The White People and Other Weird Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

God to man; they were collected as War and the Christian Faith (1918). But a much more interesting response to the war came in the short novel The Terror (1917), which was also serialized in the Evening News (October 16–31, 1916). Once again we are faced with a reportorial account—sober, factual, even a bit bland—but again the purpose is to demonstrate that “science deals only with surfaces” and that the true causes for the revolt of animals against the domination of mankind lie much deeper.
    The Terror reveals several features characteristic of Machen’s later fiction. The first, perhaps, is frank autobiography. Not only does the first-person narrative voice seem, as in “The Great Return” and “Out of the Earth,” to be Machen himself, but he plays upon his own role as a journalist and reporter. Is he attempting to pass off the narrative as a “true” story? To be sure, there is no deliberate intent to deceive; but the circumstantiality of his account, and its generally reportorial tone, make one wonder whether Machen is hoping to convey a deeper truth—the truth that the brief, fitful, and ultimately temporary “revolution” of the animals against humanity’s reign over the earth is a signal that human morals are collapsing as a result of the hideous and unprecedented warfare that had broken out two years earlier.
    The other feature that distinguishes The Terror is its mystery or even detective element. On the basis of several stories included here, one could easily imagine Machen writing an accomplished detective novel, but of course he would never have done so, for the notion of resolving all loose ends, and thereby emphasizing the rational intellect’s understanding of the world, was anathema to Machen. For him, something of mystery must remain as a bulwark against the relentless march of science. And yet, in its way The Terror is nothing more than a logical working out of all possibilities, so that, by a process of elimination, a single explanation—even if it is supernatural—remains as the only viable solution to the case.
    By the 1920s Machen occupied a peculiar, even bizarre position in the English literary scene. In 1923 a first edition of The Hill of Dreams was fetching the fabulous price of £1,500, or $7,500, far more than most people earned in an entire year. And yet, Machen himself was struggling along as a journalist for a variety of British magazines and newspapers, making ends meet only by writing with unrelenting regularity for such papers as the London Graphic, John O’London’s Weekly, the Lyons Mail, and the Observer; toward the end of the decade he had lapsed into such poverty that an extraordinary effort was made by British writers—T. S. Eliot among them—to garner a Civil List pension for him; the effort succeeded in 1931. Thereafter Machen had an annual income of £100 from the British government, and this allowed him to live in comfort at his home in Old Amersham, Buckinghamshire, for the remaining sixteen years of his life.
    Scarcely a year in the 1920s passed without some significant publication of Machen’s work, but in the great majority of instances these presented stories, novels, or essays that he had written years or decades before. His major original works of the period were his three sensitive autobiographies, Far Off Things (1922), Things Near and Far (1923), and The London Adventure (1924), which paint a bittersweet portrait of the poverty he endured when he left his native Wales in the early 1880s to work as a Grub Street hack during the day while spending the evenings writing those imperishable works of fantasy and terror that have earned him a small but choice readership. Alfred A. Knopf began issuing a multivolume edition of his major works in the United States in 1922, and those volumes, with their familiar yellow covers, are still highly soughtafter items for the book