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From the Independent<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Six days before Halloween, here\u2019s another reposting of an old blog entry about one of my favourite writers of macabre fiction.\u00a0 This time it\u2019s Robert Aickman, about whom I wrote this piece in 2015. <\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Over the years I\u2019ve 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\u2019t be put down.\u00a0 However, the blurb on the cover of The Wine-Dark Sea<\/em>, a collection of short stories by Robert Aickman that was originally published in 1988 and republished in 2014, is bang on the money.\u00a0 It contains a comment by Neil Gaiman, no less, who says of the author: \u201cReading Robert Aickman is like watching a magician work, and very often I\u2019m not even sure what the trick was.\u00a0 All I know is that he did it beautifully.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n That\u2019s as good a description as any of the feeling I get when reading Aickman.\u00a0 You\u2019re aware that he\u2019s going to perform a trick involving some literary sleight-of-hand.\u00a0 You don\u2019t know what the trick\u2019s going to be, or when he\u2019s going to do it.\u00a0 Afterwards, you\u2019re not even sure if the trick has<\/em> been performed, or what the point of it was.\u00a0 Then you mull it over.\u00a0 And most of the time, you decide: Wow! That was impressive!<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I\u2019ve added \u2018most of the time\u2019, though, as a disclaimer to that last sentence.\u00a0 Because, very occasionally, my reaction to an Aickman story has been different: What a load of bollocks!<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I first came across Aickman\u2019s work in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when his stories cropped up in horror anthologies such as The Far Reaches of Fear<\/em> (1976), New Terrors<\/em> (1980) and Dark Forces<\/em> (1980).\u00a0 Although in those collections they rubbed shoulders with some grisly items, Aickman\u2019s stories didn\u2019t fit comfortably with the \u2018horror\u2019 label.\u00a0 And the claim that some people made about him, that he was actually a \u2018ghost\u2019 story writer in the mould of M.R. James, didn\u2019t convince either.\u00a0 Aickman liked to describe his stories as \u2018strange\u2019 ones and \u2018strange\u2019 is the adjective I\u2019d attach to them too.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t just his fiction that seemed out-of-place.\u00a0 Aickman himself seemed out-of-place in post-war Britain, being a man of old-fashioned views and erudite \u2013 some would say \u2018elitist\u2019 \u2013 tastes.\u00a0 He was a conservationist who co-founded the Inland Waterways Association and battled to prevent Britain\u2019s 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.\u00a0 I imagine that by the 1970s, when the UK\u2019s 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<\/em> (1973-76) and On the Buses<\/em> (1969-73), he was not a particularly happy bunny.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Inevitably, this sense of alienation appears in his fiction.\u00a0 His stories feature a lot of discontented middle-aged men (or women) who are set in their ways and don\u2019t do a good job coping with a changing, modern world that seems diametrically opposed to their ways.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I found much of Aickman\u2019s work baffling when, as a teenager, I first encountered it.\u00a0 However, I was impressed by his contribution to New Terrors<\/em>, a 55-page story called The Stains<\/em>.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Stephen becomes infatuated with Nell, with the result that he takes early retirement from his job, abandons his ties with the \u2018civilised\u2019 world and attempts to live with her in an empty, tumbledown house on the moors.\u00a0 Yet the story is no New Age male fantasy.\u00a0 Aickman steers it in a darker direction.\u00a0 Nell seems to embody the natural world, but nature soon intrudes on her relationship with Stephen in a more grotesque way.\u00a0 As their romance progresses, Stephen notices weird moulds, fungi and lichen spreading across the walls and furniture around him.\u00a0 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 \u2018body horror\u2019.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Stains<\/em> is regarded as one of Aickman\u2019s most autobiographical stories.\u00a0 Many people see in Stephen\u2019s unpleasantly doomed relationship with Nell a metaphor for Aickman\u2019s love affair with the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard.\u00a0 After being involved with him, and then with Laurie Lee and Arthur Koestler, Howard married Kingsley Amis in 1965.\u00a0 Aickman, whose obsession with Howard was described by one friend as a \u2018mental aberration\u2019, must have found the thought that she\u2019d chosen the increasingly boorish Amis over him hard to stomach.\u00a0 Incidentally, like several of Aickman\u2019s stories, The Stains<\/em> shows that he wasn\u2019t afraid to infuse his work \u2013 no matter how fuddy-duddy the characters \u2013 with a strong dose of the erotic.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a9 Berkley Books<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n My teenage self was sufficiently curious to seek out more of Aickman\u2019s work and I located two collections of his short stories, Dark Entries<\/em> (1964) and Cold Hand in Mine<\/em> (1975).\u00a0 Predictably, some of those stories bewildered me, and a few irritated me; but several, like The Stains<\/em>, have haunted me ever since.\u00a0 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<\/em><\/a>, their second single, which they released in 1980.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n One story I remember well is The Swords<\/em>, in which a young travelling salesman goes to bed with a strangely blank woman whom he encounters at a seedy carnival sideshow.\u00a0 Again, this allows Aickman to serve up some disquieting body horror at the story\u2019s close.\u00a0 Also memorable is The Hospice<\/em>, a Kafka-esque tale of a motorist getting lost at night and asking for shelter at the titular institution.\u00a0 Inside the hospice, he notices odd things about how the inmates are cared for.\u00a0 For instance, in the dining room, he sees that one patient is discreetly shackled to the floor.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And in the award-winning Pages from a Young Girl\u2019s Journal<\/em>, Aickman tackles one of the commonest tropes in horror fiction in one of its most traditional settings. \u00a0This purports to be a series of diary entries written by a young woman in 1815 who\u2019s accompanying her parents on a tour of central Europe.\u00a0 She becomes excited when she discovers that they\u2019re in the same neighbourhood as her secret hero, Lord Byron, who lives there \u2018in riot and wickedness\u2019.\u00a0 And she soon encounters her own personal Lord Bryon in the form of a mysterious gentleman attending a local contessa\u2019s party.\u00a0 His \u2018skin is somewhat pallid\u2019, his nose is \u2018aquiline and commanding\u2019 and, most suspiciously of all, his mouth is \u2018scarlet\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 You can guess where this is heading.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Aickman\u2019s approach to telling creepy stories was subtle, mannered and leisurely.\u00a0 Often, his stories needed a lot<\/em> of build-up before they reached their denouements.\u00a0 By the start of the 1980s, this seemed anachronistic.\u00a0 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\u2019d experienced a punk-rock moment in the mid-1970s when James Herbert unleashed a slew of bestselling horror novels like The Rats<\/em> (1974) and The Fog<\/em> (1975) that were unapologetically in your face with gore and violence.\u00a0 And a little later, in the 1980s, Clive Barker\u2019s Books of Blood<\/em> series (1984-85) would pioneer a style of horror-writing that was in equal parts perverse, visionary and wildly gruesome.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So when I read in 1981 that Aickman had died of cancer \u2013 which, in his typically obstinate way, he\u2019d refused to have any conventional medical treatment for, preferring instead to rely on dubious \u2018homeopathic\u2019 cures \u2013 I assumed, sadly, that his work would soon be out of fashion, out of print and out of readers\u2019 memories.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a9 Mandarin-Reed Books<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Years later, I stumbled across a copy of a posthumously-published collection by him called The Unsettled Dust<\/em> (1990).\u00a0 It contained one or two stories that annoyed me, but generally I greatly enjoyed it.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Admittedly, I sometimes wasn\u2019t sure what happened at the stories\u2019 ends.\u00a0 And even after thinking about them carefully, I still wasn\u2019t sure.\u00a0 But what the hell?\u00a0 With Aickman, the pleasure was in getting there.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I particularly liked the title story, in which an official stays at a stately home whilst negotiating the transfer of the house\u2019s running from the hands of its aristocratic inhabitants into the hands of the National Trust.\u00a0 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. \u00a0This illustrates another of Aickman\u2019s abilities, to convincingly weave into his stories scenes and incidents that are totally outlandish.\u00a0 So sober is the tone of everything else going on that you readily accept these mad bits as parts of the narrative.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Nonetheless, it seemed appropriate that I found The Unsettled Dust<\/em> in a rack of second-hand books in a corner of a small antiques shop in a village in rural County Suffolk \u2013 an obscure place to find an obscure book by an obscure writer.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But, happily, I was wrong.\u00a0 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<\/em>, Dark Entries<\/em>, Cold Hand in Mind<\/em> and The Unsettled Dust<\/em>.\u00a0 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<\/em> (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.\u00a0 And the Guardian, Independent and Daily Telegraph have all printed articles about him lately.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I\u2019ve just finished reading The Wine-Dark Sea<\/em> and it\u2019s possibly my favourite Aickman collection yet.\u00a0 I wouldn\u2019t say it\u2019s perfect, though.\u00a0 This being Aickman, there has to be at least one story that gets on my wick.\u00a0 In this case the offender is Growing Boys<\/em>, 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Aickman uses the story to bemoan the delinquency of the younger generation and the inadequacy of Britain\u2019s post-war institutions.\u00a0 It\u2019s reactionary but, much worse, it isn\u2019t funny.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n On the other hand, my favourite story here is The Inner Room<\/em>.\u00a0 It\u2019s about a haunted doll\u2019s house, which is a staple of many scary stories, most famously one written by M.R. James called \u2013 surprise! \u2013 The Haunted Dolls House<\/em>.\u00a0 Aickman, however, treats the subject with dark humour.\u00a0 The story\u2019s climax is unexpectedly and phantasmagorically weird, meanwhile, and reminds me a little of the work of Angela Carter.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Elsewhere, both Never Visit Venice<\/em> and Your Tiny Hand is Frozen<\/em> suggest Aickman taking two of his modern-day bugbears and transforming his indignation at them into horror stories.\u00a0 Never Visit Venice<\/em> lays into mass tourism.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Your Tiny Hand is Frozen<\/em> 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.\u00a0 Telephones were becoming increasingly widespread at the time the story was written, presumably to Aickman\u2019s discomfort.\u00a0 It\u2019s just as well that he didn\u2019t live to see the situation today when smartphones have practically taken over the world.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Incidentally, so in vogue is Aickman now that there\u2019s even a Facebook<\/a> page and Twitter<\/a> account devoted to him.\u00a0 Robert Aickman with a presence on 21st<\/sup>-century social media?\u00a0 I\u2019m sure he would have loved that.\u00a0 Not.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a9 Faber & Faber<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Independent Six days before Halloween, here\u2019s another reposting of an old blog entry about one of my favourite writers of macabre fiction.\u00a0 This time it\u2019s Robert Aickman, about whom I wrote this piece in 2015. Over the years I\u2019ve learned to be sceptical of the publicity blurbs adorning the covers … <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/bloodandporridge.co.uk\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/RA-CHIM.jpg\")
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