The Great God Pan

A reckless doctor performs an experiment on a young woman's brain – a procedure he claims will let her glimpse the true face of the world, the wild and terrible reality the ancients called the great god Pan. The experiment succeeds. That is the problem. Years later, across London and the quiet English countryside, a string of inexplicable deaths and ruined lives begins to trace a pattern back to that single night. A beautiful, nameless woman moves through high society leaving devastation behind her. And a handful of men, piecing together fragments of a story they barely want to believe, slowly realise what was let into the world. First published in 1894, The Great God Pan scandalised Victorian England and went on to haunt the imaginations of Lovecraft, Stephen King, and generations of horror writers since. Arthur Machen's slim, sinister masterpiece is where cosmic horror begins. Some doors should stay shut.