The story is a fast read and is told through a number of retellings of a whole history of a few men doing a whole lot of talking and not much thinking. Skipping informed consent from an orphan minor, Dr. Raymond (who literally thinks he owns this girl) performs an operation to make her "see the god Pan," a special state of unadulterated Dionysian nature that humans have evolved to filter out so they can function. This immediately melts the teenager's brain, and the men are like, "oh well, what can you do?" Later we find out the teenager mothered a child NINE MONTHS EXACTLY after the experiment, but who's the father?

It turns out the child grows up to be a FREAK, and she's causing rich men to die. Meanwhile, another woman throws the best parties around town, yet it takes a long time for the men to figure out what we already know: we're talking about the same woman (they don't ever get invited to one of her great parties, they just gossip about her non-stop). The men puzzle out the mystery, and horror ensues.

There's a lot of innuendo, and a lot of it is around some extremely transgressive sexual situations: children being forever changed by some terror in the forest, the state of the orphan before she was given the operation, the parentage of the child this orphan conceived, what types of things Clarke is collecting...there's a lot of feeling like something is clearly wrong with everyone.

This needs to be adapted to a mockumentary (à la What We Do In The Shadows).

{Clarke looks concerned} "Are you perfectly sure, Raymond, that your
experiment won't harm this poor girl?"
{Raymond pulls Clarke away from the operating chair to reassure him} "Of course! I'm sure it is perfectly harmless!" {Raymond makes a face at the camera that shows the experiment will NOT be harmless}

It feels an impossibility that Aleister Crowley didn't read this book, and there were a few parts of the book I know he would have thought were bangers, such as:
"Suppose that such a man saw uttermost space lie open before the current, and words of men flash forth to the sun and beyond the sun into the systems beyond, and the voices of articulate speaking men echo in the waste boid that bounds our thought."
"I stood here, and saw before me the unutterable, the unthinkable gulf that yawns profound between two worlds, the world of matter and the world of spirit; I saw the great empty deep stretch dim before me, and in that instant a bridge of light lept from the earth to the unknown shore, and the abyss was spanned."
"I saw the form waver from sex to sex, dividing itself from itself, and then again reunited. Then I saw the body descend to the beasts whence it ascended, and that which was on the heights go down to the depths, even to the abyss of all being. The principle of life, which makes organism, always remained, while the outward form changed."

There are other stories in the book, so I’ll add more as I read more. ( )