Machen! That doesn't happen often enough, anymore! The best part is that after I did fall asleep, I woke up from a really intense nightmare later on, skin crawling and head buzzing. As soon as the 13 year-old girl begins her narration in 'The Green Book', it really becomes a free form, kaleidoscopic hallucination, and I nearly felt like I was experiencing the tale as a fever dream. I was really tired, with drooping eyelids, but for some reason I was compelled to read the story from beginning to end. I had an interesting experience reading this the other night. That being said, I still enjoyed 'The White People' very much, especially as it's Machen's own monster mash in many ways. I think 'The Great God Pan' works much better as a horror story. Some (including Aleister Crowley) believe the charges against Gilles were trumped up. Gilles de Rais (or Retz) (1404-1440) was a French nobleman and soldier who was accused of torturing, raping, and killing dozens, perhaps hundreds, of boys and girls.

Lovecraft regarded it as the second-greatest weird tale ever written, next to Algernon Blackwood's 'The Willows.' In the introduction to THE HOUSE OF SOULS, Machen claimed to have composed the work from 'odds and ends of folklore'. Because of its length, it has not appeared in a great many anthologies, but it was included in Alexander Laing's The Haunted Omnibus (1937), Basil Davenport's Tales to be Told in the Dark (1953), and Jack Sullivan's Lost Souls (1983), among others. It was gathered in The House of Souls (London: Grant Richards, 1906 New York: Alfred A. 'The White People' was written in 1899 and first published in HORLICK'S MAGAZINE (January 1904). From Joshi's footnotes on 'The White People' in The White People and Other Weird Stories (which I want to post before I lose track of them):

The white people by arthur machen