The Great God Pan
"The Great God Pan" implied sexuality caused a scandal upon its original release and hurt Machen's reputation as an author. Reviewing the novella for the magazine "Literary News", Richard Henry Stoddard criticised the story as "too morbid to be the production of a healthy mind". The art critic Harry Quilter's review of the book, titled "The Gospel of Intensity", and published in "The Contemporary Review" in June 1895, was even more harsh. Quilter declared: "The Great God Pan' is, I have no hesitation in saying, a perfectly abominable story, in which the author has spared no endeavor to suggest loathsomeness and horror which he describes as beyond the reach of words." Quilter warned that Machen's books were a dangerous threat to the entire British public and that they would destroy readers' sanities and senses of morality. Quilter went on to attack the story's publisher, John Lane, as well as Machen himself: "Why should he be allowed, for the sake of a few miserable pounds, to cast into our midst these monstrous creations of his diseased brain?" Quilter added that works of fiction like Machen's should be unanimously condemned by literary critics and newspapers: "If the Press was so disposed it could stamp out such art and fiction in a few months: And that disposition must be acquired, must even be enforced." He was particularly harsh in his denunciation of sexual ambiguity and polymorphous androgyny in the book. He expressed revulsion at Machen's description of Helen's sex changing immediately before her death and concluded his review with a comment of distaste regarding the "nasty little naked figure of dubious sex and humanity with which Mr. Aubrey Beardsley has prefaced the story". A positive appraisal of the novella came from Oscar Wilde, who called it "un succès fou."
New Worlds (magazine)
A US reprint edition of "New Worlds" ran briefly in 1960, published by Great American Publications, who at the time were the publishers of "Fantastic Universe", edited by Hans Stefan Santesson. The first issue appeared in March 1960; it omitted Carnell's name, and credited Santesson as editor. Although the fiction consisted entirely of reprints, with all but one story coming from the British "New Worlds", this was not declared to the reader. Carnell was unhappy with the results of this attempt to break into the US market, but in the event Great American collapsed later that year and only five issues appeared, on a monthly schedule from March to July. The contents of the issues did not correspond to specific British issues: the majority were taken from "New Worlds" but one story was reprinted from Nova's edition of "Science Fiction Adventures", and three were taken from "Fantastic Universe", which had ceased publication with its March 1960 issue.