Robert Aickman (1914–1981)

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-unsettled-dust-by-robert-aickman/

This is a collection of eight spooky stories, with a foreword and afterword expanding on Aickman’s life and career. He has a particular gift for atmosphere, of making places that were slightly odd in the first place become more sinister and threatening. Two of the eight stories, to my surprise, are actually set in Belgium, one in the catehdral in Gent and the other in Brussels in the Wiertz Museum and surroundings (now the EU Quarter). I must go to the Wiertz Museum some time, it’s less than ten minutes’ walk from my office.

Peter McClean, to whom I am very grateful, sent me this book ages ago, with a strong recommendation which I can now endorse. I admit I had not heard of Aickman previously, but his modest output is clearly of very high quality.… (more)

*Partial spoilers ahead*

I like Robert Aickman, but I'm not a huge fan. (I prefer him to Walter de la Mare, whose mantle he obviously inherited.) He's the kind of writer whose stories you read one or two at a time, savoring them, and Cold Hand in Mine contains eight mostly fine examples of his style. You won't feel the urge to consume them back to back--I didn't, anyway--but if you've just finished one long novel and are about to tackle another, Aickman's stories make for interesting palate-cleansers.

Several of the tales in this 1975 collection have been widely anthologized: "The Swords," "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal" and overwhelming fan favorite "The Hospice." The two stories I've found myself rereading most frequently are "Niemandswasser" and "The Same Dog," which address similar themes (families with a military background; mothers who died young; awkward, somewhat unconventional male-female relationships) but produce distinctly different effects. The former is an overtly dark meditation on death and the inescapable collapse of all human endeavor, disguised as a monster-in-the-lake yarn; the latter is a surreal account of what happens to two children who witness a strange, disquieting phenomenon after wandering away from their school one afternoon. Aickman hints at explanations (the moldering grimoire that Elmo finds in the family library in "Niemandswasser"; the apparently regenerative effect that Mary has on the haunted house in "The Same Dog") without actually offering them, and this is what readers will find either fascinating or offputting. Like de la Mare in his classic tale "All Hallows," Aickman aimed to create a sense of unease: not to provide resolutions.… (more)

There are very few books, even ones that I have enjoyed, that I know while reading them that I will do so again. This 1975 collection of short stories by Robert Aickman is one. I am a recent addition to Aickman’s audience, ever since I read ‘The Stains’, a longer instance of what he called ‘strange stories’. ‘Strange’ hardly does justice to the stories in this collection, which almost casually embody the sentiment of the volume’s epigraph, from Sacheverell Sitwell, ‘In the end it is the mystery that lasts and not the explanation.’

In the year that he died, Aickman won a World Fantasy Award for ‘Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal’, one of the stories in this collection; and perversely enough, this was one of my least favourite. It is, in its gothic way, a straightforward story—a kind of pastiche—so there is less about this that is recognisably Aickman than the other stories. Similarly, though the heart of ‘Niemandswasser’ is as dark and cold as you might hope, the setting does not cause the flesh to creep. It has a very fairy-tale ring to it, with a Prince and a kingdom, and rather heightened language. It is the language that particularly undermines these two tales. The real and leaden dread of the best stories here is the way that the mundane and quotidian plunge the character into inexplicable and possibly dangerous situations.

An editor of pornographic literature may have experienced a future event. A salesman seeks refuge, and finds nothing but rococo bizarrerie. A woman buys a house on a path where, in some world, new pall-bearers take up the coffin. Aickman’s characters are very distinctive, and their slightly neurotic personalities add to the strong sense of inexorability that is reminiscent of some of Patricia Highsmith’s novels. Everything appears ordinary at the start, and some small kink in a plain suburban path brings it to a tipping-point, when it turns into the path through the forest, without the reader being able to pinpoint how exactly it happened.

‘Meeting Mr. Millar’ has a faint sense that the mystery has been resolved, but it has been resolved off the page. It is conceivable that the cuckolded husband of the story has a grasp on what is happening (he is one of the few sturdy, practical, likeable characters in the collection) but it is evidently none of the reader’s concern. ‘The Swords’ is possibly the eeriest, but ‘The Hospice’ is a strong contender for the strangest story in this collection. There is an immediate sense of nightmare when the food is described, and the reader visualises a steaming slab of turkey, accompanied by a sauceboat full of ‘specially compounded fluid, dark red and turgid.’ There is clearly no escape when the protagonist notices that one guest is fettered by the ankle. Aickman’s horror is built up with subtlety. The monstrous meat is ‘seeping slightly with a colourless, oily fluid’ which is somehow far worse than mere liquid. In 'The Real Road to the Church', the woman on the route to the church hears a ‘faint, fluttering knock, not necessarily on the outer door.’

Two of my favourite podcasts have aired episodes on Cold Hand in Mine—Weird Studies focusing on ‘The Hospice’, Backlisted on the collection as a whole. In the latter, Andy Miller (I think) had embarked on an effort to synopsise a ‘typical’ Aickman story, and the editor Simon Spanton had suggested “Something happens, which may or may not.” Miller also said “He likes to take you somewhere, and leave you there, without saying there’s the path back.” There is no path back with Aickman. You have been through the story, and nothing ever returns to normal.… (more)