Beaumont’s true identity as it slowly spirals back to the early The story follows Villiers’ investigation of the

While they are not described in-depth, what details Machen does The action starts to accelerate as an epidemic of suicides starts allĪcross London. This is all accomplished with a mounting sense of dread, with nothing actually happening “on-screen” after that first fateful surgery. Much like in Dracula and The Call of Cthulhu, characters, especially main protagonist Villiers, recount chance meetings, unnerving apartment tours, accidentally found portraits and art books. The so-called surgeon can’t even be bothered to be upset, dismissing her with the comment, “After all, she has seen the great god Pan.”įor readers expecting shocks, The Great God Pan will seem to move very slowly at first as the rest of the story unfolds like a jigsaw puzzle across multiple chapters and characters, starting to come together to form a ghastly whole. The setting is not even a surgical theater, just a home laboratory he has set up.

Raymond plans to perform on an orphan girl he took in years before. The narrative itself starts on a disturbing scene, like Clarke, the protagonist of the early part of the story, accepts an invitation to oversee some home brain surgery his friend Dr. Readers will come to understand those authors’ reverence for Machen, and especially that story. More recently, Stephen King has declared it, in his opinion, “one of the best horror stories ever written. This terrifying tale of occult miscegenation was lauded thirty years later by Lovecraft in his essay The Supernatural In Literature. His story The Bowmen entered the realm of urban folklore as World War One legend of the “Angel of Mons.” And that story was only a very tiny fraction of Machen’s output, which included works as The Novel of the White Powder, The Three Imposters, and what is generally acknowledged as his 1894 masterpiece, The Great God Pan. Machen (1863-1947), whose real last name was Jones, produced prolifically in the genres of fantasy and horror.

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