Machen, ArthurWhite People, The (April 20, 2007)

Literary critics see Arthur Machen’s works as a significant part of the late Victorian revival of the gothic novel and the decadent movement of the 1890s, bearing direct comparison to the themes found in contemporary works like Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The White People is a highly influential horror story of a young girl's discovery of ancient magic. It was written in the late 1890s as part of a longer unfinished novel, some sketches from which went into his book Ornaments in Jade. Fans of supernatural fiction often cite this story as a classic in the genre. (Summary by Charlie Blakemore and Wikipedia)

Read by Charlie Blakemore

This item is part of the collection: LibriVox

Author: Machen, Arthur
Date: 2007-04-20
Source: Librivox recording of a public-domain text
Keywords: librivox; audiobook; fiction; horror

Creative Commons license: Public Domain

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Reviewer: Shadows_Girl - - May 29, 2007
Subject: MORE ABOUT ARTHUR

I LOVED "The White People"...and so will you if you like the kind of tale that's best read around Midnight on one of those Bulwer-Lytton style "dark and stormy nights". This, and his tale "The Great God Pan" have topped my lisat of "favorite stories to give yourself the creeps by" ever since I was 13 (I'm 57 now and SHAME on you for asking a lady's age!!!)

ANYWAY, what got overlooked about Mr. Machen (and, yes, there's a reason why there's a character in John Carpenter's THE FOG by that name who tells spooky stories to the kids on the beach---yes, he gets carried over in the re-make...sort of..but he's no longer a STORYTELLER which kinda defeats the purpose of giving the character that name).

But, I digress. Arthur was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn back in the latter part of the 19th Century and hung out with characters like MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley and that crowd. What's important about his legacy is that WITHOUT him there would probably never have been an H. P. Lovecraft (and therefore probably no Frank Belknap Long, or Clark Ashton Smith or August Derleth, EITHER!!! And NO bumper stickers with CTHULHU FOR PRESIDENT and THEN where would we have been???)

Well, I don't know. And fortunately I won't have to find out because I dwell in THIS universe where there WAS an Arthur Machen and not the universe-next-door where there was also an Arthur Machen but THAT one was an insurance saleman from Topeka, KS and therefore of no use to anyone.

---The Shadowsgirl