The Green Book, Part 1
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What is the premise of this episode and why is Arthur Machen’s “The Green Book” featured?
Hi there, Fred here. Welcome you back to Undert Realms podcast of the weird and the wicked. As I write this, it is early July, and I've been descending a rabbit hole I'd like to offer you to join me on. As you know, I'm based in Maine, where Stephen King is a bit of a patron saint of horror, so I take his recommendations on spooky stories quite seriously. One of my favorites of King's relatively newer books is Revival, a sweeping tale of cosmic horror, a novel. That was partially inspired, it turns out, by the works of Welsh author Arthur Mackin, specifically the short story The Great God Pan, which was published in 1894. In fact, King called The Great God Pan one of the best horror stories ever written in the English language.
So you might be wondering why uh this episode is not The Great God Pan, and it is not. Uh but it did, uh reading that did send me on a bit of an Arthur Mackin journey. Uh and it's actually one of his other stories that I wanted to share. So we're starting with a story that is called The White People, which uh contrary to what the name might suggest today, is about literal ivory white people from another world, not about anyone's melanin. And I found it quite riveting, though admittedly it's kind of a difficult work to ingest. Most of the story is a single uninterrupted paragraph, little punctuation. and this real stream of consciousness feel to it. So it's a bit overwhelming on the page. However, I found it really enchanting and read aloud, the rhythm of the narrative starts to work a lot better.
So I decided to read it for you, which is what you'll be hearing today. However, disclaimer, I have made a couple of changes. So I dissected the work called The White People, and it's being released under a different name, The Green Book, because that's what the section you're hearing is called. Uh the the work called The White People also includes a prologue and epilogue, which I am not including in this release. So if you're an Author American purist, you may get mad at me for this, but you know, it's my podcast. And uh so my explanation here is that the prologue and epilogue of the original story, that bracket, the green book, uh, the green book you'll hear itself is presented as a journal, a literal green book that's a first-person account of a young.
Woman who goes on some extraordinary experiences. She passes through the veil, visits other worlds, and tries to reconcile these experiences with the limits that are imposed by her gender and societal norms of her time, threaded with uh little uh recollections of a really quite lovely relationship with her girlhood nurse, um, yeah, who has taken on a maternal role after her mother has died, and is in a big contrast to the stern and overbearing father. So it In the original text, the prologue and epilogue introduce two male characters in uh Victorian England. There's a visitor, the curious Cotgrave, and there's a host, the intellectual Ambrose. Uh, Ambrose leads a rather, uh, in my view, didactic conversation about the nature of good and evil.
Evil in this context being defined as things that kind of go against God's order in the universe. Uh, not you know, murder or theft or social misdeeds, but instead sin is defined as. Sort of breaking the order of the universe in the search for forbidden knowledge. Examples of evil being if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, or if the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning, uh things that we might call cosmic horror today. Uh the point uh in this passage being that basically human beings should be of this realm. It is a realm with rule. That were defined by God, even though uh obviously from the time it's a more scientific understanding of the universe that's still kind of reconciling uh with the godness of it all.
Uh, and that you know certainly the message here is that exploring other realms and seeking to gain and manipulate their power in this realm is the act of a sinner, and it's evil in a way that's more profound than any sort of social evil that you get in trouble with at the courthouse.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the premise of this episode and why is Arthur Machen’s “The Green Book” featured?
0:09–9:24
2
Why does the host edit the original “The White People” text and how are the prologue and epilogue handled?
9:24–30:31
3
How does the narrator introduce the “Green Book” section and set the scene for the journal entry?
30:31–33:07
4
What strange visions does the young woman describe when she discovers the hidden well and the green moss?
33:07–41:34