Alone with the Horrors
Winner of both the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award for collection: the canonical one-volume Campbell and a standard text in any serious horror education.
Book Entry · Horror
What is The Great God Pan about?
A Welsh brain surgeon performs an experiment to let a young woman 'see the great god Pan'; she is left an imbecile, and years later a mysterious Helen Vaughan moves through London society leaving suicides in her wake. Machen assembles the story sidelong, through fragments and overheard horrors, until the appalling lineage connecting experiment and femme fatale becomes clear. Denounced as degenerate filth in 1894, which did sales no harm at all, it fuses pagan survival, sexual panic and the dissolution of form into something still genuinely disquieting.
Why it matters
A landmark of weird fiction. Stephen King has called it perhaps the best horror story in the English language and pastiched it in 'N.'; Lovecraft's 'The Dunwich Horror' is its direct descendant.
Read next
At the Mountains of Madness
The peak of Lovecraft's 'materialist' horror, hugely influential on SF-horror hybrids from The Thing (Campbell's 'Who Goes There?' is its sibling) to Alien and Prometheus.
The Call of Cthulhu
The defining cosmic horror story and source of one of modern culture's most recognisable monsters, endlessly adapted, gamed and (regrettably) plushified.