Tag: Bauhaus

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Happy World Goth Day 2023

 

From worldgothday.com / © BatBoy Slim

 

Today, May 22nd, is among other things International Day for Biological Diversity, Buy a Musical Instrument Day, National Vanilla Pudding Day and, due to it being Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s birthday, Sherlock Holmes Day.  However, what piques my interest in May 22nd is the fact that it’s also World Goth Day. Yes, it’s that date in the calendar when we celebrate Goth, the world’s most black-clad, most kohl-eyeliner-rimmed, most sunlight-adverse musical sub-culture.  Today even has its own Goth-themed logo, designed by the fabulously-named BatBoy Slim.

 

To mark the occasion, here are links to a dozen of my favourite Goth tunes on YouTube.  My apologies if, first, you have to sit through a few of those annoying and asinine adverts that nowadays seem to clog the channel like fatbergs in a London sewer. .

 

To start with, here’s one of the genre’s most old-school bands, Fields of the Nephilim, with their 1987 anthem Moonchild – I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Moonchild is also the name of a novel that occult icon and self-styled ‘wickedest man in the world’ Aleister Crowley had penned 70 years earlier.  With the sepulchral voice of singer Carl McCoy and the band’s peculiar look – moth-eaten Wild West gunslingers covered in flour – I thought Fields of the Nephilim were a bit of joke during their 1980s heyday, but I have to say they’ve grown on me since then and I find Moonchild and its lyrical refrain (“Moonchild, lower me down, lower me down / Moonchild…. Lower me down, down, down, down, down, dowww-wwwn!”) irresistible.

 

© Situation Two

 

Also defiantly old-school in sound, but of a more recent vintage – it was originally released in 2006 – is Tear You Apart by Californian band She Wants Revenge.  Like many people, I hadn’t heard the song before it was used in a 2015 episode of the TV show American Horror Story (apparently at the insistence of Lady Gaga, who featured among the cast).  When I did hear it, with its cheeky emulation of the dub-style guitar sound from Bauhaus’s 1982 epic Bela Lugosi’s Dead, and its titular homage to Love Will Tear Us Apart (1980) by Joy Division, I genuinely believed for a moment this was a 35-year-old Goth classic that’d somehow eluded me since the 1980s.

 

Another band hailing from California is London After Midnight, who no doubt took their name from the long-lost 1927 silent vampire film London After Midnight, which starred Lon Chaney Sr.  In a genre where too often songs lapse into pompous, overblown melodrama, their 1992 song Sacrifice manages the difficult trick of being stately and melodramatic – check out that thunder in the background – while being rather sweet and jaunty as well.

 

© Rotation

 

Now for a classic from the early 1980s and the nascent years of Goth music: 1982’s Torch by Soft Cell.  The Soft Cell duo of Marc Almond and Dave Ball would probably hate to see themselves categorised as ‘Goth’ and have one of their songs included in a playlist like this, but their sound – and especially the gorgeous trumpet-synth sound featured here – has always, for me, evoked the scene’s candlelit melancholia.  Incidentally, when the pair of them were interviewed in the Guardian earlier this month, Almond made a memorable observation about how old age suddenly sneaks up on you: “One day you’re smearing your naked body in cat food at art college, the next you’re choosing terracotta pots at the garden centre.”  Yes, Marc, I wholly agree.  Not that I ever smeared my naked body in cat food at art college, though.

 

And here’s another synth-orientated duo.  In 2011 Light Asylum consisted of Brooklyn singer Shannon Funchess and keyboardist Bruno Coviello – the latter departed shortly afterwards – and I found this clip of them on YouTube performing their song Dark Allies live at the time. Funchess’s barnstorming vocal performance is amazing.  It’s just a pity that the audience seem as animated and appreciative as an army of arthritic zombies.

 

Still keeping with synth-y musical outfits…  Despite the death of founding member Andy Fletcher in 2022, the veteran Basildon band Depeche Mode have a new album, Momento Mori, out this year and, like Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th movies, seem unkillable.  I’m partial to this remix – the ‘Headcleanr Rock Mix’ – of their song Nothing from the 1987 album Music for the Masses.  The Rock Mix takes out much of the original’s synth sound and replaces it with one that’s, well, rocky.  It also plays up the song’s ‘Woo-woo!’ backing vocals and the result is like an up-tempo version of the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil (1968).

 

© Mute

 

Goth icon Nick Cave received some flak this month for being part of the Australian delegation that attended the coronation ceremony of King Charles III.  When challenged about this on his website The Red Hand Files, Nick declared an admiration for the House of Windsor, stating that the late Queen Elizabeth II “seemed almost extra-terrestrial and was the most charming woman I have ever met.”  This from someone who once duetted with P.J. Harvey?  Wow!  Nick must have found Queen Liz powerful stuff indeed.  He also answered the question, “What would the young Nick Cave have thought of that?” by saying: “…well, the young Nick Cave was, in all due respect to the young Nick Cave, young, and like many young people, mostly demented, so I’m a little cautious about using him as a benchmark for what I should or should not do.”

 

In fact, I wouldn’t have minded Cave attending the coronation if he’d brought his band the Bad Seeds along with him and they’d been allowed to perform my all-time favourite Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds number Stagger Lee, which is the next song on my list.  (In the Stagger Lee video, Nick looks scary even while wearing a pink T-shirt.)  Yes, the coronation would have been a much livelier affair if, instead of Handel’s Zadok the Priest, Westminster Abbey had resounded to Nick Cave hollering about slobbering on someone’s head and climbing over pussies to get to ‘one fat boy’s asshole’.  And having Blixa Bargeld shrieking animalistically at the moment that Charles got crowned would have worked perfectly.

 

There was never much chance of Robert Smith, frontman and mainstay of the Cure, getting invited to the coronation.  Not as he once said of the Royal Family, “I’m much better than them.  They’ve never done anything.  They’re f**king idiots.”  Anyway, here’s footage of the glorious Mr Smith performing, not with the Cure, but as a collaborator with the Canadian band Crystal Castles in 2010.  They’re doing a cover of the song Not in Love, originally recorded by another Canadian outfit, Platinum Blonde, in 1983.

 

From indy100.com

 

I don’t know why I like this cover of the 1968 Yardbirds number Heart Full of Soul by the Goth band Ghost Dance – who were formed in 1985 by Gary Marx (late of the Sisters of Mercy) and Anne-Marie Hurst (late of Skeletal Family), and who disbanded in 1989, but who have recently reformed again.  I just do.  It’s a joyous-sounding thing.

 

Not normally joyous is the sound of Goth / industrial-rock juggernaut Killing Joke, whose mission according to singer and keyboardist Jaz Coleman was to “define the exquisite beauty of the atomic age in terms of style, sound and form”.  Actually, the band’s crunching, thunderous urgency rarely sounded ‘exquisite’ or ‘beautiful’, but it was pretty impressive.  Here’s a track I like very much from their eponymous 2003 album.  It’s called Asteroid and features Coleman screeching the blunt but memorable refrain, “Asteroid…!  Coming in from the void!”  The hectic drums are courtesy of a guest artist, Nirvana and the Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl.  Killing Joke had once accused Nirvana of plagiarism because of the similarity of the guitar riff in Nirvana’s Come as You Are (1991) to the one in their 1985 song Eighties, so clearly there were no hard feelings between them and Grohl.

 

© Zuma / Epic / Columbia

 

Idiosyncratic Birkenhead indie-rock troubadours Half Man Half Biscuit could in no way be described as ‘Goth’, but their 2000 song With Goth on our Side not only takes the mickey out of a certain Bob Dylan effort, but also pokes affectionate fun at music’s darkest subculture with its tale of Dai Young, who’s ‘the king of Welsh Goths’, and his girlfriend: “She sits and she crimps / Her mother’s convinced / She’s communing with imps.”  The girlfriend also has a kid brother called Wilf, who’s all right because ‘he’s into Placebo and Cradle of Filth’.

 

And to call the curtain on World Goth Day 2023, here’s Cities in Dust by Siouxsie and the Banshees, the stand-out track on their 1986 album Tinderbox – which, incidentally, was the first album by the band that I ever bought.  Needless to say, I hold Siouxsie Sioux in high regard.  Indeed, if Nick Cave believes Queen Elizabeth II is the most extra-terrestrial and most charismatic woman he’s ever met, well, I can only surmise that he’s never met Her Gothic Highness, the majestic and imperious Siouxsie.

 

© Polydor / Geffen

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Happy World Goth Day 2022

 

© Halperin Productions

 

Does the sun seem to be shining a little less brightly, or a little more darkly, today?  Does the air seem unusually clammy, redolent of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘the bleak December’ rather than the cusp-of-summer May?  Do the people walking past on the street seem to be sporting a tad more kohl eyeliner than normal?  Are you staring at your TV, unsure if the pudgy, chaotic, tousle-haired figure you see on the screen is indeed Boris Johnson and not Robert Smith?

 

If the answer is ‘yes’…  Well, this is probably because today, May 22nd, is World Goth Day.  According to Wikipedia, the idea of having a day dedicated to the planet’s blackest-clad subculture ‘originated in the United Kingdom in 2009 initially as Goth Day, a smaller scale celebration… inspired from the broadcasting of a special set of shows on BBC Radio 6.’

 

So, to mark the occasion, here’s a playlist of my dozen favourite Goth tunes, with YouTube links.  (My apologies for any ultra-irritating YouTube advertisements that might pop up at the beginning.)

 

© Cleopatra

 

First up is the Goth-dancefloor fixture Adrenaline by Liverpudlian band Rosetta Stone.  Actually, when I think of all the Goth nights I attended in my youth in places like Edinburgh, Norwich and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, this is the only tune I remember the DJs playing.  Yes, I know they must have played other stuff, but this is the one song that accompanies my memories of those events.  (Maybe they did play Adrenaline all night long, in a Gothic variation on that Father Ted episode where Ted and Dougal organise a charity disco and then realise they only have one record, the Specials’ Ghost Town.)

 

I’ve heard many authorities declare that Bauhaus’s Bela Lugosi’s Dead is the greatest Goth song of all time.  But by way of something different, I’ll offer this tune instead, which is a cheeky riposte to the venerable Bauhaus anthem: Bela Lugosi’s Back by the fabulously titled Lesbian Bed Death.  I love how they’ve peppered the song’s video with footage from that hypnotically weird and dream-like movie White Zombie, which had Lugosi as its villain back in 1932.

 

© Polydor

 

I’m a big fan of Siouxsie and the Banshees, but I thought on this playlist I’d include something from the formidable SIouxsie Sioux’s other band the Creatures, which she formed with fellow Banshee and one-time husband Peter ‘Budgie’ Clarke.  I’ve had a fondness for the Creatures ever since seeing them perform a storming set at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall in 1999.  This is called Pluto Drive and listening to it always lets a few tingles loose on my spine.

 

© The Mission

 

A band I saw in Edinburgh during the same period, though this time at the city’s Liquid Rooms, was the Mission.  Now it was customary that when the Mission played their most famous number, the Led Zeppelin-esque Tower of Strength, their die-hard fans – who were known as ‘the Eskimos’ – would climb on top of each other and create a human tower in the middle of the auditorium.  Well, not so much a tower as a pyramid, with lots of Eskimos on the floor forming its base, and smaller numbers of them forming the higher levels that tapered up to its apex.  This was easy to do during the Mission’s heyday in the 1980s, when those Eskimos were mostly lean, lithe and light teenagers.   However, by the late 1990s, the Eskimos had got not only a wee bit older but also a wee bit heavier… And I watched the building of that human Tower of Strength with some trepidation.   Predictably, the whole thing soon wobbled and toppled over.  But at least no Eskimos were hurt.

 

Anyway, here’s the song Belief from the Mission’s 1990 album Carved in Sand.  I don’t know why this song isn’t better known, as I always thought it was an epic, relentless thing epitomising the band at their bombastic best.  (Though some unkind critics would probably reword that as ‘at their bombastic worst’.)

 

Similarly, I don’t know why this next tune, Number One by the German outfit Clan of Xymox, isn’t better known either.  It soars in an impeccably synth-y way.

 

I’d like to think that if, besides being tested for the ethnic groups you came from, your DNA could be tested for the musical sub-cultures you belonged to, my DNA would show a strong ‘Goth’ component.  However, also being a fan of heavy metal, I’d hope that it showed a big ‘metalhead’ component too.  Thus, my next two choices lie in that fascinating area where the two genres, Goth and heavy metal, overlap.  First, here’s the wonderfully sepulchral – thanks to the band’s vocalist, the late Peter Steele – Everyone I Love is Dead by Type O Negative.

 

© Music for Nations

 

And here’s the finest goth-metal band to ever hail from Country Suffolk, East Anglia: Cradle of Filth.  Their song A Gothic Romance: Red Roses for the Devil’s Whore follows a tried-and-trusted Cradle of Filth formula, starting with a civilised, classical-music opening, but rapidly descending into howling, pounding, guitar-mangling chaos.  As ever, the croaking / shrieking vocals of Suffolk icon Dani Filth are at the forefront.

 

Now it’s time for another Goth dancefloor-stomper.  It’s hard to resist Doctor Online by industrial Norwegian outfit Zeromancer, a song I assume was inspired by the infamous, euthanasia-supporting Doctor Jack Kevorkian, aka ‘Doctor Death’.

 

Canadian band the Birthday Massacre are smartly named.  The word ‘birthday’ suggests glowing candles, ornately decorated birthday cakes and, generally, the magical happiness that people associate with childhood memories of their Big Day; while the word ‘massacre’ suggests, well, blood, darkness and death.  That juxtaposition sums up Goth perfectly.  And here’s their song Happy Birthday, whose vibe nicely blends that sense of child-like wonder with sinister premonitions that something bad is going to happen.

 

© Beggars Banquet

 

Returning to Bauhaus for a moment, I find this solo effort by their celebrated frontman Peter Murphy, Cuts You Up, poignant and rather lovely.

 

The young band Savages – okay, that’s young by my standards: they formed in 2011 – are described in their Wikipedia entry as a ‘post-punk, noise rock, alternative rock’ outfit.  That description sneakily avoids using the ‘G’ word…  But come on.  I defy anyone to listen to their song Husbands and not think of Siouxsie and the Banshees at their imperious best.

 

Finally, how else could I finish this post but with a link to the greatest Goth anthem ever, the Sisters of Mercy’s majestic, thunderously operatic This Corrosion?  Be warned – this is the 11-minute remix.  By the end of those 11 minutes, after you’ve been bludgeoned into submission by singer Andrew Eldritch and Patricia Morrison’s caterwauling vocals, by producer Jim Steinman’s celestial choirs and Wagnerian guitar-squalls, and by that never-ending chorus of “Hey, now / Hey, now now…”, you will be begging the Sisters for mercy.

 

© Merciful Release

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The unsettling Robert Aickman

 

From the Independent

 

Six days before Halloween, here’s another reposting of an old blog entry about one of my favourite writers of macabre fiction.  This time it’s Robert Aickman, about whom I wrote this piece in 2015.

 

Over the years I’ve learned to be sceptical of the publicity blurbs adorning the covers of new paperback books, which usually assure potential buyers that the book in question is an absolute page-turner and can’t be put down.  However, the blurb on the cover of The Wine-Dark Sea, a collection of short stories by Robert Aickman that was originally published in 1988 and republished in 2014, is bang on the money.  It contains a comment by Neil Gaiman, no less, who says of the author: “Reading Robert Aickman is like watching a magician work, and very often I’m not even sure what the trick was.  All I know is that he did it beautifully.”

 

That’s as good a description as any of the feeling I get when reading Aickman.  You’re aware that he’s going to perform a trick involving some literary sleight-of-hand.  You don’t know what the trick’s going to be, or when he’s going to do it.  Afterwards, you’re not even sure if the trick has been performed, or what the point of it was.  Then you mull it over.  And most of the time, you decide: Wow! That was impressive!

 

I’ve added ‘most of the time’, though, as a disclaimer to that last sentence.  Because, very occasionally, my reaction to an Aickman story has been different: What a load of bollocks!

 

I first came across Aickman’s work in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when his stories cropped up in horror anthologies such as The Far Reaches of Fear (1976), New Terrors (1980) and Dark Forces (1980).  Although in those collections they rubbed shoulders with some grisly items, Aickman’s stories didn’t fit comfortably with the ‘horror’ label.  And the claim that some people made about him, that he was actually a ‘ghost’ story writer in the mould of M.R. James, didn’t convince either.  Aickman liked to describe his stories as ‘strange’ ones and ‘strange’ is the adjective I’d attach to them too.

 

It wasn’t just his fiction that seemed out-of-place.  Aickman himself seemed out-of-place in post-war Britain, being a man of old-fashioned views and erudite – some would say ‘elitist’ – tastes.  He was a conservationist who co-founded the Inland Waterways Association and battled to prevent Britain’s no-longer-in-commercial-use canal system from being filled in; a political conservative; and a connoisseur of ballet, opera, classical music and highbrow theatre.  I imagine that by the 1970s, when the UK’s political and cultural landscape was one of Labour governments and frequent industrial action by trade unions, glam rock and bubble-gum pop music, platform heels and loon pants, and cheap, cheerful and massively popular television sitcoms like Man about the House (1973-76) and On the Buses (1969-73), he was not a particularly happy bunny.

 

Inevitably, this sense of alienation appears in his fiction.  His stories feature a lot of discontented middle-aged men (or women) who are set in their ways and don’t do a good job coping with a changing, modern world that seems diametrically opposed to their ways.

 

I found much of Aickman’s work baffling when, as a teenager, I first encountered it.  However, I was impressed by his contribution to New Terrors, a 55-page story called The Stains.  It tells the tale of Stephen, a widowed civil servant, who meets a mysterious, wild-seeming, almost dryad-like girl called Nell whilst rambling on some remote moors.  Stephen becomes infatuated with Nell, with the result that he takes early retirement from his job, abandons his ties with the ‘civilised’ world and attempts to live with her in an empty, tumbledown house on the moors.  Yet the story is no New Age male fantasy.  Aickman steers it in a darker direction.  Nell seems to embody the natural world, but nature soon intrudes on her relationship with Stephen in a more grotesque way.  As their romance progresses, Stephen notices weird moulds, fungi and lichen spreading across the walls and furniture around him.  There are even hints that these agents of decay have manifested themselves on his flesh too, which I suppose makes the story an example of what would later be known as ‘body horror’.

 

The Stains is regarded as one of Aickman’s most autobiographical stories.  Many people see in Stephen’s unpleasantly doomed relationship with Nell a metaphor for Aickman’s love affair with the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard.  After being involved with him, and then with Laurie Lee and Arthur Koestler, Howard married Kingsley Amis in 1965.  Aickman, whose obsession with Howard was described by one friend as a ‘mental aberration’, must have found the thought that she’d chosen the increasingly boorish Amis over him hard to stomach.  Incidentally, like several of Aickman’s stories, The Stains shows that he wasn’t afraid to infuse his work – no matter how fuddy-duddy the characters – with a strong dose of the erotic.

 

© Berkley Books

 

My teenage self was sufficiently curious to seek out more of Aickman’s work and I located two collections of his short stories, Dark Entries (1964) and Cold Hand in Mine (1975).  Predictably, some of those stories bewildered me, and a few irritated me; but several, like The Stains, have haunted me ever since.  By the way, I wonder if a young Peter Murphy got his goth-y hands on the earlier collection and was so impressed by it that he pinched its title for the Bauhaus song Dark Entries, their second single, which they released in 1980.

 

One story I remember well is The Swords, in which a young travelling salesman goes to bed with a strangely blank woman whom he encounters at a seedy carnival sideshow.  Again, this allows Aickman to serve up some disquieting body horror at the story’s close.  Also memorable is The Hospice, a Kafka-esque tale of a motorist getting lost at night and asking for shelter at the titular institution.  Inside the hospice, he notices odd things about how the inmates are cared for.  For instance, in the dining room, he sees that one patient is discreetly shackled to the floor.

 

And in the award-winning Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal, Aickman tackles one of the commonest tropes in horror fiction in one of its most traditional settings.  This purports to be a series of diary entries written by a young woman in 1815 who’s accompanying her parents on a tour of central Europe.  She becomes excited when she discovers that they’re in the same neighbourhood as her secret hero, Lord Byron, who lives there ‘in riot and wickedness’.  And she soon encounters her own personal Lord Bryon in the form of a mysterious gentleman attending a local contessa’s party.  His ‘skin is somewhat pallid’, his nose is ‘aquiline and commanding’ and, most suspiciously of all, his mouth is ‘scarlet’.   You can guess where this is heading.

 

Aickman’s approach to telling creepy stories was subtle, mannered and leisurely.  Often, his stories needed a lot of build-up before they reached their denouements.  By the start of the 1980s, this seemed anachronistic.  The British tradition of horror fiction had been subtle, mannered and leisurely once, in the days of M.R. James and E.F. Benson, but it’d experienced a punk-rock moment in the mid-1970s when James Herbert unleashed a slew of bestselling horror novels like The Rats (1974) and The Fog (1975) that were unapologetically in your face with gore and violence.  And a little later, in the 1980s, Clive Barker’s Books of Blood series (1984-85) would pioneer a style of horror-writing that was in equal parts perverse, visionary and wildly gruesome.

 

So when I read in 1981 that Aickman had died of cancer – which, in his typically obstinate way, he’d refused to have any conventional medical treatment for, preferring instead to rely on dubious ‘homeopathic’ cures – I assumed, sadly, that his work would soon be out of fashion, out of print and out of readers’ memories.

 

© Mandarin-Reed Books

 

Years later, I stumbled across a copy of a posthumously-published collection by him called The Unsettled Dust (1990).  It contained one or two stories that annoyed me, but generally I greatly enjoyed it.  By now I knew what to expect from Aickman and was mature enough to appreciate his elegant prose, his subtle build-up of suspense, his oddball but well-drawn characters and his moments of utter strangeness.  Admittedly, I sometimes wasn’t sure what happened at the stories’ ends.  And even after thinking about them carefully, I still wasn’t sure.  But what the hell?  With Aickman, the pleasure was in getting there.

 

I particularly liked the title story, in which an official stays at a stately home whilst negotiating the transfer of the house’s running from the hands of its aristocratic inhabitants into the hands of the National Trust.  He discovers a peculiar room deep inside the house where, like in a giant snow globe, huge patches of dust are continually and spectrally floating through the air.  This illustrates another of Aickman’s abilities, to convincingly weave into his stories scenes and incidents that are totally outlandish.  So sober is the tone of everything else going on that you readily accept these mad bits as parts of the narrative.

 

Nonetheless, it seemed appropriate that I found The Unsettled Dust in a rack of second-hand books in a corner of a small antiques shop in a village in rural County Suffolk – an obscure place to find an obscure book by an obscure writer.

 

But, happily, I was wrong.  Recent years have seen a revival of interest in Robert Aickman, which reached a peak in 2014, the centenary of his year of birth, when Faber & Faber republished The Wine-Dark Sea, Dark Entries, Cold Hand in Mind and The Unsettled Dust.  His work has been championed by Neil Gaiman; by Jeremy Dyson, Mark Gatiss and Reece Shearsmith of the influentially bizarre television show The League of Gentlemen (1999-2002, 2017); and by Dame Edna Everage herself (or himself), Barry Humphries, who in addition to being a comedian and actor is a committed bibliophile with a library of 25,000 books.  And the Guardian, Independent and Daily Telegraph have all printed articles about him lately.

 

I’ve just finished reading The Wine-Dark Sea and it’s possibly my favourite Aickman collection yet.  I wouldn’t say it’s perfect, though.  This being Aickman, there has to be at least one story that gets on my wick.  In this case the offender is Growing Boys, a satiric fantasy about a woman who has to deal with two sons growing at a supernatural rate, to a supernatural size, and becoming criminal psychopaths.  An ineffectual police force, an ineffectual school system and an ineffectual father (more interested in running for parliament as a Liberal Party candidate) do nothing to stop them.  Aickman uses the story to bemoan the delinquency of the younger generation and the inadequacy of Britain’s post-war institutions.  It’s reactionary but, much worse, it isn’t funny.

 

On the other hand, my favourite story here is The Inner Room.  It’s about a haunted doll’s house, which is a staple of many scary stories, most famously one written by M.R. James called – surprise! – The Haunted Dolls House.  Aickman, however, treats the subject with dark humour.  The story’s climax is unexpectedly and phantasmagorically weird, meanwhile, and reminds me a little of the work of Angela Carter.

 

Elsewhere, both Never Visit Venice and Your Tiny Hand is Frozen suggest Aickman taking two of his modern-day bugbears and transforming his indignation at them into horror stories.  Never Visit Venice lays into mass tourism.  Its hero is so disappointed in how the city of the title has been degraded by sightseers that, unwisely, he ends up taking a ride in an infernal gondola that seems to have been punted out through the gates of hell.  Your Tiny Hand is Frozen features an unsociable man who becomes addicted to his telephone, through which he communicates with a strange woman who may or may not really exist.  Telephones were becoming increasingly widespread at the time the story was written, presumably to Aickman’s discomfort.  It’s just as well that he didn’t live to see the situation today when smartphones have practically taken over the world.

 

Incidentally, so in vogue is Aickman now that there’s even a Facebook page and Twitter account devoted to him.  Robert Aickman with a presence on 21st-century social media?  I’m sure he would have loved that.  Not.

 

© Faber & Faber