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."
Spider (pulp fiction)
At roughly the same time in England, Mews Books/New American Library reprinted four Spider novels sporting new cover artwork, each different in style and execution from those used by Pocket Books. This Spider mass market series also ended after only four titles had been published. 
Then, three years later, in 1979, an unusual Spider publishing event happened right "out of the blue". Python Publishing put into print the never-before-published last original Spider novel, "Slaughter, Inc." (written by Donald G. Cormack), originally to have been published as "The Spider" pulp magazine #119. Python published it as a one-shot mass market paperback. For copyright reasons all character names were changed, and the novel was retitled "Blue Steel" ("The Ultimate Answer To Evil") and the author listed as "Spider Page" (no doubt a sly reference to the novel's origins as a Spider novel and the character's principle author, Norvell Page). The Spider was recast as the title character, Blue Steel. As with Pocket Books' Spider editions, this paperback sported a "modern" pulp cover painting featuring a very similar, non-costumed, but heavily armed blond hero (that cover appears to be an unused cover painting by artist George Gross, finished but never used for a Freeway Press reprint of the pulp magazine character Operator No. 5). In 2012, Moonstone Books finally published "Slaughter, Inc." in its original form as a Spider novel. "Slaughter, Inc." was also reprinted in its original form in 2018 by Altus Press in a facsimile edition designed to look like the unpublished issue #119 of "The Spider" pulp magazine. 
A year later, in 1980, Dimedia, Inc. reprinted three Spider pulp novels in the larger trade paperback format. In 1984, they continued with three mass market Spider novel reprints, one in 1984 and two in 1985. These last three sported new cover paintings of the original costumed Spider by artists Ken Kelly (on volumes one and two) and Frank Kelly Freas (on volume three). 
In the early 1990s, Carroll & Graf Publishers issued a series of eight mass market Spider paperbacks, each one in a double-novel format. All used original "The Spider" pulp magazine artwork for their covers. These 16 novels became the longest-running Spider reprint series done for the mass market paperback book market. One cover was a newly-painted version by Rafael DeSoto, the original artist.