Faunus: The Decorative Imagination Of Arthur Machen
Edited by James Machin,
Paperback, £15.99
148 x 210mm, 272pp
ISBN: 9781907222757
Release Date: 15/04/19
Scholarship, debate, archival material, and esoterica relating to Arthur Machen, a “modern master of the weird tale.”
“Machen’s a slippery ghost. He eludes us. The best of Faunus blows smoke towards the space he occupies invisibly and attempts to extrapolate his exact shape from hollows in a moving cloud.” From the introduction by Stewart Lee
For twenty years, Faunus, the biannual journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen, has been publishing an astonishing range of scholarship, debate, archival material, and esoterica relating to the writer H. P. Lovecraft described as a “modern master of the weird tale.”
Arthur Machen (1863–1947) was not only an author of weird and decadent horror fiction lauded by Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro (among many others); he was also a journalist and essayist who, over decades, produced a vast body of nonfiction on subjects ranging from High Church theology to “the truth about curry”. This anthology gathers some of the highlights of Faunus, from its very first issue to its most recent. Subjects include the Great War, the Celtic Church, the “real” little people, Machen and Modernism, Machen and the occult, and myriad other investigations into Machen’s life and legacy.
With a new introduction by long-term Friend of Arthur Machen member Stewart Lee, the book makes newly available reprints of rare pieces by Machen himself as well as items from the Faunus archive by writers including Tessa Farmer, Rosalie Parker, Ray Russell, Mark Samuels, and Mark Valentine.