The Inmost Light

by Arthur Machen

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Fiction, Fantasy, Weird Fiction, Classics, British Literature

48 pages, Paperback

First published September 16, 1894

About the author

Arthur Machen was a leading Welsh author of the 1890s. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. His long story The Great God Pan made him famous and controversial in his lifetime, but The Hill of Dreams is generally considered his masterpiece. He also is well known for his leading role in creating the legend of the Angels of Mons.

At the age of eleven, Machen boarded at Hereford Cathedral School, where he received an excellent classical education. Family poverty ruled out attendance at university, and Machen was sent to London, where he sat exams to attend medical school but failed to get in. Machen, however, showed literary promise, publishing in 1881 a long poem "Eleusinia" on the subject of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Returning to London, he lived in relative poverty, attempting to work as a journalist, as a publisher's clerk, and as a children's tutor while writing in the evening and going on long rambling walks across London.

In 1884 he published his second work, the pastiche The Anatomy of Tobacco, and secured work with the publisher and bookseller George Redway as a cataloguer and magazine editor. This led to further work as a translator from French, translating the Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre, Le Moyen de Parvenir (Fantastic Tales) of Béroalde de Verville, and the Memoirs of Casanova. Machen's translations in a spirited English style became standard ones for many years.

Around 1890 Machen began to publish in literary magazines, writing stories influenced by the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, some of which used gothic or fantastic themes. This led to his first major success, The Great God Pan. It was published in 1894 by John Lane in the noted Keynotes Series, which was part of the growing aesthetic movement of the time. Machen's story was widely denounced for its sexual and horrific content and subsequently sold well, going into a second edition.

Machen next produced The Three Impostors, a novel composed of a number of interwoven tales, in 1895. The novel and the stories within it were eventually to be regarded as among Machen's best works. However, following the scandal surrounding Oscar Wilde later that year, Machen's association with works of decadent horror made it difficult for him to find a publisher for new works. Thus, though he would write some of his greatest works over the next few years, some were published much later. These included The Hill of Dreams, Hieroglyphics, A Fragment of Life, the story The White People, and the stories which make up Ornaments in Jade.

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mr Black is dead. Was she murdered and what secrets has her husband Dr Black to hide? Salisbury listens to an incredible story told by his friend Dyson. Set in London the story is extremely compelling, mysterious and eerie. Machen really knows how to stage a murder mystery! The end is also quite frightening. Recommended!

[Quirkyreader · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a twisted little Machen tale.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent short featuring the character of Dyson who occurs in a number of Machen's short stories. He is to all effects, an occult investigator. Here, he discovers the strange story of Dr. Black who lives on the outskirts of London. Black had a wife who mysteriously disappeared for an extended period of time, and was then witnessed staring demonically out from a window at the back of her house by Dyson himself.

He discovers, due to unintentional assistance from a friend Salisbury, and what he terms 'acting on the theories of improbability' that she underwent a process of transformation whereby her soul was extracted into the confines of an opal, being replaced by that of a demon. Black then acted according to her wishes and killed her.

Excellent and compelling, with some truly atmospheric descriptions of London.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a rather tortured fantasy and mystery story combined. I needed to read it twice all the way through to fully grasp it. Written in 1894 it is contemporaneous with Arthur Conan Doyle's mysteries starring Holmes and Watson. It is fun to note the similarities and differences between the two takes of the same genre. By the end of a Sherlock Holmes story, every detail makes perfect sense. A crime was committed. Holmes finds out about it, deduces the facts of the case in a remarkable manner, proceeds to solve, and eventually brings the criminal to justice, setting the formula for the sleuth solved mystery in granite. Ready for the next case.

Machen didn't get the memo, and his concept is therefore quite different. Machen sets his mystery in the same London of the same period and has a sleuth solve a crime. Machen's sleuth, named Doyle ironically enough, likewise is super-powered, it seems, in deductive reasoning. There the similarities end. Unlike with Holmes' methods, the reader is never let in to see how Doyle makes his deductions, only that he does. This is really odd, like a key part of the story is being omitted.

Doyle does have a partner named Salisbury, but Salisbury is no Watson. Salisbury has no intention of chronicling Doyle's exploits. To the extent Salisbury helps Doyle it's accidentally on purpose. Really. Read the story if you don't believe that can be done. In fact, Salisbury is so the opposite of Watson that once he has finished the mission he is assigned in Machen's novel as Doyle's facilitator, he wants nothing further to do with Doyle, or the case. He certainly has no interest in how it turns out.

So how then is Machen to get the details to us readers if there is no Watson to chronicle it? That's the tortured part. Machen has to finally resort to a letter written by another character altogether to convey the solution of the crime to the reader.

Flawed as the story may be, there are a lot of fun elements to it. Machen gives us unabashedly mystical elements with a scientific explanation half-attempted of human brains being changed into devils' brains, which makes the homocide justified. What remains after that is less a real mystery than a drama, all of which takes place oddly off-screen. The authorial technique really makes this into a hot mess of a story, with not everything explained.

There is no way an Arthur Conan Doyle reader would have tolerated the kinds of ambiguity this weird story ends on. To an extent, I don't either. However, despite its technical flaws, there is something really appealing about this messy story. The atypical characters are a joy. I love the fantastic events that take place in such a humdrum urban setting. The story's lack of plot polish even works for me. I admire Machen for aiming high, for what he tried (but I think ultimately failed) to pull off. At least it's truly unique and interesting.

There is one thing I wish I had known coming in to this story that might have saved me the trouble of reading it again in order to figure it out, and that is who is telling the story. If you want, I will share my deductions with you. Maybe it will help. The story is divided into five unequal parts told in different ways.

I. Dialogue between Doyle and Salisbury, primarily Doyle telling first half of Dr. Black's story.
II. Third person omnicient focused on Salisbury.
III. Third person omnicient focused on Salisbury. Transition into dialogue between Doyle and Salisbury with Doyle telling the second half of Black's story.
IV. Third person omnicient focused on Doyle.
V. Letter from Dr. Black explaining many plot elements while leaving others still unclear, such as how the jewel was acquired in the first place.

Another reviewer stated Machen wrote other stories featuring mystic sleuth and successful author Doyle solving supernatural crimes. Searching through my Machen collection, I found more than six but less than a dozen such stories, all novelette length or shorter. I'm hooked and plan to read them all eventually. They have to get better as Machen gains experience writing them. I'll update this review with the stories' titles when I do.

[Christian Savin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was enjoying the story until the last chapter and the reveal of it all ruined it for me. Unlike the experiment in the Great God Pan, the on here felt utterly pointless, except for a madman's desire to mess with things he souldn't mess with, which sadly was not enough for me.
Though the plot was lacking, the writing itself and Machen's descriptions made this story hard to put down.

[José Cruz Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

"There is a region of knowledge of which you will never know, which wise men seeing from afar off shun like the plague, as well they may, but into that region I have gone."

Arthur Machen was both a precursor of and a better writer than H. P. Lovecraft, who claimed that the Welsh author was one of his biggest influences. But Machen was, in a sense, more conventional than Lovecraft. He uses more dialogue and less exposition than the latter. He is, however, less known than his protégé.

The Inmost Light begins with a seemingly innocuous conversation between two men named Salisbury and Dyson. The latter, however, tells Salisbury of a somewhat eerie experience the he had had some time ago. Salisbury's interest is deeply aroused by this story, but they have to cut their reunion short due to circumstances.

What follows is, probably, the most horrifying tale I've ever read. But mind you, most of the horrific things in The Inmost Light are implied rather than explicitly detailed. Once again Arthur Machen shows us the horrors that lie hidden in mundane reality.

[Bookuser (Orbuser) · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Inmost Light has a cool concept, messing with the human soul and the creepy consequences. But it just doesn’t quite hit the mark.
The story moves too fast to really build tension, and the characters feel a bit flat. Machen’s writing is nice, but compared to The Great God Pan, this one doesn’t have the same punch.
It’s an okay read if you’re into old school horror, but not the most memorable.

[Aisllan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Found this Author by chance, thanks to an album from Current 93 and of course had to read this story 'cause it was inspiration for the album, at least according to what I've read. It's indeed a very short story but it has something, some mood that's really enjoyable, creepy enough to keep my interest. Definitely reading more from him, next is Great God Pan.

[Shabbeer Hassan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A rather creepy and chilling short story featuring Machen's occult investigator Dyson. This time we have Dyson looking into the mysterious murder of the wife of a respected doctor in London and what he finds there is nothing short of revealing the inmost light of her soul!

My Rating - 3.5/5

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll give this a 3.5! I really liked the way it was written, but the story itself could have been better.

[Sem · Rating 3 out of 5]

Agnes must have been the ultimate doormat. Good grief.

[dom]

scariest thing about this is describing london like a living beast

[Rory · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://bloodknife.com/gnostic-horror...

[Anya · Rating 4 out of 5]

franchement bien zinzin i love it

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Q. has had to go and see his friends in Paris,” it began. “Traverse Handel S. ‘Once around the grass, and twice around the lass, and thrice around the maple-tree.'”

Fin-de-siècle London. Litterateurs of independent means. Flâneurs. Creeping suburbia and slums. Swirling fogs and coded messages. And hints of unspeakable, even blasphemous mysteries.

Welshman Arthur Llewellyn Jones loved these, and lived these, and even wrote about them – under the name Arthur Machen. In his early novelette ‘The Inmost Light’, written in 1892, he created a twisty narrative that, while relying a great deal on happenstance and synchronicity, languidly brought these aspects together.

In Mr Dyson, Charles Salisbury and Dr Steven Black we see these kinds of dilletante males he frequently featured, some of whom unfortunately could, and would, casually use women to achieve their dubious and sometimes occult ambitions – to their cost.

‘… [S]hortly after you saw me I succeeded to a small income. An uncle died, and proved unexpectedly generous.’

‘Ah, I see. That must have been convenient.’

While strolling around London Charles Salisbury encounters a former acquaintance, Dyson, who (as he later reveals) has received a legacy sufficient to allow him to continue researching into obscure literary and occult corners. As is the way with such matters they will eventually repair to each other’s lodgings to smoke their pipes and drink Chianti or Benedictine before mulling over their curious experiences. Dyson tells Salisbury he has been investigating a doctor he chooses (for reasons best known to himself) to call ‘Black’ – and on his perambulations out into the new London suburbs he finds in Harlesden a horrific vision staring out of a window.

‘It was the face of a woman, and yet it was not human. […]

‘I knew I had looked into another world—looked through the window of a commonplace, brand-new house, and seen hell open before me. […]

‘I heard that Mrs. Black had been much admired for her beautiful golden hair, and round what had struck me with such a nameless terror, there was a mist of flowing yellow hair, as it were an aureole of glory round the visage of a satyr.’

Subsequently Salisbury has a strange incident of his own to narrate when, after being caught in a heavy downpour, he observes from a sheltering passageway a row between a woman and a drunk: after refusing to continue working with him at some disreputable job the furious woman drops a scrap of paper – which Salisbury later retrieves. When he has time to peruse it he discovers an enigmatic message including what appears to be a spell, namely ‘Once around the grass, and twice around the lass, and thrice around the maple-tree.’

There will inevitably be a link between these seemingly unconnected episodes, which Dyson will work out after he manages to clandestinely make the acquaintance of ‘Dr Black’, now a widower and a shadow of his former self.

Dyson, who was also to appear in later narratives, is I fancy a version of Machen himself, who like Dyson received an inheritance which allowed him to pursue his literary ambitions in London. For all that it presents itself as an English surname Dyson here sounds more to me like a nickname, “Dai’s son” – Dai of course being (along with Taffy) then a common indicator of a Welshman. In addition ‘Dyson’ might allude to Machen’s birthplace, Llanddewi Fach, literally Little St David’s; equally, it could be a reference to a follower of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, ritual madness and religious ecstasy, aspects of which featured in much of Machen’s writings. In any case Machen, like his creation Dyson, was also a literary-minded flâneur who enjoyed tobacco and wine.

Further, the key to this fictional mystery is a motif well known to folklorists and anthropologists, namely the so-called soul-jar. The archetypal Russian sorcerer Koshchei, for example, kept his soul in an egg, while Sauron’s spirit resided in the One Ring and Lord Voldemort’s soul was ultimately split between seven horcruxes. What emerges – and this is no real spoiler – is that Dr Black has persuaded his young wife to submit to his ‘scientific’ practices and separate her soul from her body to place it in a suitable receptacle; but, thoughtless meddler that he is, he has not considered all the possible consequences.

Why should one read this short story? Firstly, it has doses of sly humour to leaven the horror, poking fun for instance at wannabe writers waiting for an heirloom to remove their financial worries while relying on otherwise preposterous coincidences to accelerate their plots. Secondly it fits in perfectly with other Gothic and mystery titles published around this time – Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story collection The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892) – and thus deserves its place among these other narratives by authors from the so-called Celtic fringe.

As a story that hangs together I also think it’s more satisfying than Machen’s novella The Great God Pan (with which it was published in 1894); as a species of urban horror rooted in a great metropolis such as London it’s likely to please other readers who tend to think such environments are as potentially rich in weird and terrible mysteries as might be offered by desolate rural locations or isolated medieval villages. Intoned in suitably sombre tones it might even cause a shudder or two.

[BA · Rating 4 out of 5]

very interesting story and a quick read. I was lost in the story and Machen's style of writing

[M.J. Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable reading. A short novella. Perhaps a little too contrived for modern tastes.

[Grady Ormsby · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Inmost Light (1894) by Arthur Machen (the pen-name of Arthur Llewellyn Jones) is a novella from collection The House of Souls. It is the tale of a scientist trying to peer behind the curtain to behold a truer reality. In the story Dr. Black’s wife is the subject of an experiment that produces horrifying results.

The story opens when Mr. Charles Salisbury happens to run into his friend Dyson. It is through Dyson’s current interest in crime writing that he comes across a story of the missing wife of Dr. Black. He tells Salisbury that he saw a face of a woman that was “not human” in the window of the Black home after Mrs. Black was supposedly missing. The described image of Mrs. Black’s hideous face in the upstairs window, as seen by our narrator from some distance away, is one that lingers in the memory.

The two separate but not after Salisbury gets Dyson to promise to tell him any further details of the story later. Salisbury, while walking home, encounters a drunken couple. The woman of the couple, while arguing with the man, takes out a crumpled piece of paper and throws it to the ground. The paper happens to land near Salisbury’s feet. He picks it up, but it seems like the writing is nothing more than “sheer folly.”

Salisbury gives the paper to Dyson, who is able to make some sense of it. The message on the paper takes Dyson to a small shop in a poor neighborhood of London. Through the writing on the paper, Dyson discovers the name of the shop, the name of the shop-keeper and a rhyme that he must relay to the shop-keeper in order to receive a wooden box. The shop-keeper seems distressed when Dyson appears and relays the rhyme, but gives him the box anyway.

Once home, Dyson opens the box. It is revealed through a journal in the box that Dr. Black didn’t kill his wife, but he had her soul removed. He imprisoned her soul inside a shining jewel, substituting something else into her body. His intent was to switch her soul back, but the jewel was stolen before he could reverse the process. Along with the journal the jewel is also in the box. Dyson smashes the jewel to pieces, allowing the glowing essence within to be released.

As in many of Machen’s stories most of the horrors are suggested rather than spelled out. Machen was a pioneer of horror fiction. Get one of his books and read it on a windy, moonlit night it in a dark, old house with scratchy sounds in the woodwork.

[CrowMagnumMan · Rating 3 out of 5]

5/7
The first of Machen's Dyson story ,The Inmost Light, was a fun atmospheric romp through London. The plot itself is relatively bare bones and to a degree unimportant. The story separated by chapters is unraveled through the dialogue of two friends, Dyson and Salisbury. It takes the form of a retelling of crime and then a series of coincidences seemingly unrelated to the previous story. Like many other weird tales of the time and near future the ending feels weak, explaining much of the ambiguity in much more literal terms. Much of the final chapter being less interesting lacking both the prose and intrigue of earlier chapters. Machen while verbose and unrelenting at times has a nice pace, in revealing both information and sentence structure. Perhaps the best aspect of the story is the characterization that is given to London. Both as a physical manifestation of city and what it represents. Machen's and in turn Dyson reflections of the city were both fun to read and adds an interesting way to view the inanimate urban setting as a living and breathing tertiary character , or arguably the focus of the story. Machen unlike some of contemporaries has good handle on both dialogue and character. It was nice reading the back and forth between Salisbury and Dyson with both coming off as very compelling viewpoints to read. To critique the characters there was very little to grab onto emotional or even anything more than tools to facilitate the atmosphere and mystery, fun tools but tools nonetheless. Overall the strength of prose and setting make this a worthwhile read that remains fun throughout, and more specifically scratches an itch for an occult detective story.

[Alsweider · Rating 4 out of 5]

Das alte Englisch liest sich angenehm. Interessante Geschichte, wenn man sie genau bedenkt. Dr. Black versucht, vielleicht von Hybris oder faustischem Ehrgeiz getrieben, mit wissenschaftlicher Methodik und materiellen oder alchemistischen Mitteln das innerste Licht, die Seele selbst zu analysieren und zu sezieren. Dafür opfert er seine Frau, die sich wohl aus Liebe oder Angst als Versuchskaninchen zur Verfügung stellt. Ihre Seele wird zu einem wunderschön leuchtenden Edelstein, doch ihr Körper wird zu etwas Unmenschlichem, Ausdruckslosem und in ihrem Gehirn scheint eine teuflische Veränderung stattgefunden zu haben, wie Gerichtsmediziner später herausfanden, nachdem der Doktor sein Versprechen einlöste und ihren verbliebenen Körper aus seinem neuen Zustand erlöste. "In the scheme of the world there is no vacant chamber." In der Ordnung der Welt gibt es keine leere Kammer. Wenn man die Seele aus dem Menschen entfernt, muss etwas anderes dafür in ihn eintreten. Das Opfer für die Wissenschaft und die Erkenntnis der Wahrheit war offenbar nicht groß genug, denn der Doktor wird daraufhin immer kränker und ausgezehrter und erliegt dem Wahnsinn als Preis für den Versuch, das Unbegreifbare zu verstehen und zu besitzen. Der ontologisch zerstörerische Angriff auf die Ordnung des Seins selbst, die Funktionalisierung des Innersten, scheint zwar zum Teil zu gelingen, führt aber letztendlich in den Untergang. Als der Seelenstein später mit Dr. Blacks Notizen vom Rätselfreund Dyson gefunden wird, tritt er den Opal instinktiv in den Boden und die Seele entweicht, nur schwarze Asche hinterlassend.

[Jami K · Rating 4 out of 5]

4/5

I really like Dyson's character. He is introduced as a man whose father couldn't afford to send him to college, but because he has a curious mind, he has declared himself to be a student studying the great science of London and it's people. He has seen some weird things going on with the Mr. Black and his wife disappearing and dying. He also spends a great deal of time trying to decipher a mysterious riddle.

The story is fast. My least favorite thing about it, is the story *spoiler* doesn't explicitly say what Dr. Black's experiments were trying to achieve and exactly what the "inmost light is." Most people believe he was trying to extract his wife's soul. That seems to be everybody's interpretation, but I am not sure why Dr. Black didn't explicitly say so in his final words and why that was his goal. The subject of the human soul was not explored much in the story nor from the POV of Dr. Black. The story's ending only implies that removing a soul from a human will destroy the person's humanity.

[The Starry Library · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Inmost Light is a short novel published in 1894 by author and mystic Arthur Machen. It tells the story of a mad doctor who incarnates the soul of his wife into a beautiful shining jewel.
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The story is eerie and the first page sets a dark and unsettling tone with Machen's descriptive writing of a dark, misty, Autumnal evening in London. It's a murder mystery as much as it is an occult detective story, with fast pacing and peculiar characters. The story is based on the numerous alchemical and hermetic writings of the soul being a gem that must undergo a refining process to reach perfection. Mysticism forms the foundation of Machen's work, who layers madness and horror in a way that is tantilizing and curious.
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I cannot wait to read more of Arthur Machen's work.

[Forked Radish · Rating 4 out of 5]

The awareness of a SQN correlation in opposition to a mere causal id is unprecedented in my ken. Accordingly, Machen makes modern scientists seem like antediluvian anachronisms. To wit:
“No one recognizes more decidedly than I do the impassible gulf, the fathomless abyss that seperates the world of consciousness from the sphere of matter. We know that every change of consciousness is accompanied by a rearrangement of the molecules in the grey matter; and that is all. What the link between them is, or why they occur together, we do not know, and most authorities believe that we never can know.” The House of Souls, p. 268.

[Ilse · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Once around the grass, and twice around the lass, and thrice around the maple tree”. A wondrously strange and fascinating murder story that really intrigued me. I loved the supernatural elements to the story and the descriptions were full of detail to make it really easy to imagine the setting. Although the endless rants about the case’s details in the form of substantial walls of text made it a little difficult to keep focussing every now and again, I’m definitely intending to read Machen’s other work!

[Srutirupa Acharya · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author sets the intense tone beautifully in this supernatural story. A couple of splendid atmospheric descriptions are there which I really like. However, according to me, the actual story line could have been better. It takes its time to reach at the actual matter. But then it concludes quite soon. A few things are left vaguely implied and I would have liked to know more about them to get the complete picture.

[Girandola · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another one of Arthur Machen's investigative short stories mixed with the weird and the horror. It's alright but not memorable.

For a while it had me convinced Mr.Black was in fact a victim. In any case, his motivations weren't too convincing, nor was Mrs.Black reaction to, quite out of nowhere, being asked to die for the sake of occult knowledge.

Read this as part of The Great God Pan and Other Horror stories.

[Amit · Rating 4 out of 5]

Through Salisbury Dysen get know of Mr. Black and Mrs. Bkack. Mrs. was dead but she was not normal human being but known as a good hearted and kind wife to Mr. Black. Dysen wanted to know the details of the cause about her death and he found out Mr. Black too was dead. There's something about that Opal linking with Mrs. Black's death...

Very good short tale that was...

[PRJ Greenwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great concept, but it takes its time getting where it needs to. It doesn't help that the Gutenberg freebie I downloaded is mostly one large slab of poorly paragraphed text. That aspect makes close reading a problematic chore.

All this aside, it's a creepy story, but the feeling I took away is that it could've been better, and the resolution reached quicker.

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an odd story with many coincidences and much suspense. Dyson becomes overly interested in the story of a doctor who is believed to have killed his wife. The story is choppy, but still easy to follow, with an ending that is surprising. Originally published in 1894 along with ' The Great God Pan'. Available from Audible, and narrated nicely by Felbrigg Napoleon Herriot. 3.5 stars.

[Glenn Blake · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 - A good occult mystery set in the heart of London, with a cryptic tone set early on.

The slow reveal of a story within a story really held my interest.

The only fault of the story was how at the end a letter was found which explained everything. I felt this approach was a clumsy conclusion.