Robert Aickman - Night Voices

[albie]

>>A lot of Aickman's writing seems to me not just to not explain, but to suggest that there isn't an explanation - that Aickman himself couldn't "explain" what happens in the story.

Can you be specific? Which stories?

>>And I have to say I don't see the link from Aickman to Campbell -what I have read of Campbell's work has seemed to me to be very much at the opposite end of the spectrum to Aickman, i.e. "straight" horror with an obvious (though supernatural) explanation.

Then you must have stuck to the novels. Try reading THE COMPANION, a short story of his. He writes both kinds, but I find his best is the open ended stuff. He himself delights in the tales that he has written that remain a mystery to him. (if that makes sense) So, yeah, often these people do write stuff that that has no meaning ti even themselves. But they work for people. That's what matters.

[albie]

And liver is foul. As is kidney, country music; most music, actually.

Shell suits, fedoras, leather trousers....(ten years later)...tinned garden peas, soap operas....

[Dr Strange]

> Can you be specific? Which stories?


"The Hospice", "The Swords", "The Same Dog", "The Trains", ...etc.

[dem]

Mar 23, 2009 8:52:13 GMT Dr Strange said:

Sorry if you've covered this before - but what is the best Introduction to a story collection you've read? (I suppose for a lot of Aickman fans it will be his Intros to the Fontana books?)

I can think of a couple of instances where the Introduction has been the best thing in a book... but that's not the same thing.

We had one asking if people even read them - Intro's, forewords, contributors notes .... - but it kind of tailed off. Personally, I take in the intro and any incidental material before i even think of making a start on the stories/ novel, and just some i've found both entertaining and enlightening include:

Montague Summers' epic that kicks off The Supernatural Omnibus

Just about every Michel Parry intro, but most notably an Age In Horror in the first volume of Reign Of Terror

J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Book Of Ghost Stories & The Penguin Book Of Horror Stories

Robert Aickman AND the much-maligned R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Fontana Great Ghost Stories

Ramsey Campbell is always good value where his own collections are concerned. Dennis Wheatley is great fun (try his outrageous two-page prefaces to each volume of Sphere's Library Of The Occult!). E. F. Bleiler and Devendra Varma, scholarly, very readable, over various Dover Victorian titles ......

Thanks for taking the time to quote from Barry Humphries, Jonathan. He certainly makes a better fist of selling Aickman to the first-time reader than Peter Straub!

[Dr Strange]

I always read Intros - usually as soon as I've got the book in my hands, and even if I then have to set it aside for a while before reading any of the stories.

And I really appreciate the response, but I am curious now... what did Peter Straub make of Aickman's writing?

[dem]

Mar 23, 2009 15:16:55 GMT Dr Strange said:

I always read Intros - usually as soon as I've got the book in my hands, and even if I then have to set it aside for a while before reading any of the stories.

And I really appreciate the response, but I am curious now... what did Peter Straub make of Aickman's writing?

"It is a great mistake to read the life of the writing for that of the writer, but these stories leave little doubt that for Aickman's sensibility the contemporary world was a raucous, clanging din growing ever emptier of any real content. He frequently tells us that he abhors man in the mass and the pleasures of the vulgar crowd, what in the wonderfully titled Never Visit Venice he calls 'the world's new littleness'. Experience has been flattened out all around him, being rendered coarser, simpler, and more accessible, and this process clearly made Aickman, as 'sick at heart', as it does his protagonist, Henry Fern.

This response is not merely snobbish. There is too much sadness in it for that; and beneath the educated sadness, too much fear; and beneath the fear, too much respect for the great common human inheritance"

Straub contributes an appreciative, five page foreword to The Wine Dark Sea (Mandarin, 1990), singling out Into The Wood as Aickman's masterpiece, and my rather flip remark was shorthand for "i didn't always get what he was going on about", whereas Barry Humphries' comments came over loud and clear.

Straub says that familiarity with the work of certain composers and poets are crucial to an understanding or, at least, appreciation of Aickman's, and, of course, this is doubtless true, but to the reader who has little or no classical education, you can't believe how scary it is to find this advice in the foreword of a book you've just bought! "You're out of your depth, Sonny. This isn't for you!"

Personally, I got on far better with Aickman's work when new to horror and had no idea of the standing he was held in by the critics and/ or fellow horror authors. Knowing he was so "great" just put pressure on me, that, if i didn't enjoy or understand him, there was something wrong with me. The Unsettled Dust, the companion volume from Mandarin, even quotes Robert Bloch on the cover: "We are all potential victims of the powers Aickman so skillfully conjures and commands". Wonder where they dug that one up from?

[lobolover]

I too read Intros first and its a pain in the ass if the person writing it doesnt avoid spoilers and extracts from the text itself. Like with the Hippocampus edition of "The Metal Monster" .

[albie]

Mar 23, 2009 14:36:05 GMT Dr Strange said:

> Can you be specific? Which stories?


"The Hospice", "The Swords", "The Same Dog", "The Trains", ...etc.

THIS POST MAY CONTAIN SPOIERS. ALERT!!!!!!!

The Hospice, I thought, was a fine tale. The others are so so. But, The Hospice is one of my top fave stories. If you can't get any chills out of that one then you are doomed never to like Aickman. The story suggests a place that is not quite real. That's the story behind all his fiction. It's the same monster each time: unreality. That's something best left to the imagination. But Aickman still gives you stuff to enjoy that's more apparent. Like the horrible guy he shares a room with. You could see the hospice as being his world, set up to give him what he wants; food and women, and whatever he does to them. He could be a ghost, he could be worse. It's not that there is no meaning, but lots of meanings; overlapping to create a greater fear. That's how I see his stuff working. If Aickman had no solid idea, it doesn't matter. We don't know if he did or not anyway.

The swords is of the same ilk but lesser.

[weirdmonger]

JUST A SONG AT TWILIGHT by Robert Aickman

“Most of all, of course, the heat was incredible, just incredible. She could not have believed in such heat.”

And, indeed, as we eventually learn, this island is in Southern Europe, but I think that is all we do know about it. Except perhaps, in hindsight, a very strange thing - that the wild road Lydia and Timo drive along is very muddy! They reach the house they have bought to escape from their life in London, finding that some of the land they thought that they had bought is barbed-wired off, with a sign in the island’s language that neither of them understand. Lydia is English and Timo comes from a place that then ‘no longer existed’: Estonia. The backstory of their relationship creates a backdrop to their argument at how they had been swindled and whether they should stay or not.

“They had not even agreed about getting married. Lydia was quite sure of this, certain that Timo had undermined her with the unique destructiveness of the weak and desperate; though she had since read in a book that no one ever marries anyone without fully intending it, and wishing it. The book, of course, only undermined her further.”

Luckily the well does have some water. They had had a dreadful journey there, as well, with customs officers earlier looking for signs of ‘infection’ and other things in their car! And now here they are on this island of crucifixes (“very fierce and bleeding”), crucifixes on every ridge, one of them with a grey-haired woman hanging on it with her arms wrapped round it.
The clear blue sky starts to turn green! And they are visited by a fair-haired woman with no stockings who turns out to be a haunted English woman asking them for money to get home, and needing to pay for a car that had brought her (cf Nesta and the taxi-driver elsewhere in Aickman). There now start the sounds of some music or singing, perhaps sounds of a song that Timo and this woman seem to be able to hear, but not Lydia.

“They say few can hear it. […] They say it never ends.”

The woman leaves. Later followed by Timo. Leaving Lydia behind.

None the wiser, I am genuinely haunted and disturbed by this strange undermining Aickman masterpiece. They say few can read it. They say it never ends.

“It represents what I most hate in life: the trouble that always comes from doing anything you really want to do.”

[weirdmonger]

ROSAMUND’S BOWER is a rum do, is it not !?

[weirdmonger]

Sept 30, 2021 11:00:06 GMT weirdmonger said:

ROSAMUND’S BOWER is a rum do, is it not !?

MARK INGESTRE: THE CUSTOMER’S TALE is even rummer: dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/30717-2/

[andydecker]

Robert Aickman - Night Voices: Strange Stories (Gollancz, 1985, hc, 185 pages)

Cover: Nigel Hills
Cover found on the net. Thanks to the original scanner.

Contents:

Barry Humphries - Foreword
The Stains (1980)
Just a Song at Twilight (1965)
Laura (1977)
Rosamund's Bower
The Trains (1951)
Mark Ingestre: The Customer's Tale (1980)

I seldom repeat content listings in those updated posts (done because of lost or missing cover scans), but here circumstances are different.

There is a re-issued edition done by Tartarus Press in 2013, which has a revised line-up.

Cover found on the net. Thanks to the original scanner.

Contents:

Barry Humphries - Foreword (1985)
The Stains (1980)
Just a Song at Twilight (1965)
Laura (1977)
Rosamund's Bower (1985)
Mark Ingestre: The Customer's Tale (1980)
The Model (1987)
Robert Aickman - An Essay (1977)
Ramsey Campbell - Remembering Robert (1999)

 

[Knygathin]

It was a long time since I heard Aickman being discussed on the forum. Has he fallen into oblivion?

Strange stories. Is he a product of the 1960s and 70s psychedelia? Does he have a lasting impression? Will he continue to be relevant? Like Charles Birkin, whose brutalities are timeless, and will be read hundreds of years from now.