A collection of fantastic thrillers about Arthur Machin

If you count the British literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, you will find that suspense and pan-suspense works spew out like volcanic eruptions, typical, such as Conan Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes Detective Collection", Stoker's "Dracula", etc., of course, there are some horror and horror supernatural novels, such as Oscar Wilde's "Portrait of Dowling Gray", Marsh's "The Beetle", etc., of course, there are also protagonists to recommend today - One of the four masters of supernatural horror literature and the founder of modern fantasy thriller novels, Arthur Meiqin.

For this name, I think most people may be relatively unfamiliar, Arthur Metchen was born in Welsh priesthood, at an early age began to read in his father's study of the "Heavenly Nights", "Don Quixote" and other works, coupled with the beautiful local natural scenery and nearby Celtic, ancient Roman historical sites, inspired the mysticism of Metchen, which also provided rich material for his future literary creation.

In addition to personal hearings, the world at the turn of the century was experiencing the wave of the second industrial revolution, especially Britain, which was not only the birthplace of the first industrial revolution, but also one of the first countries to contact the second industrial revolution, the rapid development of science and technology, scientific materialist thought gradually replaced the ancient legends and traditional beliefs, which were also reflected in the literary works of the time, such as Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", "Around the World in Eighty Days", etc., but in Mei Qin's view, Science does not have the ability to decipher all the mysteries of the world, on the contrary, "if we trace back to the roots, all branches of human knowledge will eventually disappear into the mystery", the power of the ancient mystery may triumph over rational civilization, and the long legend may contain terrible truths that we cannot understand.

Metzion rose to fame with the publication of Paine the Great God in 1894, a novel full of pagan horrors and sexual innuendo that caused a stir as soon as it was published, telling the story of raymond, a surgeon who tried to experiment on the young mary and use brain surgery to spy on the spiritual world, the secret of the irrational world in which Pan haunted, but the operation ended in failure with horrific consequences. Primal mystical forces invade the contemporary world through the girl conceived and born after Mary encounters Pan, causing a chain of deaths in London's upper-class communities. The significance of this work is to sound the alarm bell to science, and Dr. Raymond tries to interfere with the mysterious realm of the soul with technology, but eventually leads to a retaliatory counterattack by the ancient mysterious forces.

Since then, Mei Qin's works such as "Three Counterfeits", "White Man", "Flame Pyramid" and so on have been popular, of course, in today's view, these works may be euphemistic almost obscure, and we cannot appreciate that people at that time were in the anxiety and uneasiness caused by the collision of technological development and traditional occultism, but this did not affect the status and influence of Arthur Mei Qin's series of fantasy thrillers in literature.

Among later generations of writers, Lovecraft and Stephen King, two masters of horror, praised Megchen, the former saying that Merchen's works were "soaked in oppressive and hazy horror, while creating an incomparable sense of reality with keen literary thinking, which can be described as unique ingenuity and a sign of an era in the history of horror literature." The latter, on the other hand, says That Paine the Great God is perhaps the best horror story written in English. Mei Qin's influence on them can also be seen in the works of the two writers.

If you're interested in supernatural horror thrillers, or fascinated by London at the time, I think Arthur Metzine's work will surely win your affection.