Good gravy, where do I start? So it’s taken me, on and off, nearly three months to get through this relatively ordinary-sized short story collection - and that ain’t a good sign! Of the eight stories here, one is really good and one is half decent - the others? Holy guacamoleshit - you need the patience of a fucking saint to get through those!
The Hospice is the really good story. A traveller is stranded in the middle of nowhere, stumbles across a strange inn, and stays the night there - except the staff and guests are all weirdos! When you can read a story straight and enjoy it on its surface level, that’s great, but if it also contains layers to appreciate and read another way, then that’s quite something. And The Hospice certainly has layers - it’s essentially a metaphor for death/the afterlife. Wonderfully creepy and unsettling - how I wish the entire collection had been like this!
The half decent story is The Swords where a man watches a bizarre fetish/freak show of a woman getting stabbed with swords on stage but somehow doesn’t die or sustain any lasting injuries. It’s the same as above where the story is entertaining enough but you could also interpret it another way, in this instance as a metaphor for sexual maturity/awakening.
Then we’re firmly into the dregs. A woman witnesses a strange ceremony in The Real Road to the Church (snore), a German aristocrat gets scared on a lake in Niemandswasser (zzz), a man sees a lost love in The Same Dog (sigh), and a woman into cuckoo clocks goes, hoho, cuckoo herself in The Clock Watcher (wakka wakka)!
I have to single out both Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal and Meeting Mr Millar for being extraordinarily tedious, made all the worse for being the two longest stories as well. I had almost no idea what was happening in Meeting Mr Millar beyond the dull narrator being cheesed off with the dude who lived above him for carrying on with booze and women. I think Millar was an Aleister Crowley type, or something to do with the dead, but fucked if I know. I definitely hated it immensely!
And then Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal which is about a boring little girl who becomes a vampire in early 19th century Italy. Which sounds promising but is so one-note and skull-crushingly dreary once you figure out early on that she’s a vampire. If you want to read a far better female vampire story, check out Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla.
Robert Aickman’s writing in general is much too laborious to read and he has almost no idea how to pace a story. He’s far too subtle for his own good so it’s hard to understand what he’s driving at half the time and he is the worst at endings.
Having read another of his collections, Dark Entries, I’d say this is a writer who’s probably best read piecemeal - that is, single out a couple stories in a collection or two (Ringing the Changes from Dark Entries, The Hospice from this book), and ignore the rest. Pig-headed as I am, I got through Cold Hand in Mine but it wasn’t worth it, even for the two stories that I enjoyed.
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