Robert Aickman, thoughts?

[Extollager]

Looks like there some affordable paper back reprints coming out shortly which is good news...maybe encourage more people to try his work:

Robert Aickman to be honoured with resurrection of horror classics | Books | theguardian.com

The article mentions "The Hospice," which, as I recall, I found terribly funny.

 

[Fried Egg]

The article mentions "The Hospice," which, as I recall, I found terribly funny.

Yes, it was quite funny. A streak of black humour runs through a number of his stories.

Your remark reminds me of an American reviewer who said of his stories that his characters often find themselves in situations that they are unable to extricate themselves out of only because of their sheer British politeness. I think that applies quite well in the case of "The Hospice".

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

A year ago I would have unqualifiedly deemed myself an Aickman fan. His stories stand out of any multi-author collection and work in your mind a long time after reading them. His style is graceful and perfectly poised. It is like watching a slow, perfectly choreographed dance.

When i read the collection The Unsettled Dust, certain reservations presented themselves. I felt myself tiring of the sameness of his vaguely desolate, vaguely shabby-genteel characters. I felt that if you strip away the marvellous style, pacing and insinuation, the title tale was basically a traditional ghost story. Not truly weird at all if you were to sit down and plot it out. Yet the emotional content lifts it - if only to give you a glimpse of the quiet bereftness of the vaguely desolate and vaguely shabby-genteel. The Cicerones on the other hand, although again playing from the MR James handbook of antique vectors of weirdness, is sublime in its sudden, stark cessation. I had to check if there was a missing page!

The aura of gloom and 'quiet desperation' that lingers over so many of his characters felt, to me, monotonous over the length of a collection, if not self indulgent. The fact that some of the stories could easily be mapped and shown to be variations on traditional English ghost stories disappointed me because when he does not rely on such underlying elements he wrote things like 'Stains' and 'The Swords', which will never completely fall into place in a tidy manner, and will haunt the right kind of reader the rest of their lives, possibly.

If you go beyond the basic level of being a reader who wants clarity - or not - and accept that Aickman tells us as much as he needs to, to achieve the goals he has in mind, the thread running through Aickman is of forces, powers, from the outside the moment and the familiar, and how they find some suitable but unwitting receptacle. it is presented in a far more subtle manner than this suggests - I like the fact that it is somehow something in the main characters that is attuned to the things that unsettle them so much. I think we are often drawn to the very things that challenge and oppose us, and that seems to me a recurring element in his stories, although not all.

So yes, I have a few reservations about Aickman. A part of it is another common psychological tic - I feel emotionally in sympathy with his characters and their passive desolation and I shy away from immersing myself and reinforcing that strain in myself.

And in the balance, Aickman is still one of my leading lights in the genre. I have been so fascinated by Stains and The Cicerones in particular that many of their stratagems and concerns have found their way into my own attempts at fiction. So while I cannot say I am an uncritical fan of his work, I think I find it immensely rich and that engaging with it is fascinating and stimulating.

 

[Fried Egg]

Thanks for your thoughts there, Jayaprakash. I also read your review of this collection you wrote on GoodReads. You make some interesting points.

I read this collection a couple of years ago now but I have since revisited some of the stories since and I share your appreciation of "The Stains" and I agree that the title story "Unsettled Dust" is one of his weaker efforts although I think "The Next Glad" and "Bind Your Hair" are among his very best and stood out in my memory, more so than "The Cicerones" even.

But I can appreciate your point that his work is often better when his horror/weirdness doesn't stem from the usual, well used sources.

 

[Fried Egg]

For anyone interested in sampling Aickman, Faber have now brought out some new highly affordable paperback editions of "Cold Hand in Mine", "The Wine-Dark Sea", "Unsettled Dust" and "Dark Entries" with new, striking covers and apparently no longer print-on-demand so hopefully they've rectified the typographic problems that so beset their previous editions.

In addition, they've also brought reprinted his novels: "The Late Breakfasters" and "The Model". The former being of particular interest as this hasn't yet been reprinted by Tartarus.

 

[Fried Egg]

I don't know if anyone's seen this documentary on Aickman?

Interesting stuff.

 

[Sargeant_Fox]

R. B. Russell has written Robert Aickman: An Attempted Biography (Tartarus Press, 2023)

 

[Extollager]

Yep, I believe my local library bought a copy at my request. ; )