But Fear Itself

Just finished reading The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen. It was really good.

As I've been reading these classic horror novels and short stories I've gradually begun to piece together some thematic elements common to all of them. I can't say what it might have been about the last decade of the 19th century, but there was a sudden glut of terror tales going around and they, all of them, had something rather striking in common; they hide the ball.

The Great God Pan is an epistolary novel (mostly) and, as such, by its very nature, obscures events between the letters which make up the narrative and conceals events not known by the writers of those letters. So, right from the start the reader is fumbling a bit in the dark. Add to this a kind of late Victorian insistence on discretion and you have the makings of a gripping story glimpsed through a glass but darkly.

But all that is by way of explaining the particular reticence of The Great God Pan and does very little to describe what I think is so consistent between all of the stories I've read recently that were written at more or less the same moment in history. What I mean when I say that these tales "hide the ball" is that they resist the temptation to tell the reader what he or she is really meant to be afraid of. The whole story is absolutely chock-full of intimations of horror and rumors of unspeakable events, none of which are ever actually narrated.

This has a two-fold effect; it draws the reader in because he or she is hoping so desperately for even one fleeting look at the nightmare, and it preserves the nightmare. It preserves the trick that all good storytellers work. Because one never really does get explanations or descriptions of the central horrors, one is free to imagine them in all their id-fueled glory without ever having to make them solid and mundane - bound to one shape only to be addressed and overcome.

In other, less windy, words, the terror of all of these classics tales of terror is, quite simply, terror - the emotion itself; the sense that something is stalking you that you cannot escape. The death instinct, perhaps.

Go out and pick up a copy of The Great God Pan. It's all about an experiment gone awry and the progeny of a union between, you guessed it, the Great God Pan, and a mortal woman - a union that has dire consequences for all involved, natch. I felt almost bad for the hit job done on good ole Pan, but I certainly am not clamoring for an audience with goatpants hornhead after reading this one through.