The White People

The White People is perhaps Arthur Machen's most celebrated and haunting work, taking the form of a frame narrative that presents a single, terrifying manuscript: the diary of a young girl.

The story begins with two men discussing the nature of sin and innocence, leading one to produce a handwritten notebook left behind by a girl who died mysteriously. The remainder of the story is the girl's diary, which chronicles her life in an isolated country house and the strange, escalating lessons she learns from her nurse, a woman with a dark, pagan connection to the earth.

The White People is a foundational work of weird fiction, celebrated for its brilliant use of an unreliable, innocent narrator and its exploration of atavism (the return to primitive ancestral traits). It suggests that the true horror is not external, but the terrifying beauty and ecstatic pull of the ancient, savage past that lies latent in the human soul.