Review: “The Inmost Light”, Arthur Machen, 1894.
Written in 1892, there are several notable things about this story.
Machen has turned has his back for good on writing society tales.
It’s also his first story with Dyson, a character in four Machen works who has sometimes been called an occult detective. However, he uses no apparatus like William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki does with his electric pentacle. He is not a student of the occult like Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence nor does Dyson claim psychic sensitivity.
Dyson calls himself a “man of science”, and his science (like many a Machen protagonist) is
the great city; the physiology of London; literally and metaphysically the greatest subject that the mind of man can conceive.
It’s also the only Machen story I would describe, after reading more than two-thirds of his fiction, as genuinely, viscerally horrifying.
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