I wasn't sure about The Great God Pan when I started it. Although I was enjoying the language (I'm a fan of elaborate, discursive, evocative writing), the various chapters, and the incidents described therein, seemed haphazard, disconnected. Ah, but as I read my way through the tale, patterns began to manifest, characters and locations and occurrences began to mesh, and all began to connect and point to the denouement. I was greatly pleased because these connections were not terribly blatant or overt, no deus ex machina was employed, but instead emerged gradually, as if from an obscuring mist, and greater understanding and full enlightenment by the end flowed into the reader's mind in a very natural and seemingly uncontrived fashion. A delectable sensation.

The tale contains strong elements of horror and the supernatural, but it also had wonderful elements of mystery to it as well. The story, as I worked my way through it, reminded me in some ways of the writing and stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, Sax Rohmer, Arthur Conan Doyle, H.P. Lovecraft, and Edgar Allan Poe. That being said, The Great God Pan is very much its own voice; I am a voracious reader and I can sincerely say that never before have I read anything quite like it.

As a side note, I want to mention that there is a Canadian occult-rock band called Blood Ceremony who are quite excellent. They perform a song called "The Great God Pan" (one of my favorite songs from them) and during my read of Machen's story, this song was playing, unintentionally but delightfully, in the back of my head. A sample of the song's lyrics: "We see the horned one, we see his shape assume/The form of laughing wines and sandalwood fumes." Blood Ceremony are brilliant; perhaps give their music a try.