In "Out of the Earth," their mere presence incites a group of children to turn positively feral, horrifying onlookers, while in "The Shining Pyramid," they kidnap a young woman from a country lane, torture her, ultimately burn her alive in a human sacrifice, and are implied to have brutally gang raped her. Both stories seem to suggest a psychic bond between modern man and these primitive trolls, making the troglodytes the personification of the collective human Id: the embodiment of violence, brutality, selfishness, and chaos. By themselves neither of these works are stand-alone masterpieces, but tucked into the canon of Machen's "little people" mythos (including "The Black Seal" and "The Red Hand"), they form a disturbing narrative about a primitive race of vicious troglodytes prowling the desolate hill country of rural Wales.
0 kommentar(er)
