YMMV / The Great God Pan

• Alternate Character Interpretation: One of the text's greatest strengths is how both incredibly vague it is and how the prudish, stuck-up POV characters contrast with Machen's own occultist viewpoints. Are Helen and Pan truly demonic beings, or are they agents of liberation and, as some reviewers put it, the "revenge of the atavistic"?
• Complete Monster: Helen Vaughan, the spawn of Pan and a mortal woman, is a seemingly respectable woman who delights in cruel perversion. Having broken the mind of a boy when she was young, her "friend" Rachel returned from the woods, half-naked and insane, begging her mother to know why she let her go into the woods with Helen before vanishing forever. Helen married one respectable man ruining and eventually murdering him before taking part in cults that involved orgies and Human Sacrifice, driving others to suicide or murdering them in her wake.
• Crossover Ship: Helen Vaughan with Wilbur Whateley, owing to parallels between the respective antagonists, since Lovecraft directly based his own story on Machen's. Doubles as Theme Pairing in the rubric of Cosmic Horror.
• Draco in Leather Pants: It's only too easy to see Helen as some sort of retribution against the sexist Victorian era world, and she is in fact the subject of a fan sequel with this premise.
• Nightmare Fuel: This story managed to given Stephen King nightmares, as he described in the endnotes to his short story collection Just After Sunset.
  [The Great God Pan] surmounts its rather clumsy prose and works its way relentlessly into the reader's terror-zone. How many sleepless nights has it caused? God knows, but a few of them were mine. I think 'Pan' is as close as the horror genre comes to a great white whale.
• Nightmare Retardant: Helen Vaughan's final form:
  "... or one instance I saw a Form, shaped in dimness before me, which I will not farther describe. But the symbol of this form may be seen in ancient sculptures, and in paintings which survived beneath the lava, too foul to be spoken of... as a horrible and unspeakable shape, neither man nor beast, was changed into human form, there came finally death." ^note It's a blatant reference to the erotic art of Pompeii. This led some readers to conclude that the horrific Eldritch Abomination turned into a giant penis.
• The Woobie: Poor Mary and Trevor. Former's basically enslaved by a Mad Scientist, latter implied to be raped by Helen.
• Values Dissonance: Raymond's justification for using Mary as a test subject goes completely unchallenged:
  As you know, I rescued Mary from the gutter, and from almost certain starvation, when she was a child; I think her life is mine, to use as I see fit.
• Values Resonance: Depending on who you ask, the fact that the sexist nature of Victorian society is parodied comes across as rather amusing. The story also averts Double Standard Rape: Female on Male, depicting what Helen does to her male victims as clearly horrific.
• Vindicated by History: At the time of its release it was severely scandalous for its incessant sexual content that was largely on account of one near-unstoppable, shameless woman as a powerful antagonist (hence why Helen is not among the classics for Gothic horror like Dracula or Frankenstein's Monster). Nowadays, the brutal satire on Victorian norms combined with genuinely unnerving writing and existential horror so potent that it inspired Lovecraft has made it a Cult Classic of sorts.

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