The Great God Pan

A doctor performs a small operation on a young woman's brain to let her, as he puts it, see the god Pan, to lift the veil on the real that the senses keep out. She is destroyed by it, but not before a child is conceived on the far side of that veil. Years later a woman of terrible beauty moves through London leaving suicides and ruin in her wake.

A handful of men slowly trace her back to that night in the doctor's study. Machen's masterpiece is a story of unholy parentage and a reality too vast and vital to survive, and its influence on Lovecraft and all cosmic horror after is hard to overstate. The Archive gives Pan a sly swing, beauty with the whole green terror behind it.