Robert Aickman – Blood and Porridge

February 28, 2025March 10, 2025

The Moore, the merrier

© Bloomsbury

I first came across the works of Alan Moore in the mid-1980s, while I was a student in Aberdeen. One day, I discovered a ramshackle shop on the city’s King Street selling tatty second-hand paperbacks and comics out of cardboard boxes at ridiculously low prices.

There, I managed to buy most of the 26 issues of a comics anthology called Warrior, which had appeared monthly from 1982 to 1985. Initially, I was attracted to Warrior because its contents included the continuing adventures of Father Shandor, a comic-strip character I’d been obsessed with in my early teens. (Shandor was a 19^th-century Transylvanian monk who fought vampires and demons. He’d actually started as a movie character, played by the gruff, no-nonsense Scottish actor Andrew Keir, who was the foe of Christopher Lee’s Dracula in the 1966 Hammer horror movie Dracula: Prince of Darkness. He became the hero of a comic strip in the late-1970s magazine House of Hammer, whose editor Dez Skinn would later edit Warrior. At an even younger age, I’d been a big fan of Marvel Comics’ Doctor Strange and Shandor seemed a darker, more serious and more violent version of that.) However, it was only one of many serials in Warrior and the most striking of these sprang from the pen of Alan Moore.

These included Marvelman, a revival of a British superhero who’d originally been the lead character in a comic book that’d run from 1953 to 1964, and The Bojeffries Saga, about a family of Munsters-like misfits and monsters living in a council house in Northampton, which incidentally is Moore’s hometown. But it was the dystopian V for Vendetta, penned by Moore and drawn by David Lloyd (with occasional contributions from Tony Weare) that made me re-evaluate what comics were capable of doing.

Set in a neutral Britain that’s managed to avoid destruction in a nuclear war but now, in a dire situation after the subsequent nuclear winter, is under the heel of a fascist, totalitarian government, V for Vendetta was the first comic-book serial I’d encountered that seemed both utterly serious and utterly adult. Yes, this was a time when it was still assumed anything drawn as a series of cartoons, in a series of boxes, with speech bubbles, could never be adult and must always be juvenile. It also made uncomfortable reading – again, ‘uncomfortable’ was an adjective I hadn’t previously associated with comics – because (a) it was inviting its readers to associate with a hero who was, ostensibly, a terrorist, and (2) the authoritarian society depicted in V for Vendetta didn’t seem that far down the road from the one a certain Margaret Thatcher was engineering in Britain in the time.

Ironically, if the world of V for Vendetta was to come about, Thatcher wouldn’t have been in power for most of the 1980s. Presumably the story had been conceived before the 1982 Falklands War, which gave a massive boost to Thatcher’s popularity. Back then, it’d looked possible she’d lose the next British general election and the Labour Party, led by the pacifistic Michael Foot, could win it, which would have set up V for Vendetta’s neutral-Britain-survives-a-nuclear-war scenario.

Anyway, 40 years later, it’s highly unlikely anyone would only find out who Alan Moore is after rooting around in a box of second-hand comics in a shop in Aberdeen. After V for Vendetta (published in its entirety by DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint in 1988-89), The Ballad of Halo Jones (1984-86), Watchmen (1986-87), From Hell (1989-98) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999-2019), and his acclaimed work with established comic-book characters like Batman, Superman and Swamp Thing, and his authorship of the tomes Jerusalem (2016) and The Great When: A Long London Novel (2024), and his reputation as a magician and occultist, and his popularity as an interviewee and a social commentator, and his being garlanded with accolades such as ‘national treasure’, ‘sage’ and ‘world’s greatest living Englishman’, it’s fair to say we’re living in an era of Alan Moore ubiquity. And we’re all the better for it.

From wikipedia.org / © Quality Communications

Anyway, I’ve just read his 2022 collection of short stories, Illuminations. Of the nine pieces it contains, eight are good or great in my opinion. Also, one of the stories, What We Can Know About Thunderman, isn’t a short one but a 240-page novel. It’s about 30 pages longer than the other stories put together.

Fortunately, given its length, What We Can Know About Thunderman isn’t the story I consider to be a dud. No, I think the dud is the penultimate one, American Light – An Appreciation, which purports to a poem by an imaginary Beat poet called Harmon Belner, choc-a-bloc with references to the ‘San Franciscan and Beat culture’ and the ‘post-Beat counterculture that prevailed in San Francisco during the 1960s and 1970s’, plus an introduction and copious footnotes by an imaginary scholar called C.F. Bird. Connoisseurs of all things Beat may find it a delightful pastiche, snapshot and celebration of the movement, but it simply didn’t appeal to me, someone who finds most Beat writers tedious, pretentious and arsehole-y. (How I cheered when I read what Keith Richards said of Allen Ginsberg in the former’s autobiography: “…Ginsberg was staying at Mick’s place in London once, and I spent an evening listening to the old gasbag pontificating on everything. It was the period when Ginsberg sat around playing a concertina badly and making ommm sounds, pretending he was oblivious to his socialite surroundings.”)

What We Can Know About Thunderman on the other hand is a fictionalized history of the American mainstream comic-book industry where the foundational superhero of that industry isn’t Superman but a Superman-like character called Thunderman. It’s also an indictment of the business, which has inflicted indignities and belittlements on numerous writers and artists, including Moore, over the decades. For instance, Moore is justifiably bitter about losing ownership of V for Vendetta and Watchmen to DC Comics. (When he made a guest appearance in a 2007 episode of The Simpsons, Milhouse Van Houten was shown making a grievous faux pas by asking Moore to autograph a DVD featuring the DC Comics characters, Watchmen Babies in V for Vacation.)

Although the characters in Thunderman have unfamiliar names, comics fans won’t have difficulty linking many of them to real-life publishers, editors, writers and artists. I’m not particularly knowledgeable, though even I recognized one Sam Blatz “…in his tilted hat, his jacket slung over one shoulder like Sinatra…” and wearing ‘snazzy sunglasses’. Blatz’s chief talent is for titling characters: “…at least Sam’s monsters looked great, drawn by Gold or Novak, so that all he had to do was think up whacky names…” Yes, Blatz is Moore’s sour reimagining of Marvel Comics’ head-honcho Stan Lee. That would make the artists ‘Gold’ and ‘Novak’ the more talented, but less financially rewarded, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. There has been writing online, some of it in great detail, about who the cast-members of Thunderman represent in the real comics world. If your expertise in the field is lacking, as mine is, it may be useful to have one of those online pieces handy, for consultation, while you read the story.

Thunderman is impressively bilious as it charts its characters’ progress during the 20^th and early 21^st centuries. They start as young, naïve comic-book enthusiasts, become comic-book creatives, and wind up as middle-aged predators or victims: variously corrupt, grasping, sociopathic, perverted, ridiculous, embittered or crushed. The story is told from a range of perspectives and in a range of styles and formats, including interviews, monologues, reviews, playscripts, internet-forum discussions, psychoanalysis sessions and comic-book panels (described in written form), as well as in conventional prose. If not every part works equally well, the assorted viewpoints and formats keep it fresh. Fear not if something isn’t quite engaging you – something different will be along in another few pages.

My favourite sections were the comic-book panels, which chronicle how the creators of Thunderman, Simon Schuman and David Kessler – thinly-veiled versions of Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegal and Joe Shuster – were conned out of the rights to the lucrative Thunderman franchise by American Comics, the story’s stand-in for DC Comics; and a series of reviews that evaluate how Thunderman has been adapted to the large and small screens. Again, Thunderman’s exploits in the cinema and on TV mirror Superman’s. I particularly enjoyed the review of Thunderman IV: The Search for Love, obviously inspired by 1987’s Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. However, while Superman IV had the late Chrisopher Reeve in the title role, trying to preserve his dignity in a poor film, Moore brilliantly imagines Thunderman IV featuring Robin Askwith, star of those dire British 1970s sex-comedies, the Confessions films: “…most of the supposed humour rests in the mullet-styled hero using his Thundervision to see through the walls of ladies’ changing rooms, complete with BOI-OI-OING sound effects.”

© Canon Group, Inc. / Warner Bros.

Elsewhere in Illuminations, Moore stretches his imagination and writing abilities with The Improbably Complex High-Energy State. This is both a cautionary tale and a riff on the paradox put forward by 19^th-century physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who mused that it was statistically more likely for a self-aware brain, perceiving an infinite universe, to come into being through random fluctuations of particles than it was for an infinite universe itself, as postulated under conventional cosmological theory, to exist. In other words, we’re more likely spontaneously-created entities thinking we see an infinite universe than we’re actual parts of an infinite universe. Moore’s story has such a brain – and a lot of other stuff – appearing soon after the universe does. As it becomes aware of its unique situation, it rapidly develops human, and depressingly familiar, personality traits.

From the birth of the universe in The Improbably Complex High-Energy State, Moore moves to the end of the world in Location, Location, Location. He describes the apocalypse in majestically vivid Book-of-Revelation fashion, but sets the action in the unassuming English market-town of Bedford. This is where the real-life Panacea Society, believers in the teachings of the 19^th-century prophetess Joanna Southcott, believed the site of the original Garden of Eden to be. They also maintained a house on Bedford’s Albany Road as a residence for the Messiah to move into after the Second Coming. In Location, Location, Location, it transpires that, yes, the Panacea Society got it right and Jesus Christ – who’s presented like a well-meaning but slightly embarrassing ‘cool dad’, with a pierced ear and a T-shirt saying ‘I may be old, but at least I got to see all the best bands’ – has just arrived in Bedford to claim the house. The story is told through the eyes of an understandably distracted solicitor called Angie, who’s been given the task of overseeing the handover. This she has to do while images of giant winged beasts with lions’ heads and battling squadrons of angels fill the sky above. Location, Location, Location is an excellent example of Moore’s ability to combine the jaw-droppingly fantastical with the humdrum and mundane.

But the stories I enjoyed most in Illuminations were a trio of tales that struck me as belonging to a school of spooky British fiction that stretches from Arthur Machen, via Robert Aickman, to Ramsey Campbell, in that they present the supernatural in very British settings: everyday, awkward, slightly rundown and tawdry. Not Even Legend features an organization of hapless paranormal investigators called CSICON (the Committee For Surrealist Investigation of Claims Of the Normal), who are trying to get to grips with some cryptid-type beings so adept at hiding themselves that no one, until now, suspects they even exist. Not Even Legend has a complicated structure that rewards the reader’s patience when it becomes clear how clever the story’s premise is. And Moore’s enthusiasm for inventing strange new types of monsters is endearing. He mentions such creatures as Snapjackets, Mormoleens, Jilkies and – most prominently – Whispering Petes.

More conventional is Cold Reading about a phony, but pathetically self-justifying, clairvoyant who spots an opportunity to make easy money when a man asks him if he can contact the spirit of his deceased twin brother. A twist can be seen coming, but the story’s mixture of cynicism and melancholia, and its evocation of a bleak wintry night in Northampton, make it very atmospheric. Finally, I greatly enjoyed the title story, which takes place in a dilapidated, seen-better-days British seaside resort. Moore obviously relishes describing the setting. The tale of a middle-aged man returning to the coastal town in which, during his childhood, he used to holiday with his parents, it reminds me slightly of the Harlan Ellison short story One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty (1970). And there’s something about it that calls to mind the Gerald Kersh story The Brighton Monster (1948) too.

Your enjoyment of Illuminations may depend on your willingness to spend half of it reading a novel that’s a diatribe against the American comic-book industry. I was happy to do so, and I got a lot out of that story and out of the collection generally. Illuminations really did light up my reading life for a few days.

From wikipedia.org / © Matt Biddulph

October 31, 2021November 1, 2021

10 scary pictures for Halloween 2021

From unsplash.com / © Nicola Gambetti

It’s Halloween today and as usual I thought I’d celebrate the occasion by displaying ten of the most interesting pieces of macabre art I’ve come across in the past year.

And what better way to start than with this illustration by the Italian-born, American-reared artist Joseph Mugnaini for Ray Bradbury’s 1972 fantasy novel The Halloween Tree? Never having read that novel, I don’t know what the winged, cadaverous, hooked-nosed figure represents, but he makes an elegant and cosmically weird image.

© Yearling Books / From monsterbrains.blogspot.com

In these art-themed Halloween posts I usually include something featuring skeletons, as a nod to the festival that comes immediately after Halloween – Mexico’s skeleton-obsessed Dia de Muertos, the Day of the Dead, at the start of November. This year’s skeletal number is by Vincent Van Gogh, no less. Known as Skeleton with a Lit Cigarette in its Mouth, it now resides in Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum. The museum’s website describes it as “a juvenile joke”, painted by Van Gogh “in early 1886, while studying at the art academy in Antwerp… Drawing skeletons was a standard exercise at the academy, but painting them was not part of the curriculum. He must have made this painting at some other time, between or after his lessons.” I find the painting discombobulating, not just because of the cigarette or, indeed, the revelation that Van Gogh, associated with intensity and misery in most people’s minds, actually had a sense of humour. No, it’s more that the skeleton is such a complex assemblage, of corners, ridges, crenels, shelves and slats. It’s almost machine-like – slightly reminiscent of the lethal, metal endoskeleton that pops up at the climax of The Terminator (1982).

From vangoghmuseum.nl/en

Going further back in time, I have to say I love this depiction of a devil, which occupies the front side of the right-hand panel in the triptych Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation. It was painted in the 1480s by the German-born, Bruges-based artist Hans Memling and is now on display in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Strasbourg. It’s the merriment with which the little fellow is dancing, on top of those sinners suffering in eternal hellfire, that gets me. Why, he’s practically riverdancing.

From musees.strasbourg.eu

Now for a devil from a different culture and different part of the world. This bloated, pustular apparition is what’s known as a ta-awi, a Philippine ogre / demon. I happened across it on Cryptid Wiki, which describes the beast as “a large hideous humanoid from Philippine mythology.” It “raids villages and devours people alive, but doesn’t eat their eyeballs because it can’t digest them for some reason.” All I can determine about the artist is that his name is Isaiah Paul and he has a page on deviantart.com here.

© Isaiah Paul

Less in-your-face and more ambiguous – the figure depicted may not even be supernatural, but just an odd person who likes to immerse herself among water lilies – is this painting, which I believe is called Hidden Things and is by modern-day Welsh artist Kim Myatt. In fact, I’d say it evokes the subtle strangeness of the fiction of Robert Aickman.

© Kim Myatt

In 1980, when I was both a spotty adolescent and an aspiring writer, the first stories I ever submitted were to a handsome little magazine called Fantasy Tales. (The stories weren’t accepted, but the editors were kind enough to write back and offer me advice like “When you’re typing, try leaving a space after commas and full stops,” or “It’s probably not a good idea to have six single-sentence paragraphs in a row.”) What made Fantasy Tales so visually appealing was that it featured the artwork of Lancastrian Jim Pitts, whose exquisitely detailed and atmospheric illustrations, often in black-and-white, recalled the great artists of the 1930s and 1940s pulp-fiction magazines such as Virgil Finlay and Hannes Bok. Here’s a gothic and vampirical item that Pitts did for issue four of the magazine Dark Horizons.

© Jim Pitts

Another English illustrator I remember fondly from my youth is Les Edwards, whose work adorned the covers of paperbacks like Karl Edward Wagner’s Bloodstone (1975) and Robert Holdstock’s novelisation of the movie Legend of the Werewolf (1975). I like Edwards’ work for being unpretentious and upfront – you certainly knew what sort of book you were getting when you saw his art on the cover – but also for its precision and colour. This piece is called The Shade and achieves a chill despite its graveyard scene being pictured in daylight. There’s a suggestion of mist creeping ominously in from the distant trees and the stone angel in the foreground adds to the discomfort.

© Les Edwards

A third illustrator whose work was familiar to me in my teenage years was the American science fiction and fantasy artist Rowena Morrill, who sadly died in February this year. Morrill blazed a trail as a rare thing in 1970s paperback illustration – a woman. Her work graced the covers of the first collections of stories by H.P. Lovecraft that I managed to lay my hands on, The Dunwich Horror (1978) and The Colour Out of Space (1978). Her depictions of Lovecraft’s ‘Elder Gods’ as amalgamations of bits of wildly-different creatures may not be how most people imagine Cthulhu and company nowadays, i.e., with lots of tentacles, but they’re grotesquely and baroquely weird. Here’s the picture that adorned The Dunwich Horror.

© Jove / HBJ Books

I’ve seen the Czech artist Jindra Capek described online as a ‘children’s book illustrator’. Hmm. I don’t know if the following picture, showing a hungry ghoul-type creature (though one civilised enough to be wearing what looks like a pair of boxer shorts) taking a bite out of a newly-dug-up corpse, is what you’d expect to see in the pages of a children’s book. Come to think of it, though, my ten-year-old self would have been delighted by it.

© Jindra Capek

One sort of image I’ve always found unsettling is that of an insect, or general creepy-crawly, sporting the facial features of a human being. I’m thinking of David Hedison in The Fly (1958), playing a hapless scientist whose experiments with teleportation go astray and end up grafting his head onto the bug of the title; or the scuttling, insectoid, human-faced aliens in The Zanti Misfits, the famous 1963 episode of the TV anthology show The Outer Limits. Needless to say, I find this item disturbing. It’s by the Belgian artist Henri Lievens, who in his lifetime created the covers for more than 200 books. Entitled L’Araignee, its lady-faced spider is icky-looking but also, with those large doe eyes, worryingly fetching. The lurid blue and black palette heightens its effect.

From unquietthings.com

And that’s it for another year. Happy Halloween!

October 9, 2021October 19, 2022

Short, sharp shocks

© New English Library

We’re into October now, a month that ends with the scary festival of Halloween. In keeping with the spirit of the season, I thought I would repost on this blog a few old entries that have a macabre, and hence Halloween-y, theme. I’ll start with this item, which I originally wrote in 2017. It’s about my favourite volumes of short horror stories: books that deliver a series of short, sharp shocks.

These are the ten collections of short horror stories that have had the biggest impact on me. To keep this exercise manageable, I’ve limited it to collections written by a single author. And the authors included are ones who are still alive or were alive when I started reading their work. Hence, no Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft or Arthur Machen.

Blood and Water and Other Tales (1988) by Patrick McGrath

Patrick McGrath has spent his career writing fiction that shows his love for the gothic and grotesque but, in a rare display of broad-mindedness, critics have avoided pigeonholing him as a ‘horror’ or ‘fantasy’ writer and treated him as a serious mainstream-literary figure instead. What a lucky man he is. Blood and Water… showcases McGrath’s short fiction and features, among other things, a diseased angel (The Angel), a hand that starts growing out of an unexpected place (The Black Hand of the Raj), a community of anaemic vampires (Blood Disease) and, most surreally, a girl who discovers a jungle explorer camped in the bushes at the bottom of her suburban garden (The Lost Explorer). Particularly vivid is The E(rot)ic Potato, a meditation on decay told by a fly. And an even less likely narrator relates the events of The Boot’s Tale, an account of a nuclear holocaust that manages to be both horrible and funny.

© Penguin

The Bloody Chamber (1979) by Angela Carter

Horror stories are often likened to dark fairy tales and Angela Carter’s short fiction commonly explores the overlap between the two. For me, The Bloody Chamber is her greatest collection. It provides adult, gothic reworkings of such fairy tales and myths as Beauty and the Beast (The Courtship of Mr Lyon), Snow White (The Snow Child) and Bluebeard (the title story). It also contains one of the most gorgeous vampire stories ever, The Lady of the House of Love. And werewolves get a look-in too thanks to the stories The Company of Wolves, The Werewolf and Wolf-Alice, which were incorporated into the classy 1984 movie The Company of Wolves, directed by Neil Jordan and scripted by Jordan and Carter.

Books of Blood, Volume 1 (1984) by Clive Barker

In the mid-1980s Clive Barker caused a sensation with the publication of his six Books of Blood, which are basically six volumes of short horror stories linked by a clever framing device. Such was their impact that Stephen King dubbed Barker the Beatles of horror writing – whilst likening himself to horror’s slightly old-fashioned Elvis Presley. To be honest, I found many stories in the later Books of Blood a tad pretentious; but Volume 1 is just about perfect in its blend of the funny, the profound and the hideously, graphically bloody. Humour comes courtesy of the demonic-haunting spoof The Yattering and Jack and the charming supernatural-theatre story Sex, Death and Starshine (no doubt drawing on Barker’s experiences running the Dog Company theatrical troupe in late 1970s and early 1980s). Profundity is supplied by In the Hills, the Cities, which takes place in the then-Yugoslavia and spookily prefigures the Balkans conflicts of the 1990s. And for sheer, gross horribleness you can’t beat The Midnight Meat Train or Pig Blood Blues, the latter being one of my candidates for the title of Scariest Story Ever.

© Sphere

Dark Companions (1982) by Ramsey Campbell

Ramsey Campbell has long been regarded as Britain’s greatest living horror writer and Dark Companions is an ideal starting-point for anyone new to the Campbell oeuvre. Both grim and believable, his short stories take place in a recognisably frayed and decayed modern Britain, populated by lonely and frightened people whose everyday fears gradually and nightmarishly take on tangible form. Highlights include the distinctly un-Christmassy Christmas story The Chimney; The Depths, a dismaying exploration of why someone would want to write a really nasty horror story; Mackintosh Willy, which combines childhood fears of the bogeyman with all-too-real themes of homelessness and child abuse; and The Companion, surely the best ‘haunted fairground’ story ever written.

Night Shift (1978) by Stephen King

I can’t not include Night Shift here. In my boyhood I’d go to scout summer-camps in the countryside near the Scottish town of Hawick. During one camp I spent three days stuck almost permanently inside a tent because the Scottish weather was doing its normal thing and pissing non-stop with rain. Luckily, in a Hawick bookshop beforehand, I’d bought a copy of Night Shift, a 1978 volume of Stephen King’s short stories, and to keep boredom at bay, I read that during the three days. It made a big impression. King has produced slicker collections of short stories since, but the unpleasant things inhabiting the tales in Night Shift have stayed with me for 40 years. A huge demonically-possessed laundry machine that rumbles into malevolent life (The Mangler)… Giant mutant rats lurking in the basement of a factory (The Graveyard Shift)… A man slowly transforming into a monstrous flesh-eating slug (Grey Matter)… A Mafia-type organisation that helps you give up smoking by threatening to torture and kill your family every time you puff a new cigarette (Quitters Inc)… No, Night Shift isn’t subtle, but it certainly scared the bejesus out of me when I was a thirteen-year-old boy scout.

© Panther

The October Country (1955) by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury is someone else I couldn’t not have on this list as, to me, the guy was basically God. He could turn his hand to writing anything – horror, science fiction, fantasy, magical realism and yes, our old friend ‘mainstream literature’ – but The October Country is probably his purest collection of macabre stories. It features such pieces as The Scythe, about a man who finds a mysterious scythe, starts using it and becomes the Grim Reaper, harvesting souls rather than wheat; The Jar, wherein a man buys the titular jar at a fair and becomes obsessed with the indescribable something that’s floating around inside it; and the splendidly-grisly Skeleton, about a paranoid man who becomes convinced that the bony figure embedded inside his own flesh is an imposter and takes action to evict it.

Shatterday (1980) by Harlan Ellison

Remarkably, the science fiction / fantasy writer Harlan Ellison managed to win fame by largely eschewing novels and writing masses of short stories instead. Well, fame in the USA at least. His name was little-known and his work hard to come by in Britain. Among many collections, Shatterday is possibly his best. Particularly memorable is the melancholy Jeffty is Five, about a little boy who refuses to grow up; The Man Who was Heavily into Revenge, about a schmuck who haplessly wrongs another person and then, inexplicably, finds the whole world venting its wrath upon him; Count the Clock That Tells the Time, a cautionary tale about the consequences of doing nothing meaningful with your life and frittering it away; and the unsettling title story, about a man who phones his own apartment one evening and finds himself talking to himself, or more precisely, to a sinister alter-ego who’s planning to usurp him from his own existence.

© Penguin

Swamp Foetus (1993) by Poppy Z. Brite

New Orleans writer Poppy Z. Brite’s collection Swamp Foetus was a revelation when I read it in the 1990s. It’s populated both with the archetypes of traditional gothic fiction – ghosts, zombies, freaks – and with the characters of another type of Gothicism, the modern-day sub-culture that arose when kids, inspired by punk, new romanticism and Edgar Allan Poe, started dressing in black, applying kohl eyeliner and listening to bands like the Sisters of Mercy and the Cure. Swamp Foetus thus has stories like His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood where decadent, black-clad, absinthe-swigging youths fall foul of ancient voodoo / vampire horrors. That said, no Goths are to be found in the best story here, which is Calcutta, Lord of Nerves. Calcutta takes a fresh angle on George A. Romero’s original trilogy of Living Dead movies. In the films, Romero’s zombie apocalypse is a very American one, with barely a mention of events in the rest of the world. As its title suggests, Brite imagines the same apocalypse happening in the capital city of West Bengal. What happens? Nobody seems to notice it that much.

Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch (1996) by Dorothy K. Haynes

Scottish writer Dorothy K. Haynes is much underrated. Her stories, often set in the dour, oppressive society of 1930s, 1940s and 1950s Scotland, when the Presbyterian Church still had undue influence, are impressively disturbing in their quiet way. Perhaps most disturbing is The Peculiar Case of Mrs Grimmond, about an old woman who takes pity on a strange, unidentified little animal that her cat drags into the house one day and, while she looks after and nurtures it, incurs the wrath of the community around her. Haynes also tackles myth and legend. Her very Scottish takes on such fabled creatures as banshees (The Bean-Nighe), fairies (Paying Guests) and changelings (The Changeling) are satisfyingly grim and creepy.

The Wine-Dark Sea (1988) by Robert Aickman

I’ve written about Robert Aickman before on this blog, so I will just say here that this, for me, is his finest collection of stories. There’s one stinker among its contents, the supposedly satirical Growing Boys, which is an unwelcome reminder that, first-rate writer though he was, Aickman was also a grumpy, reactionary, modernity-hating conservative. However, everything else is excellent, if frequently challenging and baffling. The Inner Room is a phantasmagorical story about a weird doll’s house. Never Visit Venice pokes fun at the modern phenomenon of mass tourism with its an account of an unwary visitor to the title city taking a ride on a gondola from hell. And Your Tiny Hand is Frozen, about an unsociable man becoming addicted to a telephone, through which he communicates with a strange woman who may or may not exist, shows Aickman’s unease about the loss of face-to-face interaction that new communications technology was causing – the story was written in 1953. Maybe it’s just as well Aickman passed away in 1982. He’d have really hated our era of smartphones and social media.

October 25, 2020November 22, 2020

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.

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.

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 21^st-century social media? I’m sure he would have loved that. Not.