The House of Souls

The house holds four rooms: a London clerk and his wife who slowly wake from their small suburban life to a stranger inheritance, a girl's green notebook recording what her nurse showed her in the woods, the doctor whose experiment on a girl's brain lets her see the great god Pan, and a wife's soul shut up in an opal. Machen grew up among the Roman ruins of Gwent and never got them out of his system; these tales are where the modern weird story was made, and Lovecraft admitted the debt. Sixty plates of portraits, ruins and fading light, from Richmond to Blacklock, carry the haunted mood of Machen's tales across the century and a half before they were written.