"The Swords" (1969): A retrospective 'Coming of Age' narrative takes Aickman into some unfamiliar English regions -- the lower-class reaches of Wolverhampton. His working-class narrator is a 'typical' Aickman narrator, however -- sympathetic and baffled by the weird situation he finds himself in. It's also a very representative Aickman tale insofar as the weirdness is fully described and fully unexplained as to its meaning and mechanisms.
"The Real Road to the Church" (1975): Rarefied and attenuated tale features one of Aickman's many, finely drawn, and sympathetic female protagonists. Its finest moments are dream-like without being obscurely drawn. As much an exploration of the numinous as the horrifying.
"Niemandswasser [No Man's Water]" (1975): Something of a misfire, though still possessed of a fascinating scene or two of horror. Aickman goes way out of his comfort zone in focusing upon the travails of the prince of a small European country as he loses love and becomes suicidal. It's almost a curiosity, as if Aickman had something like The Prisoner of Zenda stuck in his head and had to get it out in as strange a way as possible.
"Pages from a Young Girl's Journal" (1973): Winner of a 1975 World Fantasy Award. This may be Aickman's least Aickman-like story, as it explores a very conventional horror (vampires), albeit through the eyes of an English girl bored out of her mind during her parents' tour of Italy. Our narrator is sympathetic and, suitably, young, callow, and reckless. One of the finest vampire stories ever written in English, often oblique but always involving.
"The Hospice" (1975): Cited by many as being one of Aickman's most 'English' of strange stories. This tale of a businessman who finds himself stuck for the night at an unusual hospital/hospice is often reprinted. As with many of Aickman's stories, the horrors leave one disquieted even though one is hard-pressed to explain what's so horrible about them.
"The Same Dog" (1974): Slightly more conventional-than-normal Aickman story gets stranger as it goes along, and ends on a capital 'M' Mystery.
"Meeting Mr. Millar" (1972): A young writer is plagued by the arrival of a mysterious accounting firm on the floor below him in his apartment building. The story grows its disquiet from the accumulation of just-slightly-off moments experienced by our young narrator. The intersection of a mysterious yet mundane business and Strangeness now reads like a precursor to much of Thomas Ligotti's work.
"The Clock Watcher" (1973): A seriously WTF tale of sinister clocks and suburban, post-WWII suburban life. What's really going on? I have no idea.
Overall: If nothing else, Robert Aickman was the greatest writer of Robert Aickman stories who ever lived, 'strange stories' as he wanted them dubbed. For me, he marks the borderline between horror and all the weirdnesses that don't horrify -- absurdism, New Weird, what-have-you. Writers will occasionally make one-story forays into Aickman Country (Ramsey Campbell's "The Companion" is a good example; so, too, stretches of Peter Straub's Mrs. God). But only Aickman lived in Aickman Country. Highly recommended.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.