This was a perfect blend of horror and scifi, it had what I wanted from both genre. The characters were great and I really loved the storyline.

3.5/5. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for a copy in exchange for a fair and honest review.

First, I had never read the Great God Pan, so I did before reading Plantation Pan. I'm glad I did. It's not absolutely necessary, but I don't think Plantation Pan would have the same impact without doing so. If anyone wants to read Plantation Pan, I highly recommend reading the also relatively short The Great God Pan. It's public domain, easy to find, and short.

Plantation Pan did a great job of capturing the same atmosphere as TGGP. It's kind of confusing, distant, eerie, disturbing, I don't know what, but it creeped me out. It also did a good job of merging three different story lines into one. The sci-fi aspect was involved enough to lend to the atmosphere and give the story freshness, but not so much involved that the atmosphere was lost in the sci-fi.

The reason I rated it 3.5 stars is because it just feels a little rough. The future story doesn't really develop at any even pace to match the ending, so that feels sudden. Some of the character interactions felt abrupt. Fragments of the writing itself didn't seem to efficiently convey what was meant. With a good polish, these minor problems could be eliminated, and then I think it would be a very good novella.

I know the original TGGP is so effective because it leaves a lot of questions and unknown, but I would like Plantation Pan to be expanded, if not in this particular publication, then perhaps in additional volumes. Still keep the unknown horror aspect, don't explain everything, but expand it more in the future timeline. Visually, that part was fascinating and could be great in some form of visual media.

Overall, I'd recommend this to anyone who liked The Great God Pan and anyone who likes sci-fi horror.

“Plantation Pan”, written by Eddie Generous, is presented as a sequel to Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan”, a novella where Dr. Raymond mutilates a woman’s brain in order to prove that a human could perceive more than it was established and actually see the pagan god. This experiment was witnessed by Mr. Clarke which serves as a link between the viewer. the “experiment” and the events that came after it.

On Generous’ story we are presented with a more dynamic way of storytelling, where we jump from present to future, from a planet Earth that is roughly the same as we know it now to an era where humans have colonized space.
After the corruption of Earth and after living many years on save “plantations” on several other planets of the solar system, our protagonist learns that there is a secret plantation on Earth. This project is working on making the planet habitable again but they have lost communications with the crew that was sent there and they need to send more people to learn why that happened.
As we follow Lay Watt on her journey back to homeland we also read passages from the past, where the dreaded experiment to meet the god Pan was again attempted.

The writing is engaging, the jumps are well executed and do keep the reader wanting to know more. Yet this could have been a better tale if it was a bit longer, giving us more time to meet the several characters and slowly learn more about them.
The only other objection that I have is the over sexualization used. Sex is part of Pan’s myth and it played a part on Machen’s story but it was, in my opinion, ill used on this sequel. As in a lot of things, less is more, and the implication of the act and the use of subtlety, in my opinion, would have had a frightener effect.

Overall “Plantation Pan” is a solid horror tale that I recommend even if the reader was not the biggest fan of it’s prequel.