The White People and Other Stories: Vol. 2 of the Best Weird Tales of Arthur Machen (Call of Cthulhu Fiction) (Paperback)

by Arthur Machen (Author), S. T. Joshi (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Born in Wales in 1863, Machen was a London journalist for much of his life.Among his fiction, he may be best known for the allusive, haunting title story of this book, &"The White People", which H.P. Lovecraft thought to be the second greatest horror story ever written (after Blackwood's "The Wilows"). This wide ranging collection also includes the crystalline novelette "A Fragment of Life", & "The Angel of Mons" (a story so widely reported that it was imagined true by millions in the grim initial days of the Great War), and "The Great Return" telling of the stately visions which graced the Welsh village of Llantristant for a time. Four more tales and the poetical "Ornaments in Jade" are all finely told. This is the second Machen volume edited by S. T. Joshi and published by Chaosium. The first volume was The Three Impostors.

Product Details

• Paperback: 292 pages
• Publisher: Chaosium Inc.; 1st edition (May 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568821727
• ISBN-13: 978-1568821726
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #302,950 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Volume 2 of Arthur Machen's work, April 16, 2005

By	Alexander Scott (Birmingham, AL) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I was vary impressed by Chaosium's first collection of Machen's work, which was THE THREE IMPOSTERS AND OTHER STORIES. "The Three Imposters" was a narrative of interwoven tales describing a paranoid man's encounter with three people who are not who they seem. Each is an excellent story in its own right, but the whole is greater than the sum. Considering the success of the first volume, I decided to try the second.

If you don't know Arthur Machen, he wrote "weird" stories in the late Victorian - Edwardian period. They all have a distinctly British flavor that reminds me of M.R. James. Most of his stories are set in his homeland of Wales, where something of charm and magic remains beneath the hills. By necessity he began to write for a newspaper later in life, and a fictional account he wrote for the paper on spectral guardians for British troops in WWI became the "Angel of Mons" stories you can still read about today.

THE WHITE PEOPLE AND OTHER STORIES is an eclectic collection of Machen's weird stories, his poetry, and some of his later writings for newspapers. Despite being a fan of Lovecraft, I have always wondered what HPL meant when he consistently referred to a protagonist hinting at things unknown (to others), dropping outlandish names and meaning more than is said. Well, he borrowed this technique from Machen's "The White People", a story made to look like a young girl's diary. Her journal is just a collection of thoughts and experiences, and many things are hinted at as reminders to herself which we will never understand, but these brief glimpses are horrible enough. Machen's poetry collection, "Ornaments in Jade", also struck me as weirdly beautiful but also indecipherable. More is unsaid than said, hinted at than revealed. I felt that it relied on some code, a common frame of reference, that has been lost over the course of a hundred years. Perhaps his contemporaries felt the same way.

There are other interesting compositions in this volume. "The Red Hand" brings back the investigating protagonists from "The Three Imposters," with a not-too-dissimilar plotline. "A Fragment of Life" seemed to be a glimpse into the everday life from a time long ago. It is almost novel length and simply describes the common affairs of a couple in turn-of-the-century London. If this sounds uninteresting, you'll have to read for yourself how a masterful author makes common situations uncommon. Finally, there are a series of stories written from Machen's journalistic days. Besides a group that are all related to the "Angel of Mons" category, there are a few others that describe other supernatural phenomena and are written in the first-person. They are so straight-forward and sincere that sometimes it is difficult to remember they are meant to be fiction.

Machen's overarching theme is that the material, everday world is merely a shadow of reality and that true living must penetrate that shadow to see the glories beyond. This is something he truly believed and it is evident in all of his stories. The reason these stories continue to frighten and thrill is that we desire to see what is beyond the veil, but we are also afraid of what we will find.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Refreshing Change, November 29, 2005

By	Siptea "An American in Holland" (Amsterdam, Netherlands) - See all my reviews

I often find myself drawn to the explicit- gore and carnage, ala Bentley Little and Richard Laymon, so the sublety of Machen's writing was quite a departure for me. The style is quite beautiful- this is a talented writer whose prose will sweep you away with its pure visual beauty.

You will not grasp the entire sequence of events first in these tales, you may have to read them a second time, but that is a pleasure given the author's pleasing style. Perhaps it is time to take a break from the overt that is so prevalent in books and films today, and return to a kinder, gentler time where what is not said can be even more horrifying than what is thrown in your face. This is Machen.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another excellent collection of weird stories from this Welsh master, January 15, 2008

By	The Northern Light "The Kingdom of God Is Wit... (Europa, Close to Ultima Thule) - See all my reviews

This is the second book in the series of three from Chaosium where S. T. Joshi has edited a collection of what he finds to be Arthur Machen's best and most memorable weird tales. I was very much looking forward to reading this, since I for years had heard of Lovecraft's judging Machen's tale "The White People" to be the second best weird tale in existence (after Blackwood's "The Willows"). I was certainly not disappointed!

The introduction by Joshi is as always interesting and informative. The book starts out with another tale from his cycle about the "Little People"; "The Red Hand". A fine detective tale with a major twist, a splendid tale which is also quite creepy. Then comes the pleasant surprise of a cycle of prose-poems known as "Ornaments in Jade". These short "stories" were very much to my taste, and they all have a kind of dreamy and vaguely creepy character.

The title tale "The White People" appears, which is a bit of a strange tale. It's told like little scraps from a young girl's diary, and chronicles her initiatory upbringing by a peculiar nanny, and small experiences from her young life. Another very creepy tale. The prose is, as in everything I've read by Machen, exquisite, and he really had me believing it was a genuine diary. The pages fly by, and I heartily concur with Lovecraft's judgment that it is a marvellous tale, even though I'd say a lot of Lovecraft's own writing is just as fine.

The rest of the book consists of the fine but mundane tale about the famous "Bowmen", that millions believed was a genuine field report from WW1 about angels on the battlefield. Apart from this the rest of the tales are fine material, but all of the marred in some way by Machen's rather conventional Catholic Christianity, which to me personally really ruins the endings of quite a few of his tales.

That being said, this volume does contain some of the best weird tales I've ever read, and I heartily recommend it.