The Welsh author Arthur Machen, a pioneer in the genre of weird fiction, would not seem equipped to generate the terror that his tales evoke. He was a typical Victorian, sentimental and sincerely religious, with a sometimes stodgy and far-rambling writing style.
I just read a volume of his stories, and nearly every one had a moment of supreme horror—not the kind that makes you jump out of your skin but the kind where you realize you’ve been clenching your stomach without realizing it.
Machen did not need to be a supreme stylist or even a technically brilliant storyteller to write fiction that transcended time. All he needed was an honest connection to his own emotions and a dogged commitment to telling each story until the feeling it raised in him was elicited in the reader. His fiction strikes our emotion like a bell because of two authorial traits:
He was honest about what aroused his feelings—Machen was horrified by spiritual menace. He believed in dark forces and the destructive power of evil, and his stories feature human beings overcome—either physically or spiritually—by creatures of unrestrained wickedness. He did not see a need to hide or explain or justify his fear; he accepted it as a real thing and therefore valid within his stories. As a result, even if Machen’s supernatural premises aren’t convincing to all of us, his emotions certainly are.
He honored the life-span of emotions—Machen knew that emotions don’t always explode like fireworks, launched and then fizzling out within a couple seconds. In his short stories and his long ones, he exemplifies the slow burn, taking the time required to set scenes and establish events. Not every moment of each of his works is frightening. Some stories hit their pitch of fear in one short paragraph at the exact climax and others (a great example being The Terror) reach a sustained, multichapter point of horror after pages and pages of—let’s be honest—rather boring detail collection. I’m not excusing the boring parts. What I am saying is that getting through them is absolutely worth it.