Arthur Machen.

In 1895, the editors of a new magazine, The Unicorn, sought to make a splash by engaging a pair of literary hot properties to contribute parallel series of tales. The two writers were Arthur Machen and H. G. Wells, both fresh off recent publishing triumphs (in Machen’s case perhaps scandal is closer to the mark), and their contributions were to offer readers distinct modes or flavors of what we today would call genre fiction. The magazine, unfortunately, folded after a mere three issues, in which only one of Wells’s stories, and none of Machen’s, appeared. Machen related the episode, nearly three decades later, in characteristically self-deprecating fashion:

‘The Great God Pan” had made a storm in a Tiny Tot’s teacup. And about the same time, a young gentleman named H. G. Wells had made a very real, and a most deserved sensation with a book called ‘The Time Machine”; a book indeed. And a new weekly paper was projected by Mr. Raven Hill [sic] and Mr. Girdlestone, a paper that was to be called ‘The Unicorn.” And both Mr. Wells and myself were asked to contribute; I was to do a series of horror stories.

This obscure episode in late-Victorian publishing history is intriguing for a number of reasons. It would be interesting to know, for instance, just how Raven-Hill and Girdlestone phrased their offer; perhaps they requested “more stuff in the ‘Pan’ line.” Writing in the 1920s, Machen speaks of “horror stories” and “tales of horror,” but it’s unlikely that these were the expressions used at the time (unlikely, too, that the editors asked the young Wells for more “scientific romances,” let alone the entirely anachronistic designation “science fiction”). This was, after all, precisely the period during which the still fluid conceptual boundaries of emergent genre categories like science fiction, fantasy, and horror were beginning to be negotiated, shaped, and defined. But a more tantalizing question is this: If The Unicorn, and its editors’ scheme, had been a success, would the trajectory of Machen’s reputation have more closely resembled that of Wells’s—triumph after triumph, as well as worldwide celebrity, in the years to come? Machen’s star, by contrast, sank slowly back toward the horizon line of relative obscurity, then followed an irregularly wavelike course throughout his later life (and afterlife), ascending and again declining at periodic intervals. For Wells, 1895 marked the beginning of fame; for Machen it meant something like the end of it, until the next century at any rate. But what if Machen had become, as it were, the H. G. Wells of horror?  Read More