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Short Fiction ▾
contents
  1. The Great God Pan
  2. The Inmost Light
  3. The White People
  4. A Fragment of Life
  5. The Bowmen
  6. The Soldiers’ Rest
  7. The Monstrance Then it fell out in the sacring of the Mass that right as the priest heaved up the Host there came a beam redder than any rose and smote upon it, and then it was changed bodily into the shape and fashion of a Child having his arms stretched forth, as he had been nailed upon the Tree. Old Romance
  8. The Dazzling Light The new head-covering is made of heavy steel, which has been specialty treated to increase its resisting power. The walls protecting the skull are particularly thick, and the weight of the helmet renders its use in open warfare out of the question. The rim is large, like that of the headpiece of Mambrino, and the soldier can at will either bring the helmet forward and protect his eyes or wear it so as to protect the base of the skull … Military experts admit that continuance of the present trench warfare may lead to those engaged in it, especially bombing parties and barbed wire cutters, being more heavily armoured than the knights, who fought at Bouvines and at Agincourt. The Times, July 22, 1915
  9. The Great Return
  10. The Terror
  11. Endnotes
English ▾

Short Fiction

Arthur Machen

free · 141,192 words · ~9 h read

text from Standard Ebooks

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The Great God Pan

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More by Arthur Machen

  • 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.

genres

  • Horror
  • War

appears in

  • Weird & Uncanny Tales

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thank you for reading

Short Fiction by Arthur Machen. The text is in the US public domain, from the Standard Ebooks edition. Served from our own copy; read on their site for the full edition with images and typography.

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