Reviews & Blog

Review: The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen

Which is more frightening: horrors you see, or horrors you hear (of)?

The following is a review of the novella The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen, my most recent read. The story concerns a series of strange happenings, including suicides that seem more like death-by-frightenings, and an enigmatic woman at the center of it all named Helen Vaughan. This review contains light spoilers.

Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan was published in the late nineteenth century, and it carries with it all the macabre fantasy of other works from that century, like Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. While the novella’s formal tone, epistolary interludes, and top-shelf vocabulary aligns with the stylings of Shelley, Stevenson, Wilde, Poe, and Henry James, the story also has much in common with a twentieth-century descendant: Lovecraftian cosmic horror, named after the tentacle-obsessed and Hitler-sympathizing writer H.P. Lovecraft.

A telltale heart—sorry, a telltale mark—of great horror is its trust in the reader to let their imaginations do the work of terrifying them. This is why epistolary elements abound. Rather than show us directly the horror, the author obscures it with layers of other perspectives, which themselves are likely muffled with distortions. 

In the novella, an occult buff named Clarke is writing Memoirs to Prove the Existence of the Devil. (Note: Clarke reads his own writing with pride—“It was one of his humours to pride himself on a certain literary ability; he thought well of his style”—making him a relatable character for writers with high self-esteem.) From this memoir, Clarke relates a story, told to him by a friend called Phillips, of a girl named Helen V. and her transfer in guardianship to a farm in a small village in Wales. The most unsettling part of this story comes when a young boy, Trevor, enters the woods and discovers Helen and a “strange naked man” who Trevor is “unable to describe more fully.” Trevor, after a period of nervousness and reclusiveness, seems to move on from the experience, until he sees a stone statue of a satyr’s head, inexplicably connects the object with the man in the woods, and becomes permanently intellectually stunted.

Could this story—filtered through Trevor, then Phillips, then Clarke—be true? Could it be worse? Could things get worse? This is the spiral of fearful storytelling, expertly triggered by Machen’s ambiguity, and he uses this effect throughout the novella; in the beginning, a young woman, Mary, peers into another, paranormal realm and witnesses the Great God Pan herself, an experience neither we nor Clarke are privy to.

With these many layers of removal, the scariest parts of The Great God Pan resemble urban legends, passed around and distorted, its possible truths crawling on the reader’s neck like the darkness of the woods behind them as they listen to the story around a campfire. It’s like the feeling you get when you read a man’s letter to his sister describing the strange shadow of a colossal figure he saw standing in the icefields of Antarctica. Or the feeling you get when you read a nameless narrator’s summary of an insane, deceased sailor’s manuscript, which details an encounter at sea with a monster bearing a dragon body, a cuttlefish head, and scaly wings. Typical stuff.

Like much of Lovecraft’s work, Machen’s characters in The Great God Pan are fairly thin; you won’t find an easy hero to root for, nor any compelling internal conflicts to follow. Regardless, if you like short reads, Gothic language, eerie and ambiguous imagery, and horror that lets you fill in hellish gaps, I recommend The Great God Pan.

6/9/2026