“One of the best horror stories ever written...”
– Stephen King
“The most acutely and intentionally disagreeable book
... yet seen in English.”
– The Guardian
“Un succés fou! Un succés fou!”
– Oscar Wilde
“Arthur Machen... is a mystic, who knew that there
exists a threshold which, if it is stepped over, will show
us a subtly altered reality.”
– Clive Barker
An experiment into the sources of the human brain
through the mind of a young woman has gone horribly
wrong. She has seen the great god Pan and will die
giving birth to a daughter. Twenty years later fêted
society hostess, Helen Vaughan, becomes the source
of much fevered speculation. Many men are infatuated
with her beauty, but great beauty has a price, sometimes
you have to pay with the only thing you have left. The
Great God Pan was a sensation when first published
and marked the start of Arthur Machen’s ongoing
influence on modern fantasy and horror. Machen’s
dark imaginings of the reality behind ancient beliefs
feature again in the acclaimed, mesmerising short story
‘The White People’ and the curious tale, ‘The Shining
Pyramid’, also in this volume.