Content Warning: Wacky Fictionalization of Mental Illness.
I recently had occasion to read a short story from the late 19th century, which has an air of legend among horror heads. Stephen King called it, “one of the best horror stories ever written. Maybe the best in the English language.” The Great God Pan, by Arthur Machen, is about a scary lady with connection to Something Man Was Not Meant to Know. It leans heavily on implication and suffers a bit for having been written serially, but is still an interesting read. I didn’t find this thing for myself. As usual, it was my husband that brought it to my attention.
Beast from Seattle, where did you find out about this story?
BfS: I’m not sure which story we had been reading before, but I found it in the wikipedia page as being similar, a way I’ve found a lot of great stories. Thanks wiki editors!
GAS: That is pretty cool of them. What initially intrigued you about it?BfS: The concept was interesting, and the superlatives by folks like Steve up there were enticing. I think we might have been reading Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows, and it was mentioned as being in that sort of eco-horror meets cosmic-horror type vein.
GAS: Trewly it is. In the setup these Victorian dudes are enthusiasts of the occult, one of them being a physician as well, with big Dr. Pretorius energy. He develops a brain operation to allow a person a larger view of reality, which to him is personified by the pagan god Pan. He does this surgery on a street urchin that he groomed for the purpose, and hijinks ensue. So there’s the rustic horror of pagan goatboyism and the cosmic horror of awareness.
BfS: It is funny that the ‘Pan’ in the story doesn’t seem to be a faun creature, like you would imagine. The focus is on seeing ‘another world’ and then having a Lovecraftian breakdown into madness™. I liked the idea of the ‘Pan’ in question being ‘everything’ as the word would imply. The people are seeing some vision of everything all at once, that is too much to bear. If anything was going to get you gibbering, I think it would be an extreme overload of information. Really putting the pan in panic.
GAS: At the same time, the “Everything” is personified as masculine, or masculine within the feminine, in the course of the story. It’s not as queer as I imagined with all the hype, but it’s queer enough one could run with that interpretation. I originally wrote a juvenile joke here but had to delete it because too spoilery.
BfS: That seemed to be a big source of all the shock and horror. Sexual ambiguity as a real yikes for victorians. I really wish the story went into more depth, but I suppose if they couldn’t even handle this much…
GAS: That gets into a problem we had in a previous book club meeting with some other folks, while reading Turn of the Screw. A story from a different time leaning on implication so hard you could, as a modern reader, feel like it was an endless tease, or too obscure to get.
BfS: I didn’t get that impression as much with James, as just by its length and continuity, I could effectively get into the world. This story is a bit more scattered with its timeline and hopping about so it was maybe harder to get into that mind state. I believe he wrote the first chapter and third chapters as standalone stories, then tied them together with only a few more chapters between, which couldn’t have been easy.
GAS: I actually love looking at literary classics and seeing their flaws, because as a creator it makes me feel more like I could write something that ranks well with the greats. There are flawless stories, like the works of Kafka we’ve read, but even some really strong ones have issues. This story is real cool, but weaker than most of the classics we’ve read, and probably for that exact reason.
BfS: One thing I appreciated is that it actually gets more into the emotions of the characters feeling the cosmic terror. Many of Lovecraft’s stories, even if I like them a lot, use the ‘and then I went crazy’ moment as a thought-terminating cliché. Likewise with the ‘indescribable’ horrors. Yeah, it’s real bad, but couldn’t you get into it a little more? This still didn’t get as into it as I would like, but I felt going cuckoo was a little more justified.
GAS: I wouldn’t have thought of that, but it’s true. The emotions of those who get the Bad Knowledge are not well described in most stories with that subject. But what is the Bad Knowledge here? The lack of description reached a hilarious peak when a guy is reading an account of the forbidden experience, and he gives up, can’t go on any longer, sweating and freaking out. Sounds dry here… I guess my enjoyment was this: It’s the moment which comes closest to saying what is going on -the thing so horrible- but it can’t. The story itself is falling on the fainting couch.
BfS: It sounded like he read one sentence of people enjoying a sexytime and lost his shit.
GAS: Unintended humor for us, but… this implication was enough to inspire a very outsized public reaction. You told me about this…
BfS: Yeah there’s a very amusingly overblown freakout from some lame critic you can find on the wiki.
GAS: Lemme see… “Why should he be allowed, for the sake of a few miserable pounds, to cast into our midst these monstrous creations of his diseased brain? … If the Press was so disposed it could stamp out such art and fiction in a few months: And that disposition must be acquired, must even be enforced.” That reaction, once you’ve read the story, seems wild as hell.
And also from the wiki, one publisher declined to print it because it was “a clever story that … shrink[s] …from the central idea.” So even at the time, some readers found the self-censorship over the top, while more conservative ones thought it didn’t go far enough.
BfS: Something funny there, even the critic who hated this story so much was willing to call it ‘art’.
GAS: Maybe dismissing art you don’t like as “not actually art” was more popular in the 20th century. OK. What did you find strong about it? To the extent you can say without spoilers. What moved your imagination?
BfS: The premise is very strong, probably why so many people have done interpretations and offshoots. Makes you want to see more done with it. The author is said to have been inspired by a real life ruin he visited, and was trying to get at the feeling it gave him. I think that’s a good thing to aspire toward, the sense of awe and mystery you can get, even if it’s better done in stories like the Willows.
GAS: Agreed. I think about eyeshine, about animals in the dark. Not something he mentioned but it’s an image I come back to in my imagination of the world before electricity. There is something looking at you, aware of you but beyond your understanding, supremely indifferent, possibly malevolent, and powerful because it has all the darkness of the universe behind it. Appealing.
BfS: There’s a great description of the look of one of the cursed dudes in that story that got spooked before his untimely demise. “I could never have supposed that such an infernal medley of passions could have glared out of any human eyes; I almost fainted as I looked. I knew I had looked into the eyes of a lost soul, Austin, the man’s outward form remained, but all hell was within it. Furious lust, and hate that was like fire, and the loss of all hope and horror that seemed to shriek aloud to the night, though his teeth were shut; and the utter blackness of despair.”
GAS: That’s why I was thinking of eyeshine, that part. I remember now. Good shit. I had a thought that this story has something in common with the song Gloomy Sunday. That song was about suicide, which was and is very taboo. Back when it came out, it was credited with causing many suicides. I have no doubt it was quoted by the suicidal, but causative? No. And it’s pretty tame. The song ends with “I was only dreaming.” Looks quaint to modern eyes, doesn’t live up to its infamy. So with The Great God Pan. I can’t imagine it corrupting the masses with its sexy ways, but the idea was there.
BfS: Yeah in terms of horror, it was very tame compared to what Poe was doing decades earlier, or contemporary French writers. The French were doing much sexier things as well, but I suppose that’s not too surprising.
GAS: Sexy sexy sexy. I’m into it. The Great God Pan everybody, check it out.
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Addendum: One observation about The Notorious GGP that I forgot to mention here, but I noticed as I read. It was clearly a direct inspiration to Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, so much so that I feel his book was intended both as a sequel and as an exploration and expansion of the things in the original which were left unsaid. The movie adaptation of Ghost Story ignored and changed the true nature of the monster from the novel, which was more similar to Pan.
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Machen’s Pan is definitely a classic, but actually not one of my favourites of this author.
My favourite Machen story would be “The White People”. A bit lengthy maybe and more weird than horror but I enjoyed it much more. It just had this atmosphere of something strange, vaguely seen that, despite the narrators condemnation, I’m not sure was really evil.
Others like “The Novel of the Black Seal” or “The Novel of the White Powder” are much less spectacular than Pan, but somehow appeal to me more, maybe because they are simpler stories.
Machen’s big idea that showed up in a lot of stores was the continued hidden existence of previous inhabitants of the British Isles, primitive, degenerate, maybe not quite as human as us. I enjoyed reading about his little people, but damn, there is quite a bit of racism in that concept. Robert E. Howard wrote a few stories based in Machen’s idea and made the racism a bit more obvious.
love a comment on one of these with specific reading recs.
For cosmic horror?
I’m more into SF than horror, but I can point to a few things — you may already know about these, though.
On the less SFish, more traditional site, Stephen King himself has at least flirted with it a fair bit. Most strongly in a short story that’s just named “N”. The famous (or notorious?) Dark Tower heptology, which makes War and Peace look short, definitely has elements of it, but it’s a pretty big commitment.
SF, of course, tends to accept a basically scientific worldview, so is inherently very skeptical of the belief that there was anything we were “not meant to know”. But it can certainly have knowledge we’re not ready for yet, as well as messages that are damaging because they are disinformation. And it has absolutely gone into territory that I’d say can be classed as cosmic horror.
Small-commitment:
* The movie “Event Horizon”. Has supernatural/fantasy elements so is not pure SF
* “Flying to Valhalla”, by Charles Pellegrino. Our first forays beyond the solar system find creepy effects and danger. An early iteration of the “dark forest” concept, arguably.
* “Dust”, same author, has eco-horror more than cosmic horror, but you implied an interest in that too, so I’m including it. It’s somewhat longer than the previous entries.
* “Blindsight”, by Peter Watts. Like “N” and “Flying to Valhalla”, but unlike most of the others, has sanity/mental health horror alongside a fair dose of the dark forest.
* “Forge of God”, by Greg Bear: more early dark forest, but it’s tone is more thriller than horror overall. There’s a sequel that is more adventure than thriller *or* horror. One civilization is trying to bring the rule of law to the dark forest. Both are longer than most of the previous entries aside from, maybe, “Dust”.
Larger commitment:
* “The Three-Body Problem” trilogy, by Liu Cixin. The trope namer for “dark forest” is the second volume of this series. The cosmic horror elements are mainly in the third. Psychological horror aspects are present throughout, though are not as prominent as in “N” or Lovecraft. Characters are driven to hopelessness, in some cases suicide, and in a couple, murder, so be warned. This is a larger commitment because the real serious horror payoffs wait for the third book. (Believe it or not, someone even gets the Mola Ram treatment in the third book. And it’s one of the least of the horrible things to happen.) Turns out maybe there are things man would not want to know.
A key aspect to these as that they repudiate “human triumphalism” or “human exceptionalism”, often vehemently, unlike probably most science fiction. (An even earlier iteration of dark forest concept, Saberhagen’s berserker stories, is loaded with said triumphalism so can’t possibly qualify as cosmic horror.)