Ancient ritual. A lineage of madness. The monstrous survival of the past in the present.
The Children of the Pool is a late-career short story by Arthur Machen that revisits his central themes of primordial evil, hidden pagan cults, and the persistence of the grotesque past in modern life.
The story is told primarily through the investigation of a narrator, often a scholar or a curious amateur, into a series of unsettling events and unsettling characters in contemporary London. The focus is on a group of seemingly ordinary people who exhibit bizarre, often violent behavior and are bound by a strange, shared lineage and dark ceremonies.
Machen's horror is not centered on ghosts, but on a terrifying genetic and spiritual inheritance.
The Children of the Pool is a chilling synthesis of Machen's entire body of work, arguing that a lineage of evil and an awareness of the primordial world can lie dormant within the human race, waiting for the right moment to claim the present.