I was so sure I was going to love this one, given the 'doomed artist' the synopsis featured, my love for this type of character, and my previous adoration with Machen's work.His writing was as lyrical as I remembered but whilst his words continued to haunt me, the actual story line did not. If anything, I felt the events could have been protracted for better horrifying appeal. Put simply, this is a novel about an individual finding themselves and although the mediums used to do so were extraordi...

#3 from the Library of the Lost group of books to read. I'll have to think this one through (I doubt I have the stamina to reread it) before I say anything of substance about it, but I do believe it is one of the most beautiful works I've ever read. Creepy and above all intense, but I can definitely see why it is often referred to Machen's masterpiece. More to come, but so very, very highly recommended for readers of weird, occult, and Decadence fiction. Chapter VII damn near did me in.

The Hill of Dreams follows the aesthete and dreamer Lucian Taylor as he loses himself in nature and mysticism that surrounds the small Welsh village of Caermaen where he grows up, and later as he moves to London to write a book and slowly descends into a strange hallucinatory world of his own creation.Part mystical exploration, commentary on a materialistic society and part autobiographical to Machen, The Hill of Dreams is a book unlike any other I have ever read. Lucian Taylor’s thoughts, dream...

The Hill of Dreams features Lucian Taylor, only child of an impoverished vicar, growing up in the small Welsh town Caermaen, based on real-life Caerleon. Even as a schoolboy Lucian’s isolated, preferring to spend his time buried in a book, avoiding his classmates who regard him as peculiar. When he’s not reading, Lucian wanders the local countryside where one day he experiences an otherworldly force, Machen only briefly suggests what that might be but for Lucian it’s something sensual that both

"There was a glow in the sky as if great furnace doors were opened." Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams It is the dreamiest of all novels, a metaphysical journey through time and imagination into the heart of inner space--I can't recommend it strongly enough. I will never forget the ending, so unexpected, so perfect.

Quite possibly one of the greatest books I have ever read, and certainly Machens greatest achievement. The imagery is breathtaking and some passages positively glimmer with sheer decadent ecstacy. I would definately recommend, to everyone, ever!

This strange novel by one of the early masters of the weird tale is halfway between Dorian Gray and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Its protagonist is the introverted son of a poor Welsh minister striving to become a writer in the indifferent streets of late 19th century London. There is no plot to speak of, but the vivid prose sings with a rich, peculiar music that evokes the inner life of the young author. Not for all tastes, but definitely worth a try. Machen's descriptions of the Wels...

Each year, I try to read a "major" book, something that is a challenge either because of its length or its density of prose and ideas. One year was Moby Dick, another Ulysses, a third 1Q84. I had supposed that I would give Swann's Way or Finnegans Wake a swing this year, but alas, I'm just not ready, as this year has already gotten the best of me, and I doubt I will be able to finish either of those and give them the attention they deserve this year. To my surprise, Arthur Machen's The Hill of D...

the poor delicate soul, a lotus in the mud, reaching higher and always getting ground down, ever down, into the muck and grime of confined, earthly living. the poor morbid soul, dreaming of the past and of escape, dreaming himself away and into strange places where he will be lord or victim, dreaming of bacchanalia and decadence, or of a more refined way of living, or of childhood and a place where he was comforted, given succour. the poor forlorn soul, his love has left him, that love that was

Something extraordinary happened to me while I was reading The Hill of Dreams. I kept catching myself getting lost in memories of my own through Machen's descriptions. The truth is I could relate with Lucian in many levels. I grew up in the outside of a small village (you get the point, not even in a village), and those walks in the countryside are perfectly familiar to me. I remember I used to walk and do rides with my bicycle a lot as a kid and teenager and mesmerizing was a frequent pastime a...

The more I read stories by Arthur Machen, the more I feel like he was a fantastically gifted writer that had nothing to say; at least not in the traditional sense that we imagine a writer of novels and short stories. That is to say, he seemed to care more about images and feelings rather than plot or characters. If he had gotten into poetry, where plot and characters are naturally secondary, then he may have been the next Shelley. Instead, he wrote stories for us to puzzle over. Sometimes this d...

This a lyrical yet sad book of a poor young man who dreams of using words to paint sound pictures that stir the heart and soul of all who read them. Villified by his peers for being poor, different and dreamy he increasingly descends into the finer reality inside his head, where Greeks, Romans, Alchemists and Druids all vie for space, living life in a grand style. Soon the line between the world inside his head and the world without get ever more blurred as reality takes a back seat to beauty, t...

Very good, Machen is a master of the wilderness, mystical, beautiful, dangerous. For me this drug a bit midway, but all was revealed at the end of the tale.

The Hill of Dreams is a beautiful and complex book about the creative process. It is also a really honest book, it's like being in the mind of Arthur Machen for a while. He mentions everything that he likes in this book, from Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra, Thomas De Quincey, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, everything is here. His love for the Middle Ages and Ancient Rome, as well as its anti-materialistic ideas are here. It is the struggle of a writer trying to put down on paper his impress...

Poor, poor LucianFirst, he climbed a hill, and it ruined his lifeThen, he kissed a girl, and it ruined his lifeThen, he tried to write a book, and it ruined his lifeThen, a girl asked him to go for a walk with her, and it ruined his lifeThen, he saw a house, and it ruined his life…Poor, poor LucianSome of the nature descriptions were excellent near the beginning, but even those grew tiresome as Machen treaded the same territory over and over. I think we're supposed to sympathize with Lucian and

Less the Hallowe'en horror I set out to read than a decadent-era study of the tortured artist (and the mystical and maddening possibilities of nature and Roman ruins) in luscious language. We meet Lucian Taylor in boyhood and see the [semi-autobiographical] difficulties he experiences growing up in a narrow-minded small Welsh town, so he's more obviously sympathetic than his near-contemporaries such as the hero of Hunger, or Charles Strickland of The Moon and Sixpence - whose single-mindedness h...

Perhaps the strangest bildungsroman ever published; like a daemonic Proust Machen winds his protagonist down an ever-narrowing labyrinth of memories until we find ourselves trapped in a grimy bedsit, dreaming of better times: a singular, minor masterpiece.