated editions for many years. Many consider the novels The House of Souls and The Hill of Dreams to be his best work.

He was a close friend to the writer and occultist A. E. Waite. Through Waite’s influence, Machen joined athe Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. However, Machen’s involvement with the organization was not lasting. Machen investigated Celtic Christianity, the Holy Grail and King Arthur and wrote about those topics in Lord Alfred Douglas’s The Academy. He theorized that the legends of the Grail were based on rites of the Celtic Church. These ideas also featured strongly his novel The Secret Glory. This was first use in fiction of the idea of the Grail surviving into modern times. This idea has resurfaced in Dan Brown's writings and in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

The Three Impostors

He was pondering these problems one evening in a house of call in the Strand, and the obstinacy with which the persons he so ardently desired to meet hung back gave the modest tankard before him an additional touch of bitter. As it happened, he was alone in his compartment, and, without thinking, he uttered aloud the burden of his meditations. `How bizarre it all is!' he said, `a man walking the pavement with the dread of a timid-looking young man with spectacles continually hovering before his eyes. And there was some tremendous feeling at work, I could swear to that.'

The Great God Pan

"An incoherent nightmare of sex..." That was The Westminster Gazette's description of Arthur Machen's first book, The Great God Pan, upon its publication in 1894.

An unwittingly complimentary description for one of the greatest works of weird horror and decadence, in which Machen unfurls with his singular eye for the bizarre and macabre the tale of a young girl cursed by her unnatural parentage to become a creature of shape-shifting polysexual demi-human evil. Illustrated by Austin Osman Spare.

It was otherwise, however, when within three weeks, three more gentlemen, one of them a nobleman, and the two others men of good position and ample means, perished miserably in the almost precisely the same manner. Lord Swanleigh was found one morning in his dressing-room, hanging from a peg affixed to the wall, and Mr. Collier-Stuart and Mr. Herries had chosen to die as Lord Argentine.

Tales Of Horror And The Supernatural

'The Red Hand' and 'The White People'

This volume contains two of Arthur Machen's best stories: THE RED HAND, a murder mystery involving flint weapons, treasure and the chalking of a red hand upon a wall; and THE WHITE PEOPLE, a story thought by H.P. Lovecraft to be the second best horror tale ever written, which centers around a young girl's diary relating her encounters with the deadly inhabitants of an alternate world. "But I remember when I was five or six I heard them talking about me when they thought I was not noticing. They were saying how queer I was a year or two before, and how nurse had called my mother to come and listen to me talking all to myself, and I was saying words that nobody could understand. I was speaking the Xu language, but I only remember a very few of the words, as it was about the little white faces that used to look at me when I was lying in my cradle."

The Ghost-Ship - and Other Stories.

Richard Barham Middleton (October 28, 1882 - December 1, 1911) was a British poet, who is remembered mostly for his short stories, in particular The Ghost Ship an The Biography of a Superman. Other stories include;

A Drama of Youth, The New Boy, On the Brighton Road, A Tragedy In Little, Shepherd's Boy, The Passing of Edward, The Story of A Book, The Bird In The Garden, Children Of The Moon, The Coffin Merchant, The Soul of a Policeman, The Conjurer, The Poet's Allegory, And Who Shall Say----?, The Biography of a Superman, Blue Blood, Fate and The Artist, The Great Man, A Wet Day