There are strange things lost and forgotten in obscure corners of the newspaper. I often think that the most extraordinary item of intelligence that I have read in print appeared a few years ago in the London Press. It came from a well known and most respected news agency; I imagine it was in all the papers. It was astounding.

Dr. Raymond's ultimate goal is to devise a way to open the mind of man so that he may experience all the world has to offer. He calls this, "seeing the great god Pan." After much study of the human mind he devises an experiment which involves minor brain surgery. He performs this experiment on a young woman named Mary, but when she awakes she is terrified and mentally crippled. Years later, the beautiful but sinister-looking Helen Vaughan is reported to have caused a series of mysterious happenings in a small nameless town. She spends all her days in the woods, scares a boy so much he is...

At once supernatural and vividly realistic, this celebrated novel follows the life of Lucien Taylor, a young man possessed by strange dreams and inner demons. In sublime prose, Arthur Machen evokes the wonder and terror of Lucien's erotic visions, and his eventual succumbing. One of the finest portrayals of the "accursed artist," The Hill of Dreams has influenced such writers as H.P. Lovecraft, Henry Miller, and Stephen King.

Arthur Machen was a Welsh writer and mystic who was best known for supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction.

A woman in Wales has her mind destroyed by a scientist's attempt to enable her to see the god of nature Pan. Years later, a young woman named Helen Vaughan arrives on the London social scene, disturbing many young men and causing some to commit suicide; it transpires that she is the monstrous offspring of the god Pan and the woman in the experiment.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

The novel recounts the life of a young man, Lucian Taylor, focusing on his dreamy childhood in rural Wales, in a town based on Caerleon. The Hill of Dreams of the title is an old Roman fort where Lucian has strange sensual visions, including ones of the town in the time of Roman Britain. Later it describes Lucian's attempts to make a living as an author in London, enduring poverty and suffering in the pursuit of art.

Arthur Llewelyn Jones (1863-1947) who wrote under the pen name Arthur Machen was a leading Welsh author. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. He is also well known for his leading role in creating the legend of The Angels of Mons (1915). In 1884, he published the pastiche The Anatomy of Tobacco, and secured work with the publisher and bookseller George Redway.

From the beginning of his literary career, Machen espoused a mystical belief that the humdrum ordinary world hid a more mysterious and strange world beyond. His gothic and decadent works of the 1890s concluded that the lifting of this veil could lead to madness, sex, or death, and usually a combination of all three. Machen's later works became somewhat less obviously full of gothic trappings, but for him investigations into mysteries invariably resulted in life-changing transformation and sacrifice. Machen loved the medieval world view because he felt it manifested deep spirituality alongside...