Tales of Horror and the Supernatural

Considered the quintessential Machen, with his best longer stories.

From the beginning of his literary career, Machen espoused a mystical belief that the humdrum ordinary world hid a more mysterious and strange world beyond. His gothic and decadent works of the 1890s concluded that the lifting of this veil could lead to madness, sex, or death, and usually a combination of all three. Machen's later works became somewhat less obviously full of gothic trappings, but for him investigations into mysteries invariably resulted in life-changing transformation and sacrifice. Machen loved the medieval world view because he felt it combined deep spirituality alongside a rambunctious earthiness.

Machen's strong opposition to a materialistic viewpoint is obvious in many of his works, marking him as part of neo-romanticism. He was deeply suspicious of science, materialism, commerce, and Puritanism, all of which were anathema to Machen's conservative, bohemian, mystical, and ritualistic temperament.

Contents:

• N (1936)
• Out of the Earth (1915)
• The Bowmen (1914)
• The Bright Boy (1936) (only in later printings)
• The Children of the Pool (1936)
• The Great God Pan (1894)
• The Great Return (1915)
• The Happy Children (1920)
• The Inmost Light (1894)
• The Novel of the Black Seal (1895)
• The Novel of the White Powder (1895)
• The Shining Pyramid (1895)
• The Terror (1916)
• The White People (1904) 

Editions

• First Edition 1997
  • Limitation: 230 copies, plus 20 copies with marbled endpapers for presentation
• First edition, second Impression, 1998.
• Second edition, 2004. Adds 'The Bright Boy'
• Second edition, second impression, 2006.
• Third Edition

The copy we currently have is a first edition, first impression with marbled endpapers (presentation copy), the book is near fine/near fine, as there appears to be very slight fading to the spine, you can tell if you lay the jacket flat, but i'm not sure a picture would even show it, and the page edges have some slight discoloration, again I'm not sure if a picture would show it, but we'd be happy to send any if anyone has any questions.