The Hill of Dreams

By: Arthur Machen

Narrated by: Alan Munro

Machen's most important and moving work.

Lucian Taylor, the hero, is damned either through contact with an erotically pagan "other" world or through something degenerate in his own nature, which he thinks of as a "faun". He becomes a writer, and when he moves to London he becomes trapped by the increasing reality of the dark imaginings of this creature within him, which become increasingly real.

One of the first explorations in fiction of the figure of the doomed artist, who is biographically so much a part of the decadent 1890s.

Public Domain (P)2020 Trout Lake Media

listen to this at 1,25x

it's near impossible to get through it with this narrator. the story is beautifully written in beautiful prose, machen is a master. still, it's more of a slow build than a succession of big events: if that's your type of thing, you'll love it.