SOURCE: "Arthur Machen's 'N' as Allegory of Reading," in Studies in Weird Fiction, Vol. 7, Spring, 1990, pp. 8-11.

In the following essay, Burleson provides a deconstructionist interpretation of Machen's short story "N."

There is something remarkable at the outset when the title of a story consists of a single letter of the alphabet, a seemingly simple grapheme, as is the case with Arthur Machen's "N" (Tales of Horror and the Supernatural), a tale earlier belonging to the collection The Cosy Room (1936). The titular "N", by the most facile explanation, reflects the fact that the events of the story revolve around the Stoke Newington area north of London proper (a region and a direction treated rather mystically in the tale)—but this seemingly simple title contains much more, and in fact adumbrates the reading that we shall here entertain, a reading of the tale as an allegory of reading and...