ENFANTS DE LA PISCINE et autres histoires Arthur Machen LIMITED presse tartare HC 2024

THE CHILDREN OF THE POOL and Other Stories by Arthur Machen. Introduction by Mark Valentine. Leyburn, North Yorkshire, UK; Tartarus Press; 2015. 1st Tartarus Press Press limited hardcover edition. OUT OF PRINT.

Publisher description:

In his room in Gray's Inn, London, at the end of the nineteenth century Arthur Machen had one of the most memorable mystical experiences of his life: ‘the wall trembled and the pictures on the wall shook and shivered before my eyes, as if a sudden wind had blown into the room.' For days afterwards he went about in ‘a rapture of delight'. This encounter with another order of things reinforced his conviction that there is a world beyond the one where we usually walk.

The six stories in The Children of the Pool, reflect in their different ways this lifelong belief. The bookish recluse in ‘The Exalted Omega', the kabbalistic artist in ‘Out of the Picture', the holiday¬makers in a Welsh resort in ‘Change', all encounter the truly uncanny, and cannot emerge unchanged. And in the other three stories Machen explores the edges of that unknown terrain, the human mind.

‘There are hints or indications of new paths,' was Machen's typically modest comment on the book to his old friend A.E. Waite. In this last collection of fiction (first published 1936), the Apostle of Wonder shows he has lost none of his visionary power.

Contains: Introduction by Mark Valentine, The Exalted Omega, The Children of the Pool, The Bright Boy, The Tree of Life, Out of the Picture, Change. With a Vorticist frontispiece drawing of the author.