The Great God Pan

Arthur Machen – 1894

The Great God Pan is a lurid short novel by Arthur Machen that falls into the decadent tradition of Frankenstein and The Picture of Dorian Gray in its depiction of an unnatural phenomenon seeming to result from a vague mixture of scientific and occult influences.  A scientist named Clarke – who, like many such characters in 19th and 20th century science-fiction, has an inhumane disregard for the consequences of his experiments – impels a young girl to undergo a cranial procedure that he expects will open her eyes to the deepest mysteries of nature and existence, thereby providing the key for all humanity being able to do the same.  Of course, things don’t go as planned and the victim is immediately rendered a drooling vegetable.  Years later, rumors start to spread of an entrancing and ageless woman making the rounds of London’s high society, marrying wealthy men who end up committing suicide by strangulation.  The story is told by various interested parties, one of whom is compiling a book on the occult for his own recreation.  Pieces of the picture are gradually drawn together as the characters begin to speculate that this mysterious black widow is really the offspring of Clarke’s experiment, during which his patient apparently mated with a demon they euphemistically call “the Great God Pan.”  I found the premise intriguing, but I wasn’t bowled over by that, by Machen’s style, nor by his confusion of actual Greek myth with trendy contemporary representations of Pan as a thinly-disguised devil or even Satan himself, which may have been deliberate but just struck me as either lazy or uninformed.  The story was incredibly influential on future horror writers, but I felt it to be a little too unfocused and trite.  I think the authors who may have admired Machen, and this story in particular, went on to do far better work themselves, especially H.P. Lovecraft, who was obsessed with The Great God Pan and supposedly patterned his famous 1928 story The Dunwich Horror on it.