Arthur Machen’s 20th century writings are simultaneously fascinating and frustrating. These days, if Machen is known by general readers, it is not for the relatively more recent works, but rather for his extraordinary writings of the 1890s (even if some of them were not published until later): “The Great God […]
Published in 1910, Algernon Blackwood’s The Human Chord is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good novel. But it is a strange and intermittently interesting one, and historically important in that it attempts to give fictional life to some of the key ideas of the Hermetic Order of […]
Arthur Machen’s short story “The White People” remains a masterpiece and perhaps his most difficult work of fiction — what Absalom, Absalom! is for Faulkner, what Finnegans Wake is for Joyce, “The White People” is for Machen. Though Machen wrote the story when Joyce was a teenager and Faulkner a toddler, its challenges […]
For at least a year now, I’ve been making random notes toward what may, in coming decades, if I live long enough, become a book about fiction and magic (and by magic, I mean both prestidigitation and occult ideas). Since I would like these Lexias to be opportunities for trying […]
Harry Houdini began his 1924 book A Magician Among the Spirits (likely written for him by his assistant Oscar Teale) with a confession: From my early career as a mystical entertainer I have been interested in Spiritualism as belonging to the category of mysticism, and as a side line to my […]