Often what separates good books from great ones is imagery. Good books present excellent imagery. They easily allow the reader to paint a picture similar to that which the author is intending to portray. However, great books leave out just enough, letting the reader fill in the blank with their imagination. They become enthralled with all the possibilities. Voraciously devouring each page of the book to discover more. The greedy book tightens its grip, desperately holding on, always leaving the reader wanting for more. A great story leaves desperation in its wake. Feeding just enough scraps to keep from starvation, yet aching, yearning for more. In the end, one is left combing through their mind. Analyzing everything they just read. Trying to discover small details they may have missed within the scraps they were given.

Recommend finding a dark, quiet room with a small lamp that gives off barely enough light to read by.

Twisted victorian horror of the unknowable old gods. Not bad as it goes and worth a read, but nothing amazing. Probably groundbreaking for the time though? And some effective suspense

A short yet terrifying read

Et Diabolus incarnatus est. Et homo factus est.
"And the Devil was made incarnate. And was made man."

• The prose is absolutely fucking beautiful. machen somehow manages to make environments both eerie and lush at the same time (feels kinda like Conrad's Heart of Darkness but set in rural Wales and 1890's London)
• I love the way he makes two very separated time periods mix by making the ruins of an ancient pagan temple bleed into the modern streets of London and giving us a feel of wrongness about that, like the whole pan thing is out of its time.
• ~fuck around and find out~ my favorite horror trope 🫶 
• i'm not in the occult club but in the end I’m a bitch for it and so I can’t help but stan the idea of an anti-christ girlie, hell yeea⛧
• pretty great use of the unknown/unseen/unmentionable as the main horror element – nothing scarier than an unknown malevolence imo. (not perfectly done tho because it was definitely tipping over into being too much at times)
• the whole revelation of
  Mary being the mother of Helen and Helen essentially being the anti-christ
  caught me completely off-guard. that was cool. so glad I went in blind
• All the underlying symbolism I could probably spend hours digging into – for example
  using Mary as her name because she's the mother of Helen by Pan/Satan just like Mary is the mother of Jesus by God.
   
• if this was an indie pixel horror game then clarke's bachelor apartment would be a warm and cozy save station
• I dig the shortness of it, it really doesn’t need to be longer. and the fact that it’s so short kind of smooths out the cons

• a little bit anticlimatic because the ending feels kinda subdued when it's just told in retrospective like that
• ngl I was a lil confused with the shifting povs of that handful of dudes, I wonder if it could've been written with fewer povs altogether?
• this may be my fault for not concentrating enough idk but I had a continuously poor perception of how much time was passing😂 (but maybe that was intentional?? because it definitely made the revelation hit harder lol)
• A little wordy in the middle but not terrible

The universe is silent throughout the day, and not without dread has it been sundered; it shines with nightly fires, and resounds on all sides from the choruses of the Aegipans: both the playing of pipes, and the ringing of cymbals are heard along the ocean shore.

I enjoyed this, I was expecting a gothic fantisy, but it's more gothic horror, with a little lovecraftian fantisy in it, it is a bit wordy at times, but that is to be expected for it's age.

Un poco meh, sinceramente.

No tenía muchas expectativas, pero no me ha gustado mucho.