Robert Aickman (1914–1981)

Was it overheard in that dingy freight elevator in the Shoreditch Arms that lost weekend back in November? Was it mentioned in that disjointed conversation with Aunt Betty shortly before she disappeared for six weeks? Was it in that diaphanous lucid dream whose fragments I reassembled into an erroneous epiphany that led me to an ill-fated excursion to Crete? Or maybe it was at the absurdly crowded marketplace in Crete? Frankly, I can't remember exactly when or how I first heard of Robert show more Aickman and his Wine-Dark Sea anthology of horror stories. Though ostensibly held in my e-reader, Aickman's stories are more accurately within me now. When I prematurely wake from my nightly fitful sleep, generally around 3 AM, snippets of these stories flutter in the haze and perch resolute in my semiconscious state...

Here lie eight brilliantly sly tales, often in mundane yet ominous settings, served understated in a unique and compelling style:

(1) The strange amalgam of heaven and hell that Grigg encounters in the title story. (2) The secrets of the isolated farmhouse that hikers Mimi and Margaret discover in "The Trains". (3) The telephone's unrelenting torment of Edmund St Jude in "Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen". (4) Millie's uncontrollable twins rampaging across the bizarre Grimm's fairy tale landscape of "Growing Boys". (5) The justifiably fearful Brodick Leith, forever haunted by a wraith in "The Fetch". (6) "The Inner Room" featuring Lene's most peculiar dollhouse, which her father described as "the most depressing-looking plaything I ever saw." (7) A crabwise turn of events enables Henry Fern to reach his destiny in "Never Visit Venice". (8) Accompanying her husband on a business trip to Sweden, forewarned Margaret Sawyer nevertheless decides to spend a night at the scenic Kurhus sanatorium with an unforeseen consequence in "In the Wood".

Here there are unsettling clouds of doom gathering just in sight at the periphery, but encroaching ever closer; and curious events and odd pathways that lead all travellers, whether ever-watchful or blithely unsuspecting, into an enveloping shroud of unease. show less

My second collection of Aickman's "strange tales" (I've also enjoyed his novel The Model) and I'm now convinced of his genius for the uncanny. I love the way his precise, controlled sentences work to open up dense, foetid regions of the psyche. He's like a dapper surgeon ministering to our ugliest internal maladies. I loved all six of these, but the standout was The View, in which a mid-life civil servant and amateur painter boards a ferry in Liverpool (as I used to, and bound presumably for show more the Isle of Man) and finds himself on a version of Circe's island, time liquefying and the days accumulating blurrily like impasto — and all the fuckedupnesses of life, work, love, creation, and the basic question of what gives our days meaning somehow leach out of the gauzy, indeterminate atmosphere. But there are true ghost stories here, too: I think Aickman is the worthiest inheritor of M.R. James in his understanding that ghost stories are stories of place, of the semantic range of the word "haunt". Immaculately spooky and suggestive. show less

Robert Aickman's Painted Devils is another excellent anthology of strange stories in the author's inimitable style of slowly encroaching eeriness... Metaphorically, it's as if you're wading comfortably care-free in ankle-deep water, and before you realize it you're up to your neck in a roiling river. This collection contains one of Aickman's very best, "Ringing the Changes", wherein a honeymooning couple in a small seaside village are suprised to find that the local church bells are pealing show more incessantly. Other favorites here include "The School Friend", "The Waiting Room", and "Marriage".

Aickman is a master storyteller with a sly wit and an ability to craft memorable passages of insight and detail. For example: concerning interpersonal relationships: "... associations that are not alive are best amputated as skillfully as possible before the rot infects too much of one's tissue and unnecessarily lowers the tone of life.", and "There were many seats, made years ago of wooden beams set in green cast iron frames, some almost perpendicular, some sloping lasciviously backward."

I will also note that this collection includes perhaps the only Aickman story of the few dozen I've read so far that did not really intrigue me. "My Poor Friend" is a rather bland tale which draws on the author's interest in Britain's waterways (he was a co-founder of the Inland Waterways Association), skewers the conventions and machinations of Parliamentary government, but ultimately offers little of his signature strangeness. show less

Ordinary horror writers make the monsters more vast than the character, but Aickman achieves with bacterium what others strive for with hoards of ghouls. In those vast wastelands between what people are and what we understand of them it is ever so easy to go astray and have your life shredded by the underbrush.