The Three Imposters by Arthur Machen

The press notices included in the appendix to my Everyman edition of The Three Imposters (1895) testify to the almost universal revulsion this novel induced upon publication. The Liverpool Mercury - which one must assume comes down firmly on the side of the necessity of moral fiction - reported that “(n)o one can be made happier or better by such a book as this, but on the contrary the reader’s mind is likely to become stored with images and ideas that cannot but have an undesirable effect.” The Liverpool Courier was even more blunt in declaring “Ugh! A more repulsive catalogue of horrors it would be difficult to imagine, and its existence can only be attributed to the occasional perversity of man.” Other reviewers simply found the book unimpressive, and derivative of the recent work of Stevenson, particularly his New Arabian Nights, a debt which Machen seems to readily acknowledge in his characterizations and plot devices. In short, Machen tended to be seen as a sensationalist, dwelling on the ugly and repulsive, and making the clear choice of reveling in the descriptive horror of the grotesque, rather than leaving anything to the imagination. Machen himself disavowed all but a couple of episodes in the book.


From a distance of more than a century, we can appreciate the book on its own merits, and recognize its publication as a signal event in the development of the fiction of the weird and uncanny. This novel is, to me, greater than the sum of its parts, although the parts have merit on their own. Within the frame story of the elusive character of the “young man with spectacles” the book is largely a collection of tales of the demonic and grotesque, there are weird tentacled humans, dripping with slime such as might warm the heart of a Lovecraft fanatic (as it did Lovecraft himself), a Jekyll and Hyde character (another homage to Stevenson) who taps into his atavistic demons in the “Novel of the White Powder”, and a secret society whose tentacles are metaphorical, if none the less deadly. There are scenes of grisly torture, and a moment or two of grim humor besides (note: always read the instructions for your new torture devices before operating!).


The novel utilizes a minor “a long the riverrun” device, and I can’t imagine turning the last page without proceeding immediately to the first, as the ending elucidates the Prologue. Beyond the individual stories told by the so-called “imposters”, there is an undercurrent of deception and evil intent. The imposters are on the trail of the gold Tiberius, a rare talismanic coin which serves as this novel’s macguffin. The central pigeon is a Mr. Dyson, a hapless figure only slightly less clueless than his friend, Mr. Phillipps. It is he who hears from the imposters the series of improbable tales regarding the (supposedly) sinister young man with spectacles, and the two are witness to the morbid denoument in a dilapidated mansion on the outskirts of London.

The Three Imposters is an extended piece of strange fiction which enthusiastically utilizes Machen’s favorite themes of cruel human obsession and demonic atavism as presented in The Great God Pan and The Hill of Dreams. It is an entertaining work, with a nice balance of horror and humor, and it has survived its critics to become a classic of the genre.

Two Novels of Horror and Suspense from the 1970s

William Hallahan's The Search for Joseph Tully is one of a number of supernatural thrillers dating from the late 60’s-early 70’s that include Rosemary’s Baby, The Other (see below), and the best of the lot, The Exorcist. This particular story centers on a dual narrative involving Peter Richardson, a Brooklynite having horrible, maddening premonitions of death, and Matthew Willow, a British genealogist searching for the descendants of one Joseph Tully, a resident of London in the year of Our Lord 1779. The book is a decent page turner, even though one figures out pretty quickly just how the narratives are likely to intersect in the latest iteration of the eternal recurrence of a revenge narrative necessitated by events in the gruesome prologue, set in a Roman catacomb in 1498, in which two bound men are sickeningly pierced, sliced and decapitated by a red hot sword. The dramatis personae are mainly the residents of Brevoort House, a decrepit building awaiting the wrecking ball and include the obligatory clairvoyant; an artist who dies trying to warn Richardson of his impending doom by means of a creepy mural; and a defrocked priest with a deep interest in the teachings of Giordano Bruno regarding the transmigration of souls. The story attempts to make genealogical research sexy - with limited success – although this angle does underline the perspective that we are attending to a story that spans centuries and the lives of numerous individuals. Mr. Hallahan apparently had an abiding interest in Pre-Revolutionary American, having written a couple of nonfiction works set in this time frame, and he fleshes out this book with descriptive passages on life in the wilds of colonial New Jersey.

This book is nicely atmospheric, with the backdrop of a suitably bleak winter with the wind cutting through the pages like a steel blade (hint, hint). Still, I found the ending unsatisfyingly abrupt for my taste. It seems Millipede Press brought out a nice new edition of this book a few years ago, but Hollywood apparently resisted the temptation to add it to the list of supernatural horror flicks that deluged theaters in the wake of the film adaptations of the aforementioned works.





A subgenre of the thriller/horror film trend of the early 1970’s was the gruesome “evil child” melodrama, one of which was derived from Thomas Tryon's novel The Other. Tryon’s novel is indeed gruesome and melodramatic, as well as gratingly pretentious in places. But it has not aged too badly, despite having been subsequently swamped by the Stephen King tidal wave of popular horror fiction. It has all the hallmarks of latter-day gothic – a creaky and labyrinthine old New England house, strange children with strange powers, insanity, a family seemingly under a dark curse, comfortingly predicable plot twists, and a satisfyingly sufficient number of creepy deaths. There are those who hail The Other as a significant work of modern horror, and, not having read widely in modern horror, I won’t argue the point. A quick and passably entertaining read.

The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson

The House, located in our dimension within a remote region of Ireland, is a simulacrum of its celestial archetype, a tear or portal in the universe by which the reclusive narrator of the tale encounters the terrifying gods of ancient lore, gigantic and inhuman. In the physical present, the house is besieged by swinish creatures from the depths of the earth, noxious beings which resemble a creature of unimaginable foulness which assails the narrator, driving him to madness at novel’s end.


Following several chapters in which the narrator seeks to preserve the house from the repugnant creatures, he is ultimately translated into a realm beyond time and space. As the physical universe accelerates, he witnesses the decline and death of the earth, the sun, and, ultimately, the universe before he returns, like Muhammad from his night journey, to his familiar study, with only one important bit of evidence revealing that his journey has not been a hallucination. The excursion through the dying cosmos is, it must be admitted, rather overlong, veering towards tediousness, but still with some remarkably evocative passages - not least being the recluse’s recognition that it is his own body that has crumbled to dust on the stone floor after the passage of eons. There is a certain unreality in the recluse’s tale that gives one pause to consider if his experiences are no more than madness, a worm in the brain. (His elderly sister, with whom he lives, seems quite unaware of the remarkable occurrences passing within the environs of the old house.)


It has been rightly noted that Hodgson’s tale is a transitional form between the gothic romance and Lovecraft’s tales of ancient evils and unspeakable interstellar horrors. Despite a curious and overindulged attention to the details of imagined astronomical phenomena – dark nebulae, green suns and the like – The House on the Borderland stands, even as it utilizes the standard narrative tricks of the nineteenth century while finding new ways to exploit old fears, as a classic work of modern horror.

The Black Spider

Jeremias Gotthelf's The Black Spider is an overlooked masterpiece of horror, a novella telling the story of a Faustian pact made in the Middle Ages, with repercussions through the centuries.

A Teutonic Knight makes cruel and impossible demands upon his subjects, involving the transplantation of one hundred full grown beech trees across a mountain to serve as landscaping for his newly constructed castle. While the peasants are driven to despair by this order, one brave and foolhardly woman makes a pact with a mysterious huntsman, dressed in green with a red beard and devilish eyes. He will see that the task is accomplished, but his price is the unbaptised soul of a newborn infant. The woman, Christine, believes that she can reneg on her end of the bargain with the careful connivance of the peasants and the local priest, but with each child withheld, dire afflictions and death overtake the peasants.

At the conclusion of their deal, the Huntsman had given Christine a peck on the cheek, which immediately burned as if she were being pierced by a red hot poker. Over time, the black spot grew and took on the appearance of a large venomous spider. At one point it bursts, sending forth innumerable spiderlings to plague the valley. Eventually, Christine is subsumed into the spider, which goes on an apocalyptic rampage. In the midst of the carnage, one brave soul finds the inner strength and resolve to trap the spider and cheat the Huntsman, but like the Satan of Revelations, the creature is bound for only a certain number of years, until the morals of the mountain folk degenerate again and the creature is again briefly let loose.

The tale is framed in the context of a 19th century baptismal celebration, and is told by the old grandfather to a group of fat and ruddy faced villagers, who listen with growing terror. The tale is a warning of the necessity of staying on the narrow Christian path, for the spider and it's master, while temporarily defeated, are ever present, ever ready to strike.

The horrors of the arachnid, so well described, contrast vividly with the sunny vitality of the prosperous villagers at the feast. Gotthelf was a "militantly conservative" Christian who wrote this allegory as a cautionary tale. The slow growth of the spider on Christine's cheek, and her growing sense of despair bear unavoidable comparison to Kafka, and although the narrative in summary sounds like something from a B movie, the writing is effective in inducing the sense of terror that grips the valley. The Black Spider is an excellent example of early horror writing.

There are several anthologies which include The Black Spider. The translation I read was in German Novellas of Realism, Volume One in the excellent series The German Library, published by Continuum. The old Anchor editon of Nineteenth Century German Tales, edited by Angel Flores in the 1950's, includes this story in a different translation and, as an added bonus, has a fantastic Edward Gorey cover.

Much more information can be found at a journey round my skull (see favorite links).