#109: The Terror (Arthur Machen)

The Terror

Arthur Machen
Initial publication: 1917

The sheep are watching.

Imagine just how incomprehensible the Great War must have been to people; imagine the sheer scope of the paroxysms that shook Europe and beyond. Millions died in just four years. Death, disease and destruction ruled the day. It must have seemed like almost the whole world had gone mad. 

In Arthur Machen's horror novella The Terror, that includes the animals.

Machen is today not very well known, but at the time he was quite influential. His 1894 novella The Great God Pan is an early example of cosmic horror, and during World War I, he experienced the Edwardian-era equivalent of "going viral" when his short story "The Bowmen" became the source of an urban legend about angels aiding in the British retreat at Mons. It's that Angels of Mons legend that he's probably best known for, actually, as it made for a powerful propaganda piece, implying that God Himself was on the side of the Triple Entente (France, the United Kingdom and Ireland, and Imperial Russia) and not the Central Powers (the “bad guys” of the conflict, inasmuch as there were any in the Great War.) While Machen felt some chagrin over accidentally starting the legend, he certainly didn't mind making reference to it.

But The Terror isn't really about that (though he does mention it.) It's not about a haunted castle, or a doomed Arctic expedition; rather, it's a series of violent attacks by animals throughout parts of the United Kingdom during the war. It might actually be the very first “when animals attack” story ever written in fact.

Told in Machen's characteristic journalistic style (he worked for the London Evening News at the time,) the story opens with an account of the narrator trying to get to the bottom of a purported explosion at a munitions factory, as well as a seemingly unrelated incident of pigeons flying into a biplane. The narrator eventually fades from the story as the focus changes to a country doctor who relates to him, a few years after the fact, a period of mysterious murders, accidents and disappearances that occurred in 1915, which are ultimately revealed to be animal attacks. The novella is predicated on themes of paranoia and censorship, with entire towns on edge, fearful of whatever mysterious force has been killing people. Whole conspiracy theories are invented — Germans hiding en masse underground for years!  —  but no answers are forthcoming. Machen offers a secret history of sorts, where the difficulties at munitions factories are responsible for the lack of progress in the first year or so on the front; all of this is censored by the government, and the censorship itself gets people panicked about a new Jack the Ripper. In the end, while theories are offered up as to why the animal kingdom suddenly turned against the human race (and then just as suddenly gave up their rebellion), there doesn't seem to be any clear answer, other than dark hints that it might happen again.

It's a goofy, pulpy read, but I think the animal attack stuff kind of gets in the way of the far more interesting thread about government censorship and control, and how much easier it was to do that in an age of newspapers, which feels a little prescient. It reminds me of that old meme about how new technology makes people antisocial, only the new technology is newspapers; then it was radio, then it was TV, then it was the internet, then it was cell phones. The joke behind the meme, or rather its implication, is that before newspapers, you had to actually talk to people to learn what was going on, but people still do that. The book explicitly states that the “Angel of Mons” legend grew legs because of newspapers. In an era of fake news, propaganda and AI, I think it behooves us to remember that misinformation, urban legends and bullshit fabricated wholesale for political purposes have always existed. They tell a story, and depending on who we are, that story is often going to be what we want to hear.

Anyway, while it's not Machen's best work, it's nevertheless an interestingly spiritualist take on the collective insanity that was the late 1910s, and definitely of a piece with Machen's darker work from his later career. In some ways I'm reminded of Stephen King, for all that implies — but I would have preferred something more in-depth.

-june❤