#michael wheatley

I adore the designs on these British Library Tales of the Weird anthologies, and I am happy to say that the collection lives up to its gorgeous cover.

Phenomenal collection. Establishes an image of Pan simultaneously particular and broad; he is the other, that part of the world that we cannot reach but know is there, the old world and the other world and the natural world all at once. The primary interaction here is one of access: Pan represents an access to something else, either unattainable or attainable only with the sacrifice of our participation in society, moral rectitude, sanity, or life. These human constructs that limit our experience to a finite, structured whole are antithetical to Pan, and so the access he provides must negate them. It is from this deep pool of mystery that Machen draws his tale of cosmic horror, the terror of what lies beyond the veil of consciousness perfectly represented by the otherworldliness of Pan. It is where Egerton, Pain, Keller, and Quick draw their tales of sexual repression released in devotion and betrayal of the heteronormative ideal of marriage. It is from this strangeness that Blackwood constructs his tale of manic liberation, and his primitivist characters whose passion for purity and the rejection of modern civilization borders on eco-fascism. That Lawrence and Toksvig invert Christian morality and construct parallel understandings of devotion based in something older than Christ. That Forster offers an escape from the masculine ideal in the form of his bacchanalia. That Grahame's animal characters are given access to something extraordinary out of sympathy for their legitimate bestial nature, but are too human, and so must forget lest they cease to prioritize their sense of civilization and individualism.

The primary structural tool in these stories is a turn, wherein the natural/other/old/under worlds are at first peripheral, or even beneath the human characters before the primal power of Pan shocks them into a realization of their smallness, or their passion, or their (in)humanity. This is easily seen in a short passage from Saki, as his Sylvia stands watching a great stag being hunted, who at first has sympathy for the pain of the creature before: "In an instant her pity for the hunted animal was changed to wild terror at her own danger" (153). The shift from a paternalistic sense of pity to a horror at one's own positionality as that which is not all and that which cannot see all is characteristic.

📚 Books and 🌸 Flowers

💚 The Horned God: Weird Tales of the Great God Pan edited by Michael Wheatley

💛 Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett

🌳 The Horned God: Weird Tales of the Great God Pan edited by Michael Wheatley

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

“I understand almost everything,” I heard him say. “The trees, hills, stars, water, I can see all. But isn’t it odd! I can’t make out men a bit. Do you know what I mean?”

—The Story of a Panic by E.M. Forster

Assembling ten tales and six poems from the boom years of Pan-centric literature, this new collection revels in themes of queer awakening, transgression against societal bonds and the bewitching power of the wild.

I’ve been fascinated by Pan ever since I got into Greek mythology at a young age (thanks Rick Riordan), but this collection of Pan stories/poetry is on another level. Michael Wheatley did a great job selecting an array of different tales with common themes, while interspersing it with eerie poetry. My favorite poem in the collection was “The Haunted Forest” by Edith Hurley and my favorite story was “Music on the Hill” by Saki.

Something that really made this stick out for me, which comes in the territory of Pan, was the ideas and feelings of breaking societal norms and running away to the allure of nature. I’ve had that feeling so many times, I can’t even tell you. That was something I loved in a lot of the stories.

Yet on some mystic nights in May,

Safe from the eyes of man.

Above a strange wind’s crying.

Long call the pipes of Pan.

“I understand almost everything,” I heard him say. “The trees, hills, stars, water, I can see all. But isn’t it odd! I can’t make out men a bit. Do you know what I mean?”

Next up from The Horned God is: The Moon-Slave by Barry Pain (1901) 🌕