Arthur Machen

I think you’ll find the missing link between these writers is a lack of talent.

I like ‘em too. Also Algernon Blackwood (similar to James) and Clark Ashton Smith (like Lovecraft).

I find steve m’s comment bizarre. MR James attained that rare thing: perfection; in a form notoriously difficult to get right. An exceptional and skilful writer. Nuff said.

The cases of Lovecraft and Machen are slightly more vexed. Kingsley Amis wrote an amusing short parody highlighting the histrionic defects of Lovecraft’s prose, which I will post later in the week, but both of these writers have a sinister force that is unequalled elsewhere.

I recently read the Three Impostors and The Hill of Dreams by Machen. Of the two, The Hill of Dreams is considered to be the more successful in terms of literature, while The Three Impostors is frequently comically and mystifyingly bad.

And yet… John Betjeman said that he had never been more terrified than after reading The Three Impostors as a child. In The Novel of the White Powder and the Novel of the Black Seal the supernatural effects are disturbing, partly because they intimate at forces and entities only partially, if at all explained. (This is Lovecraft’s strenth too)

(in horror the glancing, the half-seen or felt, is always more powerful than direct description - something Stephen King would have done well to remember)

To the effective combination of rural and ancient landscapes and beings that you point out should added his urban and suburban ‘Neighbourhoods of Infinity’. Machen frequently has his characters walking through neglected purlieus, where the streets seem to go on forever and they find themselves in a place they do not know, or seems to exist only in a parallel world of mystic vision.

Although more literary and better written, The Hill of Dreams, is rather duller, while still retaining that peculiar and appealing combination of rural, ancient and urban.

This is perhaps the point, I wonder sometimes whether genre fiction as I suppose we must call it (rather than ‘the good stuff that is designed to be read and enjoyed) needs a bit of bad writing. Science fiction perhaps needs flat, everyman characters and horror perhaps requires histrionics.

Although, as I said, MR James does not - his control of light and shade, dream and vision, and tone is unparalleled in all literature to my mind.

Some may say he achieved it in a limited area - but to my mind, like making people laugh, making people scared as difficult as any literary task a person can set themselves. There is no middle ground between success and failure. And success is rare.

Once again, must apologise for the length.

Fitz Psyche.

Fitz, Re: scaring and making laugh:-

“no middle ground between success and failure. And success is rare.”

I think you are right there, and while Mr Lovecraft’s style is indeed histrionic, verbose, and quite ripe for parody, I think that it is nonetheless pretty much perfect in conjuring up the essentially “other” and “wrong” nature of the entities he describes, genuinely disturbs, and so to me is an unqualified success.

With Machen, for me, the “unnerving” is too often offset with risible, off-putting notes in the prose, and the “other world” is just not as perfectly realised. Maybe I’ve just not been reading the right ones, who knows.

Anyway, don’t apologise for the length Mr Cyclonic, always a pleasure, you go on as long as you like!