The Dyson Stories were written by Arthur Machen and began with “The Inmost Light” (The Great God Pan, 1894). Dyson would go on to appear in The Three Impostors (1895), “The Shining Pyramid” (The Unknown World, May 15 1895), and “The Red Hand” (Chapman’s Magazine of Fiction, Dec. 1895). Arthur Machen (née Arthur Llewellyn Jones, 1863-1947) was a Welsh novelist, short story writer, and translator. He is well-regarded by connoisseurs of horror and supernatural fiction but not as well-known outside the field as he deserves to be.

More than other Victorian writers of supernatural fiction, Arthur Machen linked the great majority of his stories together. Machen did it in two ways, through the stories of Dyson and through the Little People Stories.

Dyson (he is never given a first name) is an opinionated and pompous young man. Thanks to an inheritance he is financially secure and can afford to write books which will never be published and to play the London boulevardier and wander the streets and byways of London to familiarize himself with the city he loves, in hopes of finding the unusual and the outré. He is also something of an amateur detective and is enthusiastic about thrusting himself into crimes so that he can solve them. In this he is not usually successful. When he does solve a crime, he is too late to forestall the victory of the criminals.

Dyson is in some ways Machen’s reaction to The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries. Dyson is not the rationalist that Holmes is. Dyson enjoys the “wonderful and the improbable” and is rather more credulous when it comes to the supernatural than not. But Holmes had set the standard for fictional detectives by 1895, and many were the detectives created then and after who were imitations of Holmes or at least heavily influenced by him. Dyson tries to practice the same type of deductive logic toward the end of solving crimes, and lectures at length about his conclusions in the Holmesian way, but Machen’s world is different from Conan Doyle’s world, and so Dyson is usually left either as an observer or explaining, to his friends Mr. Salisbury or Charles Phillipps, what has occurred. In Machen’s world the figure of the Great Detective is essentially helpless in the face of the wonders and horrors of London and the evil of the Little People and the occult past. Machen admitted that The Three Impostors was his reaction to Robert Louis Stevenson’s work, both New Arabian Nights and The Dynamiter, which made London into an urban area where anything, no matter how bizarre, could happen. But the figure of Dyson and his function in the stories is a reaction to Conan Doyle, not Stevenson.

Dyson’s London is wonderful and awful, full of ancient and terrible powers and cruel modern people. In “The Inmost Light” Dyson and Salisbury discuss the case of Doctor Black, whose wife died under suspicious circumstances; an autopsy showed that her brain was not that of a human being, but was “the brain of a devil.” Dyson and Salisbury coincidentally come into possession of an opal-like gem and Doctor Black’s diary and discover that Black had discovered the means to trap human souls. He had put the soul of his wife into the gem, very much against her will, and then killed her body. On finishing the diary Dyson breaks the gem and burns the diary. In “The Red Hand” Phillipps and Dyson begin by arguing about some flint fish hooks and end up investigating a murder case, using what Dyson calls his “theory of improbability,” which is, more prosaically, persistence wedded to cleverness, and some deduction to theorize the existence of the Little People. In “The Shining Pyramid” Dyson and his friend Vaughan investigate a disappearance in the country and a mysterious set of symbols made of ancient flints. They end up watching the Little People perform a human sacrifice, creating a pyramid of flame. And in The Three Impostors Dyson and Phillipps are gulled by three agents of a sinister crime lord who is searching London for a former agent who stole a valuable gold coin.

In the ten years between 1890 and 1899¼he changed the face of British supernatural fiction, blasting away at both the genteel narrative conventions and the ideological foundations of the Victorian ghost story. He was the first British writer of authentically modern horror stories¼.¹

If he is better known to the horror cognoscenti than those outside the field, he at least gets the regard he deserves by academics and critics, who correctly view him as a revolutionary figure.

One way to characterize Machen’s core contribution to modern horror is to say that he engaged in a thoroughgoing reconceptualization—a “reboot,” as we might say today—of the Gothic mode in the aftermath of the Victorian time revolution. Arguably no earlier writer had attempted to inscribe the newly revealed abysses of deep temporality, with its disconcerting potentialities, within a recognizably Gothic framework—certainly none so extensively, or so influentially. Machen’s haunted Wales is charged with deep time—it is not a landscape dotted with ruins of vaguely antique provenance, but a coded, stratified space preserving traces of the historic, prehistoric, and prehumen pasts alike (even if these traces have a disconcerting habit of appearing where they are not supposed to be). And the historical sciences of geology, archaeology, and ethnology, as well as such kindred fields as philology and comparative mythology, are on prominent display in Machen’s fiction, where they are not mere window dressing but rather central to the articulation of his Gothic fiction.²

combined the Stevensonian approach to the city with the Edwardian sensibility of the flâneur, and added Machen’s personal mythology of sinister Celtic atavisms, (relatively) overt sexuality, and elements of what can be called “sacred horror” or “visionary horror” (the more religious, more Victorian, version of the cosmic horror that H.P. Lovecraft would later popularize). Machen was not as directly influential as James or Blackwood; there was no “school” of writers modeling themselves on Machen, as there was with James, and Machen did not create a sub-genre of horror fiction, as Blackwood did. What later writers took from Machen was the combination of a leitmotif of proto-cosmic horror and Machen’s sinister, expansive greater London: the “vastness of London and its sprawling northern suburbs. Machen develops the world of Dombey and Sons and Sherlock Holmes into something apocalyptic.”³

Print: Arthur Machen and Aaron Worth, The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

¹ Brian Stableford, “Machen, Arthur (Llewellyn),” in St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers (Detroit, MI: St. James Press, 1998), 384.

² Aaron Worth, “Introduction,” in The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories (Oxford: Oxford University, 2018), xxiv.

³ Nevins, Horror Fiction in the 20^th Century, 12.