Ornaments in Jade by Arthur Machen audiobook.

Genre: horror

Ornaments in Jade is Arthur Machen's slender, hallucinatory collection of ten short pieces that read like prose poems disguised as stories. Written in the 1890s but published in book form in 1924, these vignettes move through gardens, city rooms, summer landscapes, and shadowed interiors where ordinary perception begins to fail. A narrator recalls a rose garden that seems too perfect to be natural; an antiquarian curiosity opens onto rumors of ancient peoples and stranger inheritances; a self-proclaimed idealist discovers how easily lofty principles buckle under secret appetite; and, again and again, the modern world brushes against rites that feel older than Christianity. Across sketches like Witchcraft, The Ceremony, Midsummer, Nature, Torture, and The Holy Things, Machen returns to a central tension: the thin veil between the everyday and the sacred or the forbidden, and the unsettling cost of seeing what lies behind it. Lyrical, decadent, and uncanny, the book invites the listener to savor atmosphere over plot as each miniature offers a new glimpse of beauty edged with dread.

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Chapters (Approximate)

(00:00:00) Chapter 01

(00:07:48) Chapter 02

(00:18:11) Chapter 03

(00:31:16) Chapter 04

(00:39:51) Chapter 05

(00:49:39) Chapter 06

(00:59:09) Chapter 07

(01:09:41) Chapter 08

(01:20:25) Chapter 09

(01:29:51) Chapter 10

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