Dark Entries

Product Information

Considering my enjoyment of horror and strange fiction Aickman's praised tales were an obligatory stop, one from which I had anticipated reaping a great deal of deadfull pleasures and delights. An artist sees a different building every time he looks out of the window of his lover’s coastal home and… bleh? I was recently presented with the opportunity to pick up a few of his collections for free, and I jumped at the chance. Aickman creates voids that act as pocket dimensions of potentiality, as outlined in both David Peaks The Spectacle of the Void and Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie. Each of these stories leaves much to the imagination, but the subjectivity adds to the uneasy yet intoxicating feeling of being lost in the maze of an alternate reality.

Somebody else described the atmosphere in some of the stories as “reality out of joint”, and that’s definitely true — for these characters, ostensibly belonging to our normal world, something jolts out of place and everything is made strange by it. Included in this edition, although not in the original edition, is "The View", which actually originally appeared in his first collection that he contributed to jointly with Elizabeth Jane Howard, We Are For The Dark. Ringing the Changes - Very weird story, less subtle than Aickman’s other’s I would say, but no less interesting, atmospheric or fascinating. I've been on a real Aickman kick recently having just finished The Wine-Dark Sea I heard about a group read for this title and decided to join the discussion. It's not 'in-your-face' horror, instead taking the more subtle approach, using the power of suggestion to fuel the reader's imagination.an older man sees his age, his ineffectuality; he will try to cross a gap and he will fail, impotent. they're more like windows that look briefly on to some strange portion of someone's life and then they move on. The strange local ritual builds to a horrifying climax which seems to leave the couple divided in unspoken ways.

The tale of “an ever-open mouth of a house”, which gets hold of a middle-aged woman, plunging her into madness and tapping her vitality, told by her former school friend who learns that it may not be too wise an idea to pry too closely into other people’s life. The tool that Aickman uses to terrific effect is the minor imbalances and hallucinations of the human mind. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. Choice Of Weapons: A man falls in love with a strange, seductive girl who lives in an eerie old house. It's about half the length of "The Unsettled Dust," "Cold Hand in Mine" or "The Wine-Dark Sea" -- especially when you take out the Introduction and "Robert Aickman Remembered" (interesting as those may be.

He's not writing to tell a gripping yarn, he's providing an "impression" which can be beautiful (exceptionally so), or unsettling, or terrifying. Regardless, highly recommended to all, especially to literary types who would never touch the genre, -- so many "classic" short stories depend so much on exactly the same kind of mystery and ambiguity that Aickman thrills in, you will find yourself on familiar, but highly intensified, ground. Like James, Aickman was a cultured aesthete, delivering scares in a precise, somewhat lofty style as though addressing the reader from behind a veil of erudition. Robert Aickman (1914–1981) was the grandson of Richard Marsh, a leading Victorian novelist of the occult. Recounting the plot - there's no such thing as a "spoiler" in these stories, and the stories are about their style.