A middle-aged company man on a business trip in 1970s England gets lost miles from the nearest town and, running out of gas near nightfall, takes refuge at a hostel, where things go from weird to worse.
In a large overheated dining room, the guests eat silently, consuming daunting quantities of food; a matronly server harasses the stranded traveler with nanny-like admonitions to finish his meal, then smashes the plate in a fit of pique when he refuses. The manager, who somehow knows his name, calmly explains that the establishment has no telephone—so as not to disturb the guests’ nerves. A beautiful lady guest moves from an unsettlingly intense after-dinner conversation to an equally unsettling amorous advance. A creepy male roommate comes and goes stealthily in the night, and may or may not alter his appearance between outings.
The next morning, someone is dead, and the traveler’s adventure ends (or does it?) in an anticlimax likely to leave one asking what in the world happened.
Robert Aickman (1914-1981) happened. A British writer virtually unknown outside a cult following, Aickman—author of several story collections as well as two novels, two autobiographies, and a book on conservation—is sometimes described as an author of supernatural or horror fiction. But the best way to describe his work is with his own preferred term: “strange stories.”
Last summer and fall, to mark the centennial of Aickman’s birth, which occurred the day before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Faber & Faber brought out a four-volume series that comprises about two-thirds of Aickman’s short story oeuvre. Dark Entries and Cold Hand in Mine are reprints of Aickman’s original books, published in 1964 and 1975, respectively; The Wine-Dark Sea and The Unsettled Dust are posthumous collections assembled from other volumes.
These handsome paperback editions may not spark a Robert Aickman revival, but anyone who picks them up is in for a memorable literary discovery—and a rewarding, though disconcerting, experience.
As a rule in supernatural fiction, mystifying and frightening things have (or eventually get) a logical, if paranormal, explanation, be it ghosts, sorcery, or demonic presence. Aickman’s work—such as “The Hospice,” the story about the traveler stuck at a sinister hostel—nearly always defies this convention. It’s as if a whodunit ended with the “who” still unanswered, and perhaps also the “how” and “why.”
There are exceptions. “Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal” is a fairly straightforward vampire tale set around 1820, lifted above the genre by its dry humor and skillfully paced descent from mundane into macabre. “Ringing the Changes,” Aickman’s most-anthologized story, draws on two horror-fiction staples—the town with a dark secret and zombies—to create a stunningly original piece. A couple on their honeymoon, the much older Gerald and his wife Phrynne, find themselves in the midst of a quaint local festival that starts with the incessant ringing of church bells. Here, the answer to the mystery is telegraphed in advance: A fellow lodger at the inn tells Gerald they are literally “ringing to wake the dead,” who rise once a year to join the living for a night of orgiastic dance. Gerald half-believes it, at best; but we know it’s true—and this knowledge heightens the growing dread, as husband and wife frantically reassure themselves there’s no cause to worry.
The frenzied throng finally invades the inn, and Phrynne is dragged away and swept up in the awful revelry. She is rescued, seemingly unharmed; but the very Aickmanesque morning-after ending hints at some ineffable transformation: “Gerald had become aware of something dividing them which neither of them would ever mention or ever forget.”
In other, more quintessential, Aickman stories, ambiguity is all. In “The School Friend,” the unspeakable coexists with the deliberately unspoken, starting with the unspecified “catastrophe” that brings the narrator, Mel, a successful novelist, back to her small hometown at the age of 41. Mel’s childhood friend, the brilliant and beautiful Sally, returns as well after her reclusive father’s death. Before long, Sally starts to change, looking haggard and unkempt, and acting oddly; and there may be someone or something else inhabiting her late father’s house. A series of perplexing events culminates in a hair-raising confrontation with Sally, horribly transfigured and “dressed in a very curious way, about which I do not think it fair to say more.” A fittingly cryptic coda follows.
“Ravissante” is another tour de force: a story-within-a-story in which a manuscript found in the papers of a deceased, obscure painter describes a life-changing incident from his younger days. On a trip to Belgium, the narrator’s visit with a prominent artist’s widow, Madame A., quickly turns unpleasant—the old woman is a repulsive gnome-like creature full of nasty gossip—and then veers into the grotesquely surreal. Soon, the spellbound guest is crouched on a bedroom floor, with Madame’s jeering encouragement, pawing at dresses that she says belong to her exquisitely beautiful adopted daughter. He is also seeing small animals that may be there and a painting that may be his. At last he escapes with nothing intact: not his art, not his self, not his sense of reality.
While these stories often have the quality of nightmares or fever dreams—indeed, some of the characters wonder if they are dreaming—Aickman means to hold a fantastical mirror to the real world, not to create a fantasy dreamland. The frame narrator of “Ravissante” observes that “the sheer oddity of life seems to me of more and more importance, because more and more the pretence is that life is charted, predictable, and controllable.” Aickman’s protagonists tend to learn the hard way that it is not.
The uncontrollable realm includes sex. Several stories—“The View,” “The Stains,” “Never Visit Venice”—focus on emotionally stunted middle-aged men whose lives are changed, and undone, by a passionate romance with a young, enigmatic (and not necessarily human) woman. These femmes fatales are figures of masculine fantasy. But Aickman can also create believable, sympathetic female characters, some of whom fare comparatively well. Margaret Sawyer in “Into the Woods,” a housewife profoundly affected by a sojourn at a Swedish sanatorium for insomniacs, is a rare protagonist whose encounter with the unknown may be the start of something better.
Aickman’s inventiveness as a storyteller is matched by his fine prose, with sparse and striking descriptions: The men reburying the dead after the festival in “Ringing the Changes” are “as thick as flies on a wound, and as black. . . . In the mild light of an autumn morning the sight of the black and silent toilers was horrible.” He evokes with equal deftness the commonplace and the uncanny, the chilling and the lyrical and the poignant. “I wanted that girl more than I had ever wanted anything,” muses the protagonist of “The Swords,” recalling his sexual initiation. “I wanted to love her and tousle her and all the other, better things we want before the time comes when we know that however much we want them, we’re not going to get them.” (Being in an Aickman story, the poor bloke ends up getting both less and much more than he bargained for.)
While the circle of Aickman aficionados may be small, there is no shortage of essays and online discussions analyzing his fiction and trying to solve his riddles: A leading theory about “The Hospice” is that the traveler is dead or dying and the hostel is either a gateway to the afterlife or a final hallucination. But such mental gymnastics miss the point. The best clue to Aickman’s strange tales is his epigraph to Cold Hand in Mine, a quotation from Sacheverell Sitwell: “In the end it is the mystery that lasts and not the explanation.”
These mysteries are here to last.
Cathy Young is a columnist for Real Clear Politics and a contributing editor to Reason.
