The White People and Other Weird Stories

"Machen was one of the first great British writers of supernatural horror fiction. He was Welsh, and wrote in the 1890s and early 20th century. He conveyed a sense of spiritual dread in a way that nobody had before. I think his greatest story is “The White People”, which is mostly in the form of an adolescent girl’s diary. Nothing is directly shown. The surface of this story is absolutely innocent, and yet the implications are quite terrifying. The story in brief is that the girl has been brought up by a governess, as they were in those days, and the governess clearly has links with the fairy folks, the pre-human creations, nymphs and so on. She has been taking this girl, from a very early age, off into the woods or into the hills, and the girl has had glimpses of the other side. A lot of the piece is told in the form of fairy tales and legends which she recounts. It’s a classic case of a horror narrative where the hints and allusions come together to suggest something very much larger than they ever directly say. The only filmmaker who makes what one might describe as horror films which genuinely terrify me, on a very primal level, is David Lynch. And I find the diary of the girl in The White People has very much the same effect. It is as uncanny an effect as I’ve ever come across. And yet if you try to take it apart and analyse it, it’s difficult to tell where the uncanniness lies. It’s a story to experience, not to talk about. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter This collection doesn’t contain The Great God Pan , which is Machen’s seminal novel. But it does have a lot of other very remarkable stories. One of Machen’s favourite themes was the old, barely human or inhuman race which reaches back to the dawn of creation, and which is often still lurking around in Wales, which is the landscape he very frequently uses. This sense of a haunted landscape is not new—the Gothic novel did it, Ann Radcliffe did it, Edgar Allan Poe refined it—but there’s a special numinous quality about Machen’s landscape that is unique up to that point. It’s difficult to know. In his autobiography he says that after he suffered intense depression after the death of his wife, he had a mystical experience, which is remarkably similar to some of the experiences his characters have in his fiction. What’s striking is that he had written about these things before having experienced them himself. He was certainly a religious chap—a High Anglican—but I think it was not so much organised religion that appealed to him as this enormous cosmic sense of the God perspective. That affected all of his best work."

"This is maybe not the most original choice, but when you’re talking about weird fiction, it’s indispensable. Machen was a really interesting writer. He was born in Wales in the late 19th century, and was a member of the Golden Dawn, so he had occult interest – but he wasn’t kooky. He wrote quite a lot about London. He was a great walker, very peripatetic, and he would do these psychogeographies of places, both landscapes and cityscapes. He wrote a book called The Hill of Dreams , which was very well received; that was mystical, very much like William Blake. The White People is probably my favourite weird tale. It has a philosophical preface, with two very English people talking about the nature of sin and this and that. But the bulk of it purports to be the diary of a seventeen-year-old girl. This girl has been raised in the countryside, and her parents are absent. Her father’s alive, but he doesn’t have any time for her. She’s very alone. She doesn’t mention any friends. She pretty much just has her governess, and she spends a lot of her time rambling in the countryside. As she’s narrating events, she keeps making references to strange things. She says there are red days and white days. She mentions a game that her governess taught her called Troy Town, where you walk in a certain way, and then you can make people do what you want. And there was that time she turned the kitchen upside down, and boy, wasn’t the cook scared? She’s talking about all the things she can remember… and there were times when she was a child in her crib and little white faces would come and look at her, and talk to her in their language. So she’s been raised partially on the fringes of fairy land, really, but she’s so naive, she doesn’t understand that’s not supposed to be possible. It’s clear that her governess is some kind of witch – not a sinister witch who’s trying to do anything, just someone who inherited very old practices, and because she’s in charge of her, she teaches her these things. And there’s this really chilling moment: the governess is carrying the little girl when she’s still very small, maybe three, and she puts her down under a tree for a while. There’s a man who’s been following them, and he and the governess go into the woods together. And from the other side of the wood, the white people come out, and they dance, and they look noble and terribly sad, and then they go away and the governess comes back out again. So what just happened? The girl doesn’t know. She just knows that she saw these white people, and when the governess realises she saw them, she’s very shaken… It’s very beautiful, and it’s very alarming. What are those people? They don’t menace the child, they don’t pay any attention to her – they’re involved in their own thing. The girl keeps recalling fairy tales, but they take on this ominous significance. And if you pay attention, you notice they tend to be about marriage, and about this other side that’s made a prior claim on the bride – and you remember, she’s seventeen, so as a good middle-class English girl from a banking family, marriage is around the corner for her. Gee, I wonder why she’s thinking about that…? But she’s not mature enough to understand that that’s where she’s going. You start to get an almost atavistic idea of what it was like to look out at the hills or the landscape and think that fairies are out there – that there’s something watching, something there that looks back. You’ve got to be careful: some people don’t come back. Some people come back changed. It’s that kind of English, psychedelic pastoral writing, where you go out into the countryside and everything gets dreamy and weird and disorienting. The device of telling the story from the girl’s point of view, so there’s no outside reference to the isolation of her perspective, is a brilliant touch. It makes for a story that won’t leave you alone after you’ve read it. You won’t look at a lush green landscape quite the same way ever again. It brings the landscape to life – in some ways, it makes it more like it used to be when you were a child. So many of my fondest memories of watching movies or reading books as a child involve my being scared out of my wits by them. It’s odd to be nostalgic for that feeling, but I think it has to do with the sense that the world seemed a lot bigger and less predictable. I never want that feeling to die. I want to look out and feel that eeriness, because it means that the world is alive, that possibilities exist."