Cold Hand In Mine: Strange Stories (1977) by Robert Aickman, containing the following stories:
"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.
Some Will Not Sleep: Selected Horrors (2016) by Adam L.G. Nevill: containing the following stories:
- Where Angels Come In (2005): The first story of Nevill's I remember reading is a doozy of a nod to classic ghost stories, but with a very contemporary, ground-level feel to it. Statues that appear midway through the story all represent M.R. James stories, though the overall effect is closer to Robert Aickman.
- The Original Occupant (2005): A sort of dry run for Nevill's novel The Ritual, told in a very traditional, M.R. Jamesian way.
- Mother's Milk (2003): Weird and horrifying and strange, a nightmarish piece that's the earliest written story in this book, from Nevill's days in a creative writing program.
- Yellow Teeth (2008): A sort of dry run for Nevill's novel Under a Watchful Eye, a tale of roommate-based horror that could be entitled "The Thing That Wouldn't Leave."
- Pig Thing (2012): For me, the weakest story in this volume primarily because it seems more like the preamble to a horror story than a horror story, and as such simply ends in nihilism.
- What Hath God Wrought? (2011): Nevill nods to his love of Western novels and movies in this tale of an evil offshoot of Mormonism (note that classic Western novelist often used Mormons as villains in his Westerns).
- Doll Hands (2013): Drawing on his experience as a night porter at an exclusive condominium, Nevill depicts a bleak and horrible future world of cannibalism and dire mutation.
- To Forget and Be Forgotten (2009): Again drawing on his experience as a night porter at an exclusive condominium, Nevill depicts a bleak and horrible present-day world of money and decay. Nevill would revisit his night portering days in his novel Apartment 16.
- The Ancestors (2009): A nod to Japanese horror and creepy toys.
- The Age of Entitlement (2012): In a weird way, a dystopic future take on Withnail and I.
- Florrie (2011): An affecting, brief take on houses and hauntings and the malign influence of the past.
Overall: There are some uneven spots in this collection, as one would expect from an attempt to cover the first 15 years of Nevill's writing career (and the first ten years of being published as a professional writer). Nonetheless, this is an excellent introduction to Nevill's work, and a very strong horror collection on any merits and not just as a "first collection." Nevill's strengths at characterization and disturbing descriptions of settings are fully evident, as are his concerns with life among the poor and over-worked. Highly recommended.
Hasty for the Dark: Selected Horrors (2017) by Adam L.G. Nevill: containing the following stories:
- On All London Underground Lines (2010): A bad day getting to work on the London Underground gets progressively worse.
- The Angels of London (2013): Some cheap apartments come at a great cost. Manages to be both cosmically and normatively creepy. The characteristics of the apartment super will be reprised in No One Gets Out Alive, though not the actual character. He's a stunning bit of punk-Dickensian grotesquery.
- Always in Our Hearts (2013): Some cab drivers are jerks. Almost an EC Comics Revenge story.
- Eumenides (The Benevolent Ladies) (2017): Sometimes a zoo is not the zoo you expect. A fine Robert Aickman homage.
- The Days of Our Lives (2016): A really bad relationship.
- Hippocampus (2015): Something is wrong with the container ship.
- Call the Name (2015): A really solid H.P. Lovecraft homage using the lens of some contemporary thinking on evolution.
- White Light, White Heat (2016): A dystopic look at the politics and economic of publishing.
- Little Black Lamb (2017): Murder sites and a dandy nod to Ramsey Campbell.
Overall: Highly recommended collection of horror stories from Adam Nevill running the gamut from the gross-out to the cosmic and visionary, sometimes in the same story. His grip on setting and the vagaries of disturbed though often sympathetic personalities is sure throughout, and none of the horrors are stereotypical; rather the opposite. This is Nevill's second collection from his own imprint, bringing the stories he wants to have collected up to the present-day (as of 2017, anyway).
Dark Entries (1964/ This edition 2014) by Robert Aickman, containing the following stories: "The School Friend" (1964); "Ringing the Changes" (1955); "Choice of Weapons" (1964); "The Waiting Room" (1956); "The View" (1951); and "Bind Your Hair" (1964); with an Introduction by Richard T. Kelly and an Afterword by Ramsey Campbell: This is Faber and Faber's reissue of weird-fiction master Robert Aickman's first solo collection of short stories, novelettes, and novels. See also my parallel review of Aickman's The Unsettled Dust.
Aickman amazes insofar as it's very difficult to distinguish between stories written in 1950 and stories written in 1979: his style and subject matter emerge seemingly fully grown and developed. Obviously, they didn't really -- Aickman started publishing in his 30's, after years of work on his art.
For all the strange and disturbing mystery of Aickman's stories and the cool, detailed nature of his prose, Aickman nonetheless often took tired horror tropes and rendered them fresh and new by re-investing them with that unexplained mystery rendered so cleanly and clearly that one feels as if one has simply missed an explanation somewhere in the story: Aickman doesn't create mystery with obfuscations of prose style. You're watching a magic trick performed without smoke and without mirrors.
Take "Ringing the Changes." It's a zombie story. But what a zombie story! Or "The School Friend": is it a Jekyll and Hyde story? Sort of. "The Waiting Room" seems like a traditional ghost story until one gets to the ghosts, whose behaviour is both inert and cosmically threatening. "Bind your Hair" makes witchcraft scary and mysterious.
These are great, mid-career stories from one of weird and horror fiction's prickly, mysterious greats. Highly recommended.
The Unsettled Dust (1990/ This edition 2014) by Robert Aickman, containing the following stories: "Bind Your Hair" (1964); "No Stronger Than a Flower" (1966); "Ravissante" (1968); "The Cicerones" (1967); "The Houses of the Russians" (1968); "The Next Glade" (1980); "The Stains" (1980) [Winner, 1981 British Fantasy Award] ; and "The Unsettled Dust" (1968); with an Introduction by Richard T. Kelly and an Afterword by Graham and Heather Smith:
The Unsettled Dust is a bit of a curiosity in Faber and Faber's recent four-volume reissue of Robert Aickman collections as The Unsettled Dust is a posthumous reprint collection that duplicates one story from both F&F's Dark Entries AND The Wine-Dark Sea reissues ("Bind Your Hair") and two more from just The Wine-Dark Sea ("The Stains" and "The Next Glade"). Given that the F&F volumes are now the only Robert Aickman short-story collections available in mass-market editions, little or no duplication among collections would be ideal.
Nonetheless, any in-print, readily available Aickman is good. He's the master of a fairly rarefied type of ghost story, one for which he preferred the term "strange story." His stories will enthrall a (relatively) small readership. Most of Aickman's stories are too subtle for most readers, leaving them unmoved and confused as to Aickman's importance. And that's fine. He's one of the Boss Levels of horror/weird fiction.
Those who like him, like him a lot -- but not liking him doesn't make one a 'bad' reader. Indeed, Aickman's hypercritical views caused him to dislike or dismiss many stories and writers considered by many (including myself) to be classics and masters -- almost the entire oeuvre of M.R. James, much of Henry James, all of H.P. Lovecraft, to name three writers whom Aickman found seriously wanting. So if you find Robert Aickman seriously wanting, you're just following in the footsteps of... Robert Aickman.
The stories here are mostly excellent. The one misfire is "No Stronger Than a Flower," a strange story about female vanity that seems both dated and obnoxiously sexist. But that's more than offset by the strange and disturbing wonders of such stories as "The Cicerones." That story is almost a short model of the Aickman approach: the events of the story are rendered clearly and precisely, but no emphatic explanations are offered as to why things are happening. It's immensely disturbing. So, too, "The Stains," in which horror, romantic rapture, and erotic fixation combine in a story about a recently widowed man who falls in love with... well, that's a good question.
In all, this is probably the best Faber and Faber volume to introduce yourself or others to Aickman, covering as it does more than a decade of Aickman's best stories. And when you've read them, please explain to me what the Hell is actually going on in "The Stains." Or "The Cicerones." Highly recommended.
