Compulsory Games collects all of the remaining Aickman stories not included in Faber's 4-volume set issued in 2014, including 3 previously uncollectedCompulsory Games collects all of the remaining Aickman stories not included in Faber's 4-volume set issued in 2014, including 3 previously uncollected stories. the majority are drawn from his outstanding collection Intrusions and the less successful Tales of Love and Death, and a couple from the excellent Night Voices. sadly, Compulsory Games does not include the strongest stories from each of those collections ("The Stains" & "The Fetch" & "Growing Boys"); it does include at least four stories that near greatness: "No Time Is Passing", "The Strangers", "Just a Song at Twilight", and "Residents Only"
the originals in the collection are not really worth the price of admission; this is a book for Aickman completists only. although the introduction by Victoria Nelson is certainly well done. better to purchase the three collections noted above.
the uncollected:
"The Coffin House" - disappointingly minor tale of two young women meeting their doom in a strange house. the writing is perfectly fine and technically accomplished; it's the story itself that is skeletal in ideas. quite abrupt as well, in a cheap way. I can understand why this wasn't collected previously - it feels like Aickman gave up on it, with an eyeroll. perhaps the weakest story I've read by the author.
"The Fully-Conducted Tour" - a husband abroad with a sickly wife finds himself on a tour of a mysterious villa, where the geriatrics in the group with him meet their ambiguous fate. another well-written story that suffers from thinness. fortunately not as abrupt as the prior tale, and the idea does have flesh on it. it's just not a very interesting idea! rather obvious, which is rarely an Aickman trait.
"A Disciple of Plato" - a 'philosopher' in a malarial 18th-century Rome meets an entrancingly intellectual woman who is set for convent life. a deep connection between their two minds is established within their first conversation; our courtly cocksman tries and fails repeatedly to change the woman's decision to leave all worldly affairs behind. there is an annoyingly shallow and un-Aickmanesque gotcha ending in which the so-called philosopher's identity is revealed. still, this story was enjoyable and certainly worth reading, if only for the unusually florid quality of the prose - the author is not typically so extravagant in his style....more
the word "story" is too small to describe what can encapsulate a person's whole life. lives are not stories and yet the stories of Intrusions describethe word "story" is too small to describe what can encapsulate a person's whole life. lives are not stories and yet the stories of Intrusions describe and encapsulate entire lives, in moments small and large and metaphorical and phantasmagorical and eerily, uncomfortably ordinary. Aickman, as ever, resists the urge to turn a life into a pat story, a series of events and decisions into a reliable narrative, an individual person into something that can be understood in 50 pages or less. his ambiguity is both a disturbance and an homage to the slippery spaces, the liminal, the movements so slow or so fast that they barely register as change, all the things that make a person's life so indescribable that in the end, words can but fail to be of use when portraying that life. ah, the eerie ordinariness of our prosaic lives, the shallows that contain secret depths. these lives, our lives, like intricately constructed but poorly running clockwork never showing the right time, or a play whose central player has forgotten their lines but the show must go ever on, or a happy empty house disturbed by the intruders that have entered it, insisting that they live there, that they know each other, that they even know themselves.
"Hand in Glove" - how does one deal with the death of love? is it a death due to a lover that infantilizes, a bullying boy to your adult woman? must the lover, or the loved one, die - to confirm if it was ever love at all?
"No Time is Passing" - how does one know a happy life is happy? is it not your beautiful house, is this not your beautiful wife? what if there is a dirty, dreamy place beyond that will neither confirm nor deny that happy life, but will make you wonder - how did you get there after all?
"The Next Glade" - how does one imagine a different husband, a different home, a different life altogether? is it just a step or a death away? will financial ruin confirm that dreams must stay dreams while life goes on after all?
"The Fetch" - This story about a wraith whose appearance presages the death of one of the narrator's loved ones is only the second traditional tale of the supernatural that I've read by Aickman. As with the first - the sublime vampire story "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal" - the fact that the author could have written perfectly accomplished and straightforward albeit old-fashioned horror fiction is fully illustrated. Although I saw few layers here, except perhaps autobiographical ones that contemplate Aickman's own relationships with women, that doesn't take away in the least from the strange, dislocating mood created and the sense of a man adrift in life, only anchored by the women whom he will eventually lose. The story is flawless.
"The Breakthrough" - how does one guard their inner self? is it by hiding the past, hiding from the past, compartmentalizing ourselves, creating new versions of ourselves, erasing our secrets so that our new selves can achieve a certain calm? what shall happen when our pasts and our inner selves break through, haunting us, showing themselves as quite alive after all?
"Letters to the Postman" - how does one recognize true love? is it what you have built in the mind or is it what you will make in the moment? when dreams come true and you learn that reality is not a dream, what will you do with that truth - one that confirms that even love is transactional after all?
"The Strangers" - how does one truly connect with another? is it by hook or by crook, by chance or misadventure, on the bed or in the heart or in an indescribable feeling for which words seem too small, words like love or friendship or connection? is our destiny to always be as dreams or as strangers to each other after all?
These are 7 fascinating, allegorical stories; 6 are gems and 1 imperfect. That less than pleasing story is "Hand in Glove" - the lessons learned felt unearned, showing a strangely petty side to Aickman, who is not an author I expected to deliver a grim twist simply to deliver a grim twist.
But the 6 that follow are so much better. Fulfilling yet still tantalizing after their finish. They were built for rereading. "No Time Is Passing" and "The Next Glade" bend both space and time in their portrait of unknowable places that exist in the woody park across the street and in the backyard past the creek, spaces that represent our dreams and fears, time that is passing too quickly to realize those dreams have gone and only fears remain. "The Strangers" and "The Breakthrough" feature hauntings: in the first, our drab lad is haunted by those he should know and love best; in the second, our urbane gent is haunted by manifestations that exist to upend the carefully predictable lives that he and his neighbors have so carefully constructed. "Letters to the Postman" portrays a wistful fantasy of love crushed by prosaic reality - one so unlike the fantasy that it achieves its own unreality in our naïve hero's mind, incapable of understanding what is obvious to all around him. My favorite of all, and somehow the most straightforward: "The Fetch" - which ends in media res. Which, in a way, makes it the most Aickman-esque of all these tales, as perhaps all of the stories that Aickman told are ones that describe just that state: "in the midst of things."
'Tis the season for lonely men to grow lonelier, for lonely women to lie sleepless in their beds. 'Tis the season for cold woods to get lost in, for s'Tis the season for lonely men to grow lonelier, for lonely women to lie sleepless in their beds. 'Tis the season for cold woods to get lost in, for sad memories to get lost in, for watery graves and tragic houses, for secrets to be unveiled. 'Tis the season for dreams to come true, alas. 'Tis Robert Aickman season!
A collection of strange stories. Not one of my favorites by him, but impressive nonetheless. The dream logic, the disturbing ambiguity, the prosaic details, the chilly formality, the awful revelations, softly stated... all in place, per usual for the author, my favorite writer in this genre.
The sheer oddity of life seems to me of more and more importance, because more and more the pretense is that life is charted, predictable, and controllable. And for oddity, of course, one would well write mystery.
"Ravissante" - a lonely artist is at first dismayed, then turned on, then dismayed again by a vulgar display :/
"The Inner Room" - don't pity the dollhouse's lonely tenants: they have a secret place where they can truly be themselves :)
"Never Visit Venice" - lonely men should never try to make their dreams come true :(
"The Unsettled Dust" - a lonely mansion is full of unsettling dust and dusty dreams and secrets best left in the dust :|
"The Houses of the Russians" - on the lonely Finnish island are the empty houses, full of blood :X
"No Stronger Than a Flower" - better to be lonely and plain than married and beautiful... veiled and clawed :o
"The Cicerones" - no one is lonely in the Cathedral; there are many guides to keep you company ;)
"Into the Wood" - pity the lonely fates of the sleepless, woken from the slumber of life... terribly awake O_O
My favorite was easily "The Houses of the Russians" in which an old man recounts his strange trip to an island full of increasingly discomfiting houses, at first apparently empty but soon seen to be inhabited. There are parties, a little boy with a gift, houses with memories of slaughters that took place far away. Evocative, eerie, and very sad....more
Aickman's third collection is a strange beast. The first four stories address modern blights in a newly direct way (well, comparatively direct, at leaAickman's third collection is a strange beast. The first four stories address modern blights in a newly direct way (well, comparatively direct, at least for him): the pernicious phone and the breakdown of communication; the layers and frustrations and mysteries of the political system; the adulation of film stars and the price paid by a life in that limelight; the ceaseless search for life's meaning, in particular by the idle moneyed classes. The remaining two stories are more of a return to the style of his prior and later collections: ambiguous creeping dread and strange transcendence beyond mortal coils depicted above; the hopeless emotional distance within relationships and the evanescence of happiness hidden below.
The author's modus operandi remains the same: establish an entirely normal situation, fill it with the most commonplace details, allow the situation to develop with only hints of strangeness seeping in from the corners... and then plunge the whole situation into dreamland.
Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen - pity the lonely diminished Edmund, victimized by a telephone, its frequent and increasingly disturbing siren calls "like the soup kitchen to the outcast, or the syringe to the drug addict"
My Poor Friend - pity the poor Member of Parliament, slave to unknown forces, beset from all sides, at home, from above, prey to the "rustle and clatter of birds, keeping their distance, but plainly following"
The Visiting Star - pity the poor Star, an actress of the old school, kept young and hollow, ready for any stage and any set and any costume, revealing her sad truth: "I have a mask for every occasion"
Larger Than Oneself - pity poor Mrs. Iblis, mistakenly attending a weekend party for spiritual leaders, all obsessed with "the great universal need, man's eternal quest for something larger than his puny self"
A Roman Question - pity the poor Married Couple, comfortable and bored, summoning the missing and the dead, hearing them crawl up the outer walls to the roof: "Not hostile; but not loving"
The Wine-Dark Sea - pity the poor Male, slave to the grindstone, barricading himself away from the Feminine, always believing that "he, like others, would be lost without tasks; that pleasures pall; and that ease exhausts"
My favorites were the final three. "Larger Than Oneself" was unexpectedly humorous, albeit humor of a rather acid sort. And what an ending! "The Wine-Dark Sea" was lovely. Sublimely wistful and unexpectedly lyrical. "A Roman Question" was my favorite of all: a prosaic story becoming increasingly bizarre, a chattiness concealing depths of sorrow or lack of affect, wit served entirely dry, and an ambiguous horror that made me both anxious and, in the end, contemplative....more
I always forget how funny Aickman can be. The wit is dry and the humor is often absurd, but it is always present in some way. Never more so than in thI always forget how funny Aickman can be. The wit is dry and the humor is often absurd, but it is always present in some way. Never more so than in this collection, which includes absurd jobs ("Marriage" has two women, one who works in "poultry statistics" and the other who "advises on baby clothing") and absurd attacks ("Compulsory Games" has a protagonist who has fits and flees at the sound of a sinister plane flown too close to ground by his estranged wife, much to the derision of the village children) and absurd situations taken in matter of fact fashion ("Growing Boys" has two 15-year-olds who are apparently giant-sized and can tear down jail walls with their bare hands). Aickman likes laughing at the absurdity of humans and the absurdity of life itself. Same.
This is probably his weakest collection that I've read or reread so far (only 2 more to go!) and certainly includes a story that I can't imagine Aickman even writing. - the uninterestingly straightforward and rather goofy "Raising the Wind" which had me rolling eyes throughout. But it does include two very standout tales: the slightly infamous "Growing Boys" and the extremely mordant "Residents Only" - I loved them both.
"Residents Only" takes the classic haunted cemetery scenario and portrays it from a highly unusual angle: via the perspective of a village council member charged with its upkeep. And so the story is even more remote than usual for the author, as all of the creepy, deadly disturbances are recounted coolly and with an eye on appropriate process and outcomes, and is as lacking in passion as the minutes of any such committee meeting. However, few committee meetings feature two perhaps deceased committee members showing up to vote no on a motion.
"Growing Boys" has challenged many an Aickman fan with its bizarre, utterly deadpan humor and its refusal to address its central situation - two boys growing out of control and a mother who flees the entire horrid situation - with anything resembling a realistic approach. That lack of realism makes the story an outlier in the author's works. I really enjoyed it though, the absurdity of it all, the disinterest of the mother in caring for these monsters, the parody of a disengaged husband, the idea of literally monstrous teens roaming the land assaulting anyone who crosses their path after being expelled from school for understandable reasons, the image of them hungrily devouring an unlucky fellow who crossed them. Kids these days!
a little girl lives in her dreams, in her icy mansion, her wintry village; as her future approaches, she builds a model of her life to come. the authoa little girl lives in her dreams, in her icy mansion, her wintry village; as her future approaches, she builds a model of her life to come. the author wrote his horror short stories, his tales of unease and things creeping on the outskirts, his ambiguous tales of dread-filled adults and the closed circles they inhabit; he wrote a novella, about a child, about dreams of the future and an uncertain life, unpublished in his lifetime. the girl meets an odd friend who accompanies her on curious adventures; at last, to the big city she comes: her model of her future life has become her life, or at least a dream of it; she steps into this dream, this model. the author used his quietly menacing style in this tale of Elena and this vision of a past Russia, but that style has shifted a bit, softened and simplified, a fable's style: the story is pleasantly unreal, vague, faintly magical. the girl meets an odd friend who she once knew in another life and is warned of an uncertain menace, a corruption of sorts; and so she flees both danger and her dreams. the author armed his novella with cutting points but enclosed them in a gauzy, enveloping circle, sharp things made deceptively softer but still capable of surprising stings; he wrote of hazy adventure and coming of age, obliquely, friendly threats and threatening friends. a young woman returns to her village, her old home, where icy magic and crystalline dreams have thawed into watery, muddy reality.
but the model has remained - still beautiful, but simply a model; she turns from it and sees a new life approaching, a coach, and enters. her real adventure has begun....more
review is for the 3 Robert Aickman stories in that collection. apparently Elizabeth Jane Howard had some slippery business with Aickman. I wish I had the actual book so I could have read her stories as well. alas!
fortunately his stories are in this excellent Tartarus Press omnibus, which also includes 3 interesting nonfiction pieces by Ramsey Campbell, David Tibet, and Aickman himself.
3 unusual domiciles of uncertain danger: a manor sitting solitary in rainy northern England, its only companions the trains rumbling frequently by its side; a crumbling ruin in Slovenia, home to two eccentric Englishwomen and servants who must remain silent; a mansion on a sunny island, somewhere south of England, somewhere south of everyday, humdrum reality.
as is his wont, Aickman toys with his readers: what at first may seem sinister or magical is soon understood to be prosaic and normal... odd but understandable. but then, just as quickly, the unease returns... a building or a person or a situation inexplicably gains layers of strangeness and menace, a sense of offness builds, sliding characters and readers into an ambiguously threatening unknown, out of the everyday and into grayer, more uncertain territories.
The blackness of the building was no effect of the light, but the consequence of inlaid soot.
"It's right on top of the railway," cried Mimi. Struggling through the murk, they had not noticed that.
There was a huge front door, grim with grime.
"What a hope!" said Mimi, as she hauled on the bell handle.
"It's a curious bell," said Margaret, examining the mechanism, and valiant to the soaking shivering end. "It's like the handles you see in signal boxes."
3 interlopers not used to straying from the comforting numbness of home, finding themselves far astray: a sheltered young woman on her first cross-country hike; an aimless son of gentry traveling abroad in search of a recluse; a gray company man, suffering from emotional exhaustion, taking a very extended holiday.
3 sets of threats for our ill-fated trespassers: a garrulous aristocrat and a servant of questionable gender; a brilliant sculptress and her sickly companion; an enchanting woman and the lone, hulking man who sits silently on her grounds. 3 strange situations made even stranger by the mundanity of that strangeness.
...he had never seen anything like the shadowy stronghold room lighted by the two bundles of flame high above Miss Franklin's unremarkable head, commonplace features, and customary dress.
Aickman turns a ghost story into something less haunting yet more horrible, with an ending full of bleak irony. he shows how humanly fallible a pair of eccentric women with only each other can be - until their foibles become monstrous and their need for control - inhuman. he takes the myths of Circe and of how human time differs from faerie time, how time slips and slides away away from all of us, and spins a bewilderingly sad tale of time lost and little gained, a life in tragic miniature.
3 different endings but only one lesson to be learned: the world and its puzzling mysteries will crush you, if given a chance. 'tis foolish to ask questions that have answers you have not been bred to understand; 'tis best to stay safe, in your tidy, tiny, meaningless holes.
"You must have noticed it is always too late when questions are answered and hopes fulfilled and sacrifices made and murder done. Because it is always later than you think."
such curiously precise sentences, so exact, so perfectly constructed. they tell you everything and nothing. it's the meaning between those words, the such curiously precise sentences, so exact, so perfectly constructed. they tell you everything and nothing. it's the meaning between those words, the implications of what is not being said that disturbs. those slippery places, those half-conscious spaces. admire Aickman for his perfect prose and his marvelous subtlety and his dry, dry wit. but love him for what he doesn't tell you, for taking you to a place where your mind must operate on a different level, someplace new and vague and troubling. he paints a picture of the night sky: the clouds and the treetops and the moon, all the stars in all of their strange remoteness. it is up to you to turn them into something, to make of them constellations - and other shapes.
I was surprised and a bit saddened to see two excellent reviews of this book insist that it is not horror. Dark Entries is horror at its most profound. horror doesn't simply scare; it inspires dread and a certain kind of chilliness, a creeping sort of understanding that the mind often resists. he provides a story that will read like a dream and he provides a meaning that he will only hint at; it is up to the reader to connect the two, to turn the oblique and the opaque into something that has its own logic. nightmare logic. Aickman is one of the absolute masters of the horror genre.
Dark Entries is Aickman's first solo collection. perhaps this early in his career he was more invested in creating horrors that were at least somewhat tangible and familiar. somewhat.
Ringing the Changes has a town that embraces the undead, and a couple that becomes trapped there. it has a suspenseful and eventually hair-raising narrative. but it is not about the undead; it is about the distance between two lovers, the distance that becomes apparent when contrasting the new and the old. a younger woman sees things her way, and rushes forward; she may quail in fear but she will dance with the dead. an older man sees his age, his ineffectuality; he will try to cross a gap and he will fail, impotent.
The Waiting Room has a traveler stranded in a train station, home to ghosts who were buried beneath. it is a ghost story and it is not a ghost story. it is about loneliness, a man as an island, a man alone and unconsciously yearning for a community, for support in his lonely world. he sleeps, and lives a brief dream of a happiness he has never had. he barely recognizes his own desperate need.
Bind Your Hair has a woman engaged to a man, and visiting his perfectly nice relatives in the country. a loving home that feels increasingly like a comfy trap, a soft and pillowy place where she may lose herself. it has a country village where people gather in the evenings, their clean strong limbs bared to the moon... for what purpose? it has two children, a peremptory guide and a savage biter. our heroine can barely resist them. bind your hair; bind away all that is you and become one of us.
Choose Your Weapons has a young man fall madly and inexplicably in love with an inexplicable, possibly mad young woman. it has hypnotism and a doctor who may know all. it has a crumbling house and a woman with two faces and a servant who grows younger. it has empty spaces at the heart of it, the gap between love and the reality of living, the excruciating smallness of minds that are obsessed by small things - things like money, class, a name, an appearance, poverty, wealth. can love ever be stronger than such small things when one part of the pair values the latter over the former? Choose Your Weapons has one of the most nightmarish narratives I've seen in an Aickman story, as well as one of the most startlingly, beautifully abrupt endings.
The School Friend has a writer returning to her hometown and finding her friend much changed, living in a perhaps haunted house that is notable for its drabness, its prosaic and dusty blandness. a school friend, once uniquely intelligent and idiosyncratic, turning drab, prosaic, dusty, and bland. the heroine slowly explores the house and the discomfort slowly increases. the horror seeps in from the frame until the whole picture is submerged. what's it all about? the meaning is hidden between the sentences, implicit never explicit, a teasing game for the author, a puzzle for the reader to work out. here are the clues: two independent women; sexuality and gendered roles; childbirth and parenthood; a descent into the horrible mundane and an ascent - maybe - into the terrible unknown. my favorite story in the collection....more
Robert Aickman, master of unease and creeping dread and eerie ambiguity, is primarily a literary writer. his ancestors include Edgar Allan Poe and AmbRobert Aickman, master of unease and creeping dread and eerie ambiguity, is primarily a literary writer. his ancestors include Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce and Algernon Blackwood; his descendants include Thomas Ligotti; his most obvious contemporary would be Joyce Carol Oates. much like Oates, his horrors are rarely visceral or even material ones - indeed, Poe is far more clear in his depiction of "horror" than Aickman is in most of their stories. both Aickman and Oates specialize in the imagining of precisely detailed, deeply characterized stories where the mundane is squarely in the foreground and various horrors scratch and whisper and moan from the edges, the outskirts, from the outside in and from the inside out. what are those horrors? intangible ones: the unknown; capture; disease; the long distance that can occur between lovers; the shorter distance between ourselves and our mistakes or even our deaths. Aickman's horrors do not spring fully-formed upon his protagonists; instead they slowly bleed into situations. what was once normal becomes something different, something disturbing, something abnormal. Aickman's horrors are usually unexplained and unexplainable. how does one go about explaining life and death? the author doesn't even try. which is why his tales are so intimately discomfiting - and so profound.
take one of the shorter stories in this impressive collection. Just a Song at Twilight is about an awkward married couple and their abrupt move to an island where they once enjoyed a vacation. Lydia and Timo barely know each other and they understand each other even less. why have they even moved here, to what end? they are not really sure. the island is not a welcoming one but it is not a particularly forbidding one either. the island is, simply enough, not their world. but the story is not about the island or their unsettling new home in this foreign country. it is about Lydia and Timo and what they don't understand about each other and about how they don't like what they come to understand. the story delineates what is their world and what is a foreign world and how they unsuccessfully attempt to navigate between the two. the horror of the story is slow to appear: an empty house... a fence that has mysteriously appeared... a stranger trying to leave the island... a song in the distance that poor Lydia can't hear but which Timo and the nervous stranger seem quite attuned to. take the opening sentence:
Up the mud road, neither old nor new, but timeless and sad as the people who built it, advanced the much battered station-wagon, far, alas, from any station.
take the closing sentence:
Then the night was on her like the curtain at the end of a play.
that's my favorite story in the collection but I don't think it is actually the strongest. that would be the nearly indescribable (a fitting description for many Aickman stories) novella The Stains. a man loses his wife to an unnamed disease. he joins his brother - a reverend and, more importantly, an expert on lichens - to get away from his grief. he meets a mysterious young lady while hiking. they fall in love. and all around them, lichens begin to grow, to surround.
why? to what end? there's no answer to that question. the story seems to have the structure of a classic horror tale: sad man with a sad history meets mysterious person with mysterious history and that mysterious history comes to get him in the end. but it is so much more than that. the nature of grief, the idea of an endless love, the unknown creeping upon the known and transforming it - or destroying it.
Aickman writes horror as symbol and metaphor, and delivers that horror in prose that is haunting yet often sharp - even sharply comic, lacerating at times - and with such sure and steady control over each story's markedly different tones and voices and visions. Aickman is a master.
____________________
musical accompaniment
His Name Is Alive: Home Is in Your Head Chet Baker: Sings Again Goldfrapp: Felt Mountain...more
as far as my love for genre fiction goes, college did a number on me and for many years i scorned my old high school loves of fantasy, science fictionas far as my love for genre fiction goes, college did a number on me and for many years i scorned my old high school loves of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. silly me; i'm glad i came back to my senses. during college, only a couple authors escaped my new-found scorn - one of them being the amazing Robert Aickman. pre-college, i enjoyed his sinister tales of uncertain, indescribable menace. in college, i found to my surprise that Aickman was a literary horror writer, and both my snobby new self and my buried-deep genre-lover rejoiced. i could appreciate him with a complete absence of guilt; if my postmodern buddies happened to notice his books on my shelf, i could defend him with ease. his stories were multi-leveled: they existed as menacing tales of horror - but they were also ambiguous, psychologically adept metaphors and analogies for life in all of its strange, unsettling complexity. nowadays, snob years long behind me, i enjoy him for both his literariness and his ability to weave a scary tale filled with dread.
but it is that literariness that really sets him apart. if you are a reader who wants your horrors to be straight-up and visceral, look elsewhere. Aickman crafted stories that are elegantly written, slow-moving, rich in nuance and detail, short on blood and shocks. he crafts - simultaneously - old-fashioned, shivery ghost stories and subtle, cerebral tales that muse on our fears and uncertainties. he is the obvious antecedent of Thomas Ligotti.
The Swords could be about a sadly inhuman and monstrous marionette who plies her abilities in tawdry sideshows and in the sex trade. it could also be about the fear of sex, the literal commodification of flesh, the dehumanization of women.
The Real Road to Church could be about a lonely woman who purchases a home that lives on the path of the dead. it could also be about a life lived without living - and a second chance, a chance to reinvent that life, and live.
Niemandswasser could be about a haunted lake. it could also be about the decadence and emptiness of aristocratic life, a shallowness so complete that it almost assumes its own kind of sad, meaningful depth.
The Hospice could be about a comforting retreat - comforting as the womb, comforting as the grave - in which our predictability-loving hero finds himself terrifyingly ensconced. it could also be about the logical end result of such predictability, a hell that pretends to be heaven.
The Same Dog could be about a vicious animal, perhaps even a kind of were-beast, one that takes captive our protoganist's first love. it could also be a literalization of how paths part, about how life moves us apart, how time changes everything, always.
Meeting Mr. Millar could be about a residence haunted by a living ghost and by a company of beings whose terrible motives remain tantalizingly beyond reach. it could also be about, well, growing up - learning that life is full of terrible things that we will never truly understand.
The Clock Watcher could be about a strange bride, a loving cipher whose existence seems to rely on her enslavement to the many ticking little cuckoo clocks that are brought into her home. or it could be a mordantly comic parody of the supposedly uber-efficient German character. it could also be about the deep gaps that exist between us all, in marriage, in our own understanding of the people around us.
so if you are new to Aickman, don't come to him expecting easy answers. expect to have to think about the purpose and meaning of why you are being supplied certain details, why stories are being framed in a certain way. Aickman does follow the traditional format of horror short fiction. a few pages are devoted to developing the story's protagonist, perhaps more pages than is typical. then the disturbing ambiguity begins, the horror unfolds... and then the tale ends. Aickman endings usually have little resolution and are almost always without an explicit explanation of what the reader has just experienced. that lack of explication is a hallmark of Aickman's style. but just as important are all of the details, important or seemingly incidental, the offbeat bits of dialogue, the disconcerting moments when the reader learns something that seems to come out of nowhere but yet somehow fits into the theme of the story being told.
i'll use "The Swords" as an example. the narrator, an impressionable traveling salesman, starts his narrative with an off-putting but perhaps often true generalization on the nature of sex, the first time, and all subsequent times. but then there is much odd detailing of the mysterious flophouses that the narrator must stay at, places he's led to by an ambiguous uncle, places teeming with squalid sexuality. these flophouses actually have nothing to do with the horror itself. later, there is a creepy conversation with a shop owner, who practically drools at the prospect of the young man before him having sex - he wants details, he wants it described to him. again, this conversation has nothing to do with the thrust of the narrative. and yet both the flophouses and the conversation have everything to do with what i think the story is about; they are there to further illustrate the story's implicit meaning. although they have little narrative purpose, they are still all of a piece. mysterious events are continuously detailed that have little internal logic but which make perfect thematic sense.
a last word on the story Pages from a Young Girl's Journal. this is in many ways an atypical Aickman tale - a journal account of a young lady's travels abroad, encountering a mysterious stranger, embracing his vampiric nature, becoming something new and terrible. the story's horrors are clearly delineated; the reader is made to understand exactly what is happening. it definitely shows that if Aickman had been of a mind to write straightforward horror, he could accomplish that in spades. it also illustrates a key strength: Aickman's skill at establishing a character. throughout all of his stories, i was continually impressed by how each protagonist was uniquely differentiated and by the depth of their characterization. they lived and breathed. but back to "Pages". although this was my favorite story of Cold Hand in Mine, i'm glad that this was not the direction that Aickman chose to go in most of his tales. i like the uncertain resolution, the creeping ambiguity. it is a pleasure not having things explained, to have to figure things out on my own. i love being able to approach his stories on whichever level i choose.
____________________
musical accompaniment
Sigur Ros: () DJ Spooky: Songs of a Dead Dreamer Andrea Parker: Kiss My Arp...more
Loading...
