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Jim Smith's Reviews > The Terror
The Terror
by
by
3.5 stars.
Most essential Machen work is from the 1890s, but The Terror is his most fully developed horror tale from his later career and of interest for those of us who prefer his darker fiction. This often waffling novella is meandering and less focused than his dark folk masterpieces The Hill of Dreams, The Great God Pan, The Three Impostors, Ornaments in Jade and The White People, but also gleefully manic and quite inspired in parts, developing an atmosphere of magical mystery and dread around the countryside and featuring moments of potent terror, particularly the harrowing final siege diary, which is worthy of Machen at his best as a horror writer.
The reveal of what "the Terror" is satisfies, though the reasoning behind it being a final justification for social hierarchies is off-putting and a general point of contention I have with Machen's reactionary worldview. I preferred the previously suggested "contagion of hate" from the war.
Most essential Machen work is from the 1890s, but The Terror is his most fully developed horror tale from his later career and of interest for those of us who prefer his darker fiction. This often waffling novella is meandering and less focused than his dark folk masterpieces The Hill of Dreams, The Great God Pan, The Three Impostors, Ornaments in Jade and The White People, but also gleefully manic and quite inspired in parts, developing an atmosphere of magical mystery and dread around the countryside and featuring moments of potent terror, particularly the harrowing final siege diary, which is worthy of Machen at his best as a horror writer.
The reveal of what "the Terror" is satisfies, though the reasoning behind it being a final justification for social hierarchies is off-putting and a general point of contention I have with Machen's reactionary worldview. I preferred the previously suggested "contagion of hate" from the war.
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Quotes Jim Liked
“We both wondered whether these contradictions that one can't avoid if one begins to think of time and space may not really be proofs that the whole of life is a dream, and the moon and stars bits of nightmare.”
― The Terror
― The Terror
Reading Progress
Finished Reading
June 9, 2018
– Shelved
