Dreamt in Fire: The Dreadful Ecstacy of Athur Machen

In 2021, a first edition of this compilation, limited to small number of copies*, was published as a kind of exemplar to accompany a lecture introducing Machen by the compiler, Christopher Tompkins, to the audience at the seventh annual Inklings Oktoberfest in Kansas. Now a much expanded second edition has appeared in trade paperback (with a small number of hardcovers), serving not as a typical anthology of Machen but more as a sampler of texts beyond Machen’s most familiar writings. It comprises some five main sections, not counting the introductions and the bibliography at the end.

The first section, “Fiction”, contains nine stories, plus the whole of the slim 1924 collection Ornaments in Jade. It begins with “The Inmost Light” (1894) and ends, chronologically speaking, with “Change” and “N” (both 1936). The second section comprises ten essays, ranging from “Cidermass” (1889) through “A Note on Poetry” (1943).

Section three, “Journalism”, contains five items from 1913-1917; while section four, “Apologetics”, contains only one item, “War and the Christian Faith” (1918); and the final section, “Memoirs”, has extracts from Machen’s three volumes of autobiography, Far-Off Things (1922), Things Near and Far (1923), and The London Adventure (1924)

The full contents plus ordering and other information can be found at the catalog page at the Darkly Bright website, here. (You have to scroll down a bit to get to the trade paperback edition.)

* The first edition was limited to 50 numbered copies: the first 10 were hardcover and the remaining 40 were softcover. That edition is out of print.The second edition hardcover is limited to 25 numbered copies. The softcover is "unlimited."