Subscribe to Read | $0.00
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Read Anywhere and on Any Device!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
A collection of highs and lows, at least for me. Here are my impressions of the four short stories:A Fragment of Life - Dear me, I've rarely been so bored reading a story. It's got a dash of interesting hints of the fantastical peppered throughout, but it's 90% a story about a married couple considering what to do with a sum of money the wife got for a birthday a while back and other such domestic troubles. Sure, the husband of the pair has strange "vibes" now and then, but (view spoiler)[the st...
What a pity. This collection started really promising with the excellent Great God Pan, but then dwindled off to confusion and dullness.The Great God Pan - When two scientists perform surgery on a young woman to open the veil to another dimension, it opens a gateway to unimaginable horrors. An engaging and influential horror story.The Inmost Light- The mystery of the woman in the window. Good narration but disappointing ending.A Fragment of Life - This was a strange inclusion, and I really don't...
The Great God Pan and 'The White People' are classics of the horror genre, while The Inmost Light is more conventional, but still a damn good piece. A Fragment of Life, the only non-horror tale in the collection, has its tedious sections, but this proves to be intentional as a rendering of the ephemera of life drowning out the beauty. Machen's career, though rarely less than entertaining, eventually descended into lesser material going over the same ideas, but The House of Souls is one of his es...
"A Fragment of Life." Although the other tales are more famous, it was this one--its images and idea--that's stuck with me clearest since I first read this collection, a few years ago. The world beneath the world, the reality beneath convention and formula...If only I could find a way back to it too. I would take it no questions asked. (Was interested, then, to read in the introduction that Machen was told by more than one person that this was his best work.)"The White People." Interesting form:...
A must for fans of classic horror.A little hard to follow at times with the changing characters but worth the effort. I recommend this to writers of the horror genre as a staple in their pursuit of mastering the darker side of fiction.
The Great God Pan and The White People are basically perfect.
Hey, look! A book that's out of copyright and available on Project Gutenberg! Yay!"The House of Souls" contains four stories that may or may not take place in the same universe; the atmosphere and details sound very much like they might, but it's never explicitly stated."A Fragment of Life" (1904) is the first one, but I think I'd have preferred it to be the last. It's a long story about a young, newly wedded couple that receives a sum of money, invests nine tenths of it and debates how to spend...
I had been wanting to check out Arthur Machen's 1906 collection of short stories, entitled "The House of Souls," for quite some time; ever since I had read two highly laudatory pieces written about this work and its author. The first was H.P. Lovecraft's comments in his widely referred to essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature," in which he claims "Of living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few if any can hope to equal the versatile Arthur Machen." And, in Jones & New...
I can understand why Stephen King thought Machen was the best Writer of Horror.
I can see why Lovecraft would rate Machen's work so highly; these four stories are marked by a constant foreboding dread of the unknown and occult. "The Great God Pan" and "The Inmost Light" are standouts.
I enjoyed the writing style and language, but the lack (absence?) of plot and structure in the stories was difficult to get around.
