Decadent Echoes: Arthur Machen, M. John Harrison, K.J. Bishop, and the Ends of Mystery

Although he first published fiction during the fin de siècle with John Lane, publisher of The Yellow Book, Arthur Machen denied a Decadent heritage for his work; nonetheless, echoes of Decadent interests and imagery carried through his fiction long after the 1890s, through to his final novel, The Green Round. Decades later, M. John Harrison’s Viriconium series of novels and stories nodded to and wrestled with the Decadent legacy, while his interest in Machen became explicit with the short story “The Great God Pan” (the title taken from one of Machen’s most famous tales) and the novel The Course of the Heart, built from the earlier story. Harrison was an initiator of the New Weird literary tendency at the turn of the millennium, and one of the books central to that tendency is K.J. Bishop’s 2003 novel The Etched City, which openly drew on Decadent writings and on Harrison’s own use of Decadent material. Attending to writings by Machen, Harrison, and Bishop, we can see ways that Decadent aesthetics and imagery carried forward, finding a home a century later, not in the literary mainstream but in an experimental corner of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres.