Short Fiction

Name: Short Fiction
Author: Arthur Machen

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The Great God Pan

fetching the rest…

The Hill of Dreams
You’ll like this if you can settle into a slow, feverish book about Lucian Taylor, whose attempts to write are tangled with the Welsh countryside, sensual visions, and a growing inability to live ordinarily. It feels less like a story than a beautiful, claustrophobic dream you’re not sure you should trust.
The Secret Glory
You follow Ambrose Meyrick through the brutal routines of an English public school and into a private, mystical vision of the Grail, with Machen making spiritual longing feel both luminous and faintly disturbing. It’s episodic and unfinished, but its odd mixture of schoolboy misery, Welsh mystery, and fierce distrust of respectable life lingers.
The Three Impostors
Machen turns London into a maze where strangers keep buttonholing you with stories, and the two nested tales (the Black Seal, the White Powder) are genuinely skin-crawling. The frame is odd and the prose is ornate, but if you like dread that seeps rather than pounces, this delivers.