Collected Fiction Volume 3

This third volume of Machen’s collected fiction begins with a tale, “The Thousand and One Nights,” that has never before been reprinted. It continues with a succession of tales that Machen wrote during and just after World War I, a cataclysm that shook Europe to its foundations. The most famous of these is “The Bowmen” (1914), a narrative of medieval soldiers coming to the rescue of besieged British infantrymen in France was widely believed to be a true account, in spite of Machen’s repeated protestations to the contrary. Machen’s final war tale, the short novel The Terror (1916), is an imperishable depiction of the revolt of animals against humanity’s rulership of the earth.

In the 1920s Machen resorted to humor and satire to convey his dissatisfaction with the increasing secularization of his era, which he felt was robbing the imagination of wonder and mystery. He also began contributing to anthologies of original weird fiction edited by Cynthia Asquith and others, producing several memorable tales as a result, including “The Happy Children” and “The Islington Mystery.”

Machen’s final novel, The Green Round (1933), is a subtle tale of supernatural menace, narrated in the blandly repertorial prose that Machen had developed in his later work. He then published two final volumes of weird tales, The Cosy Room and The Children of the Pool (both 1936), which contain many memorable tales, including “The Bright Boy” and “N.”

Machen’s collected fiction is a monument to the author’s fifty years of rumination about human life and the obscure mysteries that may lurk hidden in far-away corners of the earth—and in our imaginations. They are filled with an intensity and sincerity of expression testifying to their author’s earnest philosophical and religious beliefs, and they are written in some of the most mellifluous prose of their time.

The edition has been prepared by S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on weird fiction and the author of The Weird Tale (1990) and Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012). Joshi has prepared textually corrected editions of the work of H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, and many other weird writers.