The White People

August 1, 2011
At the turn of the 20th century, Welsh author Machen (The Hill of Dreams) wrote tales about evil and "ecstasy" (his term for supernatural experience) that made a significant impact on horror fiction. For this volume, weird fiction scholar S.T. Joshi collects 11 key works that typify Machen's vision of the uncanny and the veil that keeps "the Beyond" mercifully concealed from mortal eyes. Included are his masterpieces "The White People," about an innocent's unwitting indoctrination into foul rites of sorcery; "Novel of the Black Seal," which uncovers the survival of a malignant race of "little people" in present times; and "Novel of the White Powder," in which a drug brings on a terrifying transformation in a victim who abuses it. Though the volume doesn't include Machen's best-known tale, "The Great God Pan," it features an insightful foreword by horror movie director Guillermo del Toro, which should help get the book into the hands of contemporary horror fans unfamiliar with Machen's magnificent legacy.

October 15, 2011
With two eccentric editorial decisions, horror-fiction historian Joshi makes this sampling of the Welshman who inspired H. P. Lovecraft to create the Cthulhu Mythos invaluable. He excludes Machen's most famous piece, The Great God Pan, and includes the seldom-reprinted A Fragment of Life, which, though certainly weird or uncanny, resolves not in dread but in a mystical, parochial (not nationalistic) patriotism. It's not the only nonhorrific selection; three WWI inspirational tales in Machen's later, quasi-journalistic manner also appear (one, The Bowmen, birthed the legend that angels assisted the British at the Battle of Mons). Fragment shares in the luscious descriptive style of Machen's early stories exploiting the proto-Lovecraftian notion that a malevolent, prehuman people (the little people, or fairies of Celtic legend, Machen ventures) survive in rural isolation. That style wraps the reader in a shimmering, velvety blanket of sense-impressions. Nowadays, Lucius Shepard and Laird Barron approach it, but it's really nonpareil, and you don't have to be a horror fan to fall under its spell.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)