Tag: Robert Aickman

‘Ringing The Changes’ by Robert Aickman

  • Selected by Jo Howard

A couple honeymooning in a remote East Anglian town at Halloween are drawn into a macabre ritual.

This story stands out for its atmosphere of pure menace which builds incrementally to a frenzied climax. Nobody told Aickman to get the inciting incident in early. He makes you wait while Gerald mansplains railway construction to his much younger wife, Phrynne. And it works. Gerald’s properness is the perfect foil for the unsavoury behaviour of Holihaven’s denizens. His paternalistic concern for the tiny, beautiful Phyrnne leads him to accept the infernal tolling of the town’s church bells; the true inciting incident of the story. When he learns they are ringing to wake the dead, his need to keep up appearances leaves him incapable of evasive action.

And what of Phrynne? I had to look up that name because why not Janet or Barbara? Phyrnne was a courtesan in Ancient Greece, a historical figure, who was tried for indecency and, legend has it, acquitted upon revealing her breasts to the jury. This can’t be an accident. The sex in this story is alluded to in the most oblique way. Nevertheless, Phrynne ends up in a torn nightdress, revealing her lovely body. In the final scene, whilst Gerald is horrified, there is an undercurrent of sexual depravity to Phrynne’s reaction, “her cheeks reddened and her soft mouth became more voluptuous still.”

CW: Gratuitous use of the N word in a simile.

First published in 1955 in The Third Ghost Book, Pan and republished multiple times, including in Aickman’s 1964 collection Dark Entries, Collins and The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Ghost Stories, 1996, OUP

‘The Swords’ by Robert Aickman

It’s as if Aickman thought, “Where’s the least spooky place on earth?” and took Wolverhampton as a challenge.

I could have included any number of Aickman stories here, having first read Cold Hand in Mine as a student 25 years ago and feeling as if I’d been initiated into a cult. He’s having a well-deserved moment now, on a similar trajectory to H.P. Lovecraft. Aickman’s great power is in recording how nightmares feel, in drab contemporary settings, and refusing ever to explain what is going on.

Here, we get a lonely young commercial traveller eager to lose his virginity. Wandering the streets of Wolvo, avoiding the miserable boarding house the firm has dumped him in, he finds a fairground on a bombsite. There’s a grotty tent with a seedy show in which men first stab then kiss a pretty girl, who is also available for private shows to respectable men like him. Over tea and pies in a cafe, he gives into temptation, and agrees to bring her back to the boarding house after dark. But his first time with a woman doesn’t go quite as planned.

First published in The Fifth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, ed. Robert Aickman, 1969. Collected in Cold Hand in Mine, 1975

‘The Hospice’ by Robert Aickman

I was introduced to Aickman’s work in 2014, through a collaboration with the Curious Tales collective. It was the centenary of Aickman’s birth and Faber had reissued his ‘strange stories’ – I read two collections back to back, Cold Hand in Mine and Dark Entries, immersing myself in his world. In ‘The Hospice’, Lucas Maybury is driving home when he gets lost, ending up “somewhere at the back of beyond”. Hungry, injured and low on petrol, he stops at The Hospice for dinner and accommodation. What follows is an unnerving and anxiety-dreamlike experience, and a memorably unsettling final paragraph.

First published in Cold Hand in Mine: Eight Strange Stories, Victor Gollancz, 1975. Also collected in Cold Hand in Mine, Faber & Faber, 2014

‘The Hospice’ by Robert Aickman

My first time reading Aickman, on another writer’s recommendation, I was baffled—left with an overwhelming sense of not getting it. I assumed the problem lay with me, since the author who sung his praises was one I admired, and on a repeated attempt I did feel I sort of started to “get it,” or at least get that Aickman’s “strange stories” lend themselves to many interpretations but do not slot perfectly into any one. Instead they build to an overwhelming mood of off-ness, of horrors seen only briefly out of the corner of one’s eye that nevertheless leave one forever altered. This story to me is the prime example of how to build overwhelming dread out of troubling glimpses, Lynchian well before Lynch was a thing. It’s one of the scariest I’ve ever read—and also very funny. Lucas Maybury is lost while driving home from a business meeting, gets out of his car to wander a desolate neighborhood, and is bitten by something that might be a cat or might not. It only gets worse from there. When he seeks sanctuary at an inn, the feeling of being trapped in a very bad dream mounts over the course of the night to an unbearable pitch. 

Collected in Cold Hand in Mine, Glooancz/Scribners, 1975; in a new edition from Faber, 2014

‘The Same Dog’ by Robert Aickman

It’s sometimes hard to synopsise a ghost story without just describing everything that happens in it. That would give the game away. I’m not going to do that. Neither is Robert Aickman. Two children, a boy and a girl, spend their holiday from a mixed preparatory school wandering the sunny heaths of “southern Surrey”. As long as they’re together, they find plenty to do. We look at subsequent events and ask, What has happened here? Behind the first thousand or so words of careful introduction to the children and their milieu, before the ghost story itself has had a chance to begin, some social tension has already mounted up. There’s no reason for it. There’s no anxiety you can put your finger on until Aickman introduces you to their nascent sexuality–which they don’t even notice. Like another story of his, ‘The Swords’, this one is Freudian enough. But the Freudian conversion of that original unease into a guilt the children don’t feel (it’s for the reader, perhaps, to feel that) isn’t enough to put the hair up on your arms. Even the girl’s fate, the obvious horror, isn’t enough to do that. Something else does it, every time I read this story. So I’m not giving the game away here, and Aickman certainly isn’t. Two children arrive outside a house holding hands, and they don’t even go in, and when they leave they aren’t holding hands, and all they have seen is a dog. After all, what’s a ghost story but a set-up and a revelation? Something strange happened, that’s all, to two children: they saw a dog, yellow, in the garden of a house. For one of them that was enough to mar a life; for the other… well. Or perhaps I’m wrong and that isn’t it either. Perhaps it’s not even possible for me to give the game away.

First published 1974. Collected in Cold Hand In Mine, 1975, Faber Finds, 2008. You can hear Reece Shearsmith read it here

‘The Stains’ by Robert Aickman

There are many Robert Aickman (1914-1981) stories that I could have chosen – famous contenders like ‘The Hospice’ and ‘The Swords’ are rightly celebrated and could easily be on this list. But it is the long short-story ‘The Stains’ that has stayed with my thoughts more than any other.

‘The Stains’ focuses on that most Aickman of characters, a sad and unremarkable middle-aged English civil servant, Stephen, whose wife Elizabeth has recently died. Bereft and unsure of what to do with himself, he takes a leave of absence from work to stay with his brother in “the north” who has published “two important books on lichens”. Stephen, perturbed by his brother’s wife, begins taking long walks on the moors; and one day he meets a young woman named Nell who is collecting mosses and lichens. She fascinates him, and he is intensely attracted to her. She becomes a kind of path toward liberation for him, representing a mysterious and ancient world that he craves in the face of creeping modernity. It is strongly implied she is an aspect from nature, a nymph of some sort. She, if she exists at all, is a relic from a deep past that Stephen romanticises, much like the lichens his brother studies. He fetishises her “aboriginal” nature.

Then he notices a strange lichen-like stain on her body. They move into together, the walls of the house they attempt to domesticize becoming covered in strange fungal and lichen growths. The stains spread to Stephen’s body, before nature comes to claim him utterly.

‘The Stains’ is the most intriguing, nuanced, and saddest of Aickman’s stories and its meaning can be endlessly deciphered and interpreted but never fully pinned down; as with all of his work, that is its great and enduring strength.

First published in New Terrors, ed. Ramsey Campbell, Pan Books, 1980; collected in The Unsettled Dust, Faber & Faber, 2014