Robert Aickman's "The Same Dog" -- 10/10

[mrpelham]

I read this a couple months ago and it returns to me, perhaps unwillingly, at the strangest of times. I can be in the middle of delivering a lecture or even watching a football game, and random lines will send me scurrying to scan once again over my copy of Cold Hand in Mine. Even though it might be regarded as one of Aickman's more straightforward tales, the sinister and possibly perverse undercurrent doesn't ever make you forget that this is an extraordinarily tender snapshot of childhood friendship. Innocence falls away--or is, rather, destroyed--but ultimately prevails. I think.

(Spoiler, but not really)

The singular effect of the tale, not unrelated to the story's title, is hardly a twist of considerable acumen; nor is it particularly horrifying; and yet it stirs you to think over and over about it. Then, when you've let it course through your mind umpteen times, you realize it's the pitch-perfect device, and that Aickman is no mere mortal.

I would love to hear anyone's thoughts and reactions to what I think is thus far Aickman's masterpiece (I've only read 10 of his stories). I think the Vault of Evil message board is my only hope to talk about this story, given that Aickman is very hard to find stateside.

[Calenture]

Dec 23, 2012 3:38:36 GMT mrpelham said:

I would love to hear anyone's thoughts and reactions to what I think is thus far Aickman's masterpiece (I've only read 10 of his stories). I think the Vault of Evil message board is my only hope to talk about this story, given that Aickman is very hard to find stateside.

There used to be a couple of quite lenthy Aickman threads around here in the favourite authors section (sure I started an extra one once when I was a little the worse for wear (hic!) and couldn't find the right place to post). Can't find them now, probably cached, though typing Aickman in the search box did bring this one up.

Cold Hand in Mine has't turned up for my own collection yet, which is something I'll have to do something about through Amazon (god help us, isn't there a battered second-hand copy under eighteen quid anywhere ).

There is, dare I admit, another site where you're likely to find more Aickman fans and specifically a post on the story you mention, TLO in the meantime.

[mrpelham]

Thanks, Calenture. I had seen those sites and was hoping to elicit more focused "Same Dog" discussion on what, imo, is the superior message board.

[Calenture]

I'd hate to get to figuring which site is the more suitable - I'd rather disappear for another three years!

Truth is, TLO and Vault (and British Horror Film Board, and two or three others I can think of) all have members in common and all have people who read and discuss Aickman from time to time. I Googled Aickman and The Same Dog and found that thread on TLO... which seems a year or more old. Great place, though, like this one.

One thing your post has prompted me to do is to finally get a copy of Your Cold Hand in Mine. I think there's an Aickman collection co-written with a woman author - Elizabeth Jane Howard? Is that collection the one?

[dem]

Robert Aickman & Elizabeth Jane Howard – We Are For The Dark (Mayflower, December 1965)

Perfect Love
The Trains
The Insufficient Answer
Three Miles Up
The View
Left Luggage

Blurb:
“Conveys a curiously real sense of doom. Here are ghost stories combining the tragic, the macabre, the erotic in a way that is startlingly new.”

Cold Hand In Mine is more a greatest hits package and perhaps the ideal introduction to his work.

Thanks to Jonathan, we've threads for just about every one of Aickman's collections. Your best way of searching this board is to use this use this link and type Robert Aickman or whoever, whatever you're looking for.

[Calenture]

Ta for this. I'd just been sketching, but curiosity drew me back. I'm now trying to figure if I should lash out on both those collections - they ain't cheap, and second-hand copies of We Are For the Dark seem to start at forty-five quid!

Three Miles Up is familiar, and The Trains is another covered here long ago - starts like a BBC ghost story, ends like a giallo.

Found a review on Amazon which I'll paste without apologies. This seems the right place to share it.

'By RIJU GANGULY "perceptive reader" (India) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
This review is from: We are for the Dark: Six Ghost Stories (Hardcover)
Ghost stories are read for "a pleasing terror", but what motivates someone to read stories that are self-notified as "strange" rather than being satisfactory narratives with head, middle, tail etc? I had been drawn towards this particular volume (first published by Cape in 1951, printed again by Tartarus as per their high standards) on the basis of inputs from some highly knowledgeable & well-read horror affictionado-s who had recommended this volume as a seminal work in the evolution of ghost story in the 20th Century, and I was not disappointed.

This book contains six novellas of varying length. The shorter and more compact pieces are by Elizabeth Jane Howard, who had written the following pieces:

1) Perfect Love: search for answers to certain intriguing questions concerning the life & living of a mysterious artist.
2) Three Miles Up: what happens when a ride on the marsh & reed infested canals suddenly become strange & delirious, in the presence of a mysterious girl named Sharon?
3) Left Luggage: exactly what (or who) was left to the protagonist as a legacy, by his uncle?

Each of these three stories are examples of tight narratives, and irrespective of their open-ended nature and lots of ambiguous hints thrown here & there, these stories can be enjoyed by any lover of ghost stories. But Aickman's works belong to a different & more difficult league. His novellas are:

1) The Trains: a suffocating tale of sexual tension and creepy atmosphere piling up under the open sky as well as in a house infested by memorablia from trains, and where every human & material activity is personified by the numerous trains passing by!
2) The Insufficient Answer: a gothic tale of ghosts, cruelty, desolation, exhaustion, frustration, imprisonment (physical/spiritual) and God knows what else, except for a narrative that binds up the loose ends.
3) The View: another strange tale where the only thing that happens is the changing views from the protagonist's room (in the strange mansion where his co-passanger & later lover had graciously allowed him to stay), eventually rushing onto a rather over-traditional ending.

To conclude: I will try to find out more works by Elizabeth Jane Howard, and I would try to stay away from Aickman & anyhting Aickmanesque, because such stuff, as I have now realised, are really not "my cup of tea".'

Found here: www.amazon.co.uk/We-are-Dark-Ghost-Stories/product-reviews/1905784422/ref=sr_1_1_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

[jamesdoig]

Dec 25, 2012 22:37:07 GMT dem said:

Robert Aickman & Elizabeth Jane Howard – We Are For The Dark (Mayflower, December 1965)

Gee that's great - I didn't even know a paperback edition existed.

[Shrink Proof]

Dec 23, 2012 3:38:36 GMT mrpelham said:

I read this a couple months ago and it returns to me, perhaps unwillingly, at the strangest of times.

I get the same with "The Trains". I've always visualised it as being set in The Longdendale Valley. That's where a now-closed railway used to run, alongside the reservoirs and over the moors up to the Woodhead Tunnel, a place notorious amongst railwaymen. It was an evil place to be - the fumes were so thick & toxic that a gong activated by the passing trains had to be fixed to the tunnel wall to alert footplate crews to the need to get up off the cab floor - where they had lain with a wet rag over their heads to avoid suffocation whilst traversing the tunnel - and look out for signals on emerging. The station by the tunnel mouth was built in the best creepy Gothic style and really looked, well, like something out of a horror story:-





As you can see, the tunnels were so intensively used (built on a stiff gradient so that the locos had to work hard) that they belched smoke constantly.

A deeply atmospheric place that has exactly the same feel as Aickman's tale....

[mcannon]

I see from my morning perusal of Wikipedia's "deaths" that Elizabeth Jane Howard has passed away, aged 90. I read a newspaper interview with her just a couple of months ago - which, unfortunately, made no mention of her connection with Robert Aickman. It did indicate that she was still writing, so it sounds as though she remained active right until the end.

Mark

[jamesdoig]

Jan 2, 2014 19:16:26 GMT mcannon said:

I read a newspaper interview with her just a couple of months ago - which, unfortunately, made no mention of her connection with Robert Aickman.

From memory, her autobiography was quite dismissive of him.

[stuyoung]

Not read the story yet but I listened to the audio version read by Reece shearsmith. soundcloud.com/audibleuk/the-same-dog-from-robert

[albie]

Three Miles Up is a cracking story - very Aickmanesque.

[weirdmonger]

THE SAME DOG by Robert Aickman



“; when all was so obscure, and so properly so?”

For me a Proustianly self-memorable story, and surely you must remember it, too, as well as me! The story of Hilary, much the youngest of three brothers, who later oddly joined the army because, he was a sensitive soul. His trip as a young boy with his then childhood sweetheart Mary, who had grabby fingers for him, but not a ‘Lolita’ as explicitly hinted later by the story itself, a trip to what turned out later in his life to be a house called Maryland, was part of what these two children concocted in their secret maps of reality as well as of Fairyland, and the slithery yellow-skinned dog and Maryland’s yellow wall (a yellow patchy wall like that of Vermeer in the famous Proust book). The implications of what happened shake me even today, decades since I first read it, even though I am now, of course, a different self reading it. I never now lurk anywhere naked, although I am bald.

“A further complexity is that the sensitive are sometimes most at their ease with the less sensitive.”

[weirdmonger]

Dec 25, 2012 22:37:07 GMT dem said:

Robert Aickman & Elizabeth Jane Howard – We Are For The Dark (Mayflower, December 1965)

Anyone else read THE INSUFFICIENT ANSWER by Robert Aickman?

No. 42 as the answer?