#a little weird.. admittedly.. but Not That Weird if you compare it to the Judas Marchand stuff right? | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

see-arcane · 2 months

Text

I have been betrayed and lied to by the Penguin Classics Arthur Machen anthology 'The White People and Other Stories’ (Foreword by Guillermo del Toro).

This bastard. This one right here.

A foul deceiver.

For over a decade I have loved and cherished this volume. This and The Great God Pan have been my very best eldritch horror pre-Lovecraft saturation friends for years. So where lays the betrayal? What Judas lurks in these pages alongside the sinister satyrs and uncanny Folk hiding below the hills?

Miss Lally, narrator of “Novel of the Black Seal,” and Miss Leicester of, “Novel of the White Powder.”

‘What? That’s two different people, Arcane!’

But they’re not. They are one single insidious actress.

Specifically, the young lady known as Helen—no relation to the more imposing and inhuman Helen Vaughan of The Great God Pan—as shown in THIS:

This skinny little sucker that I finally read so, so long after devouring the lovely anthology in which I got to enjoy the company of Misses Lally and Leicester respectively, thinking to myself: “How exciting! Non-wilting, non-sexy lamp female protagonists! Two of them, even! I bet Mina Harker and Miss Lally would be such good friends, bonding over writing and tragic martyring. :3 Miss Leicester, condolences on your goo-brother, I hope you sue the apothecary for every cent :3”

But no. No.

These ladies’ stories were both narrated by the SAME LYING LIAR trying to convince the 1.5 protagonists of The Three Imposters of her sob stories to wheedle them for info about some guy she and her fellow cultists are hunting for.

I fell for an imposter. I am a fool and dunce.

But at least she was the imposter who was the far superior storyteller compared to her cohort villains. There’s a reason Black Seal and White Powder are found in a short story anthology under their own power versus the guys’ lackluster orating. 'Ooh~ scary murder mountain gang~! Ooh~ I got robbed after ripping people off and being excruciatingly English about it, ooh~!' Get out of here. Let Helen work.

My one solace here is that, considering the nature of the content, the imposter-storytellers, and the fact that within TTI there are actual external proofs of the stories as real events that occurred, the Imposters really are exactly that. Imposters posing as the actual victims of the actual weirdness and/or evils described in the stories.

Which means that somewhere out in Machenland, the true Miss Lally and Miss Leicester and Mr. Henry Wilkins and (an admittedly unscrupulous) Mr. Frank Burton probably do exist…and got ripped off by a trio of sadistic plagiarists for the sake of a bafflingly convoluted ploy to wheedle strangers for information about their target. Bet they didn’t even get royalties >:/

#in which I whine about something 2.5 other people will care about #and become an object lesson for why you should always read stories in order #sigh #arthur machen #the three imposter #novel of the black seal #novel of the white powder

6 notes · View notes