The Children of the Pool

<p><strong>Ancient ritual. A lineage of madness. The monstrous survival of the past in the present.</strong></p><p><strong><em>The Children of the Pool</em></strong> is a late-career short story by <strong>Arthur Machen</strong> that revisits his central themes of primordial evil hidden pagan cults and the persistence of the grotesque past in modern life.</p><p>The story is told primarily through the investigation of a narrator often a scholar or a curious amateur into a series of <strong>unsettling events and unsettling characters</strong> 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.</p><p>Machen's horror is not centered on ghosts but on a terrifying genetic and spiritual inheritance.</p><p><strong><em>The Children of the Pool</em></strong> 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.</p>