SOURCE: "A Theme in the Early Work of Arthur Machen: 'Degeneration,'" in English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, Vol. 35, No. 3, 1992, pp. 277-87.

Arthur Machen achieved notoriety as a writer through a series of short stories he wrote in the 1890s which, perhaps more than any other literary material, are a bridge between the supernatural tale of the nineteenth-century and the twentieth-century genre of the horror-film. Stories such as "The Great God Pan" (1894), "The Inmost Light" (1894) and "The Novel of the White Powder" (1895) achieved both fame and opprobrium for their author through the powerful sense of evil which is realised in them.

Though Machen was by no means the only writer of the 90s to concern himself with evil, it is at first sight a strange concern. Why, in an age and society increasingly agnostic and conscious of its own modernity, should a writer be impelled to create a...