The Red Hand (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures)
()
About this ebook
Arthur Machen
Arthur Machen (1863–1947) was a Welsh author and actor best known for his fantasy and horror fiction. He grew up with intentions of becoming a doctor, but followed a boyhood passion of the supernatural and occult and started to write. In 1890, Machen began publishing short stories in literary magazines. Four years later, he released his breakthrough work, The Great God Pan. Decried upon initial publication for its depictions of sex and violence, the tale has since become a horror classic and has been hailed as “maybe the best [horror story] in the English language” by Stephen King. Machen continued to publish supernatural novels but spent time as actor in a traveling player company after his wife’s death. His literary career revived once more with the publication of his works The House of Souls and The Hill of Dreams. During World War I, Machen became a full-time journalist. Though he rallied for republications of his works, Machen’s literary career ultimately diminished, and he lived much of his life in poor finances.
Read more from Arthur Machen
The Weiser Book of Horror and the Occult: Hidden Magic, Occult Truths, and the Stories That Started It All Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Novel of the Black Seal Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Five Gothic Masterpieces: The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Great God Pan, Frankenstein, Carmilla, and Dracula Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Greatest Ghost and Horror Stories Ever Written: volume 4 (30 short stories) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Greatest Ghost and Horror Stories Ever Written: volume 1 (30 short stories) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Famous Modern Ghost Stories Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Arthur Machen MEGAPACK ®: 25 Classic Works Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGothic Classics: 60+ Books in One Volume Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings50 Halloween Stories you have to read before you die (Golden Deer Classics) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Novel of the White Powder Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Arthur Machen Collection Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Book of Shadows Vol 2 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings50 Horror masterpieces you have to read before you die [newly updated] (Golden Deer Classics) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTales of Horror and the Supernatural Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Hill of Dreams: Autobiographical Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Hill of Dreams (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5TRICK OR TREAT Boxed Set: 200+ Eerie Tales from the Greatest Storytellers: Horror Classics, Mysterious Cases, Gothic Novels, Monster Tales & Supernatural Stories: Sweeney Todd, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Frankenstein, The Vampire, Dracula, Sleepy Hollow, From Beyond… Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThree Imposters and Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to The Red Hand (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures)
Related ebooks
The Shining Pyramid (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Red Hand Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Novel of the Black Seal (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Gray Cat (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Ancient Horror (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Messenger (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Lizard God (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Phantom Farmhouse (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Damned Thing (Cryptofiction Classics) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Queen of the Bees (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Great Beast of Kafue (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures) Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Days Before Yesterday Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Man-Wolf (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Matter of Fact (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Octopus Cycle (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Brazilian Cat (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOlalla (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNo-Man's-Land (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Sign of the Spider (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Top 10 Short Stories - The Edwardian Ghost Story Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRound the Fire Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Last of the Race (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Camp of the Dog (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures) Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Cave of Horror (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHunting of the Soko (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFrom an Amber Block (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRound the Fire Stories: 17 Tales of Terror, Suspense and Adventure Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Science Fiction For You
Flowers for Algernon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wool: Book One of the Silo Series Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I Who Have Never Known Men Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Stories of Ray Bradbury Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I Am Legend Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This Is How You Lose the Time War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leave the World Behind: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Silo Series Collection: Wool, Shift, Dust, and Silo Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Institute: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Shift: Book Two of the Silo Series Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Alchemist: A Graphic Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sarah J. Maas: Series Reading Order - with Summaries & Checklist Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Troop Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Frankenstein: Original 1818 Uncensored Version Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cryptonomicon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dust: Book Three of the Silo Series Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Annihilation: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Psalm for the Wild-Built: A Monk and Robot Book Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Camp Zero: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rendezvous with Rama Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Light From Uncommon Stars Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sunlit Man: Secret Projects, #4 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England: Secret Projects, #2 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Firestarter Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Warrior of the Light: A Manual Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Alas, Babylon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for The Red Hand (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures)
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
The Red Hand (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures) - Arthur Machen
The Red Hand
By Arthur Machen
A Cryptofiction Classic
Copyright © 2013 Read Books Ltd.
This book is copyright and may not be
reproduced or copied in any way without
the express permission of the publisher in writing
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
Introduction
The genre of cryptofiction has grown up in the shadow of its older brothers, science fiction and fantasy. While the latter two continue to move towards the mainstream of literary tastes – as evidenced by reaction to modern series such as Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle and George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire – many readers have probably never even heard of cryptofiction. Odd, when one considers that some of the most famous authors in the Western tradition have dabbled in cryptofiction, and that even today works of cryptofiction frequently feature on bestseller lists.
Cryptofiction takes its name from another, non-literary practice: cryptozoology. Cryptozoology is generally regarded as a pseudoscience by mainstream scientists, relying as it does upon anecdotal, often unverifiable evidence. However, it still boasts many enthusiasts, and continues to exert considerable artistic allure. Focused on the search for animals whose existence has not been established – who are literally kryptos, Greek for hidden
– cryptozoology traces its roots to the work of the 19th-century Dutch zoologist Anthonie Cornelis Oudemans (1858-1943). Oudemans’ 1892 work, The Great Sea Serpent, was a collected study of global sea serpent sightings, which hypothesised that all these serpents might stem from a previously unknown species of giant seal.
Around the same time that Oudemans’ work came to prominence, cryptozoology experienced its early crossovers with the fiction of the day. Following in the footsteps of Jules Verne’s famous Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) – which featured a mysterious giant sea monster – the 1890s saw an explosion of cryptofictional short stories, such as Rudyard Kipling’s A Matter of Fact
(1892) and H. G. Wells’ The Sea Raiders
(1896). Into the 20th-century, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) centred on an expedition to a plateau of the Amazon basin where prehistoric animals continued to thrive, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot (1924) picked up a similar theme, featuring not just dinosaurs but also Neanderthals. Less than a decade later, a prehistoric ape took centre stage in the 1933 film King Kong.
The fifties witnessed what was probably the heyday of cryptozoology. It was in 1955 that Belgian-French zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans – known as the father of cryptozoology
– published his On the Track of Unknown Animals, in which he both coined the field’s name and mapped out its intellectual boundaries. Four years later, Willy Ley’s popular Exotic Zoology (1959) was published, featuring discussion of the Yeti and sea serpents. To modern cryptozoology enthusiasts, these works are still seen as the subject’s defining texts.
While the popularity of cryptozoology has surely waned since the fifties – perhaps mainly due to the the ongoing non-discovery of creatures such as Bigfoot, the Yeti, and the Loch Ness Monster – cryptofiction may well be more popular than ever. The towering cryptofiction text of the modern era is undoubtedly Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel, Jurassic Park. It was Crichton’s book which helped trigger a renaissance in cryptofiction, which saw the publication of works such as John Darnton’s Neanderthal (1996), Phillip Kerr’s Esau (1996), Frank E. Peretti’s Monster (2006), and Steve Alten’s Meg series. 2005 even saw a $207 million remake of the original cryptofiction movie, King Kong.
Ultimately, then, despite its obscured and messy roots, the genre of cryptofiction may just be more alive than ever. One wonders why this is: perhaps it stems from an attempt to inject some mystery and