The Terror by Arthur Machen

Ingenious and spooky WWI thriller

Welsh author Arthur Machen (1863–1947) wrote primarily in the horror and fantasy genres, and his work has proved greatly influential to subsequent authors in those areas, from H. P. Lovecraft to Stephen King. Machen has only recently come to my attention, and so far I have enjoyed everything I’ve read by him. He may be the greatest of Edgar Allan Poe’s successors in the literature of horror and the supernatural. Machen’s work of the late 19th and early 20th centuries brings Poe’s gothic terror into the modern era in a way that can still be appreciated by, and frightening to, 21st-century readers.

Machen’s novel The Terror was published in 1917. It takes place in a small rural coastal village of southwestern Wales named Meirion. In 1915, at the height of World War I, a shocking rash of mysterious deaths occurs in and around this village. Children have fallen off of cliffs, or were they pushed? Bodies are found of people who appear to have died of asphyxiation, but with no apparent evidence of strangulation or other trauma. A family lies dead in the highway out in front of their home, their brains bashed in. A girl is stung to death by bees. A farmer is found dead of a stab wound, as if pierced by a spear. There are no witnesses to these killings, and no clues as to their causes or perpetrators. Since it’s wartime, however, one can’t help but wonder if the Germans are responsible. Could there be a secret network of German soldiers operating within the British Isles, spreading terror throughout the countryside? Whether the Germans are responsible or not, this tragedy and terror on the home front is certainly not helping Britain’s war effort and has greatly hindered England’s fight against Germany.

Two local citizens attempt to find an explanation for these bizarre happenings. Dr. Lewis is a country physician, while Mr. Remnant seems to be a well-read retiree. The two theorize as to the causes of these events and bounce ideas off of each other. Lewis seems to be the more rationally scientific of the two. Remnant is more open to far-fetched conspiracy theories. The story is related by an unidentified third-person narrator who, like an investigative journalist, has gathered testimony related to these incidents, much of it from the mouths of Lewis and Remnant.

Even to today’s audience, who has developed an immunity to murder novels and serial killer movies, Machen’s descriptions of the deaths are bluntly brutal and must have been quite shocking to readers of a century ago. Many horror filmmakers of today are still squeamish about killing children in their stories, but not so with Machen. The indiscriminateness of this tragedy, coupled with the journalistic style with which the details are presented, give the novel an air of realism, even when contemplating possible supernatural occurrences. There are times over the course of the novel when the plot just seems to be a collection of random scary events with no rhyme or reason to the proceedings. Machen concludes the mystery, however, with an ending that ingeniously ties all loose ends together into a unique, imaginative, and praiseworthy resolution.

Of the three novels by Machen I’ve read so far, The Terror is superior to The Hill of Dreams but falls just short of The Great God Pan. All three are really quite exceptional works. While it’s easy to draw comparisons to Poe, Machen really has a distinctive voice and style all his own. His writing is quite unlike any of his contemporaries. The horror stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, Ambrose Bierce, and Algernon Blackwood seem tame and quaint by comparison. I’m not an habitual reader of horror or supernatural fiction, but in Machen’s case I will gladly make an exception.