A Very English Influence: The Stories of Robert Aickman

| Print | E-mail Written by Nina Allan Sunday, 14 August 2011

Something Rotten In The State Of Denmark

A few days ago I received a news email from the excellent Tartarus Press, informing me that they were about to publish a reprint edition of Robert Aickman’s collection of stories, Cold Hand in Mine. For those that haven’t yet had the pleasure of handling one of their books, Tartarus are an independent press specializing in the publication of what might best be called the literature of the strange. Their commitment to ‘weird writers’ such as Sarban, Saki and Machen has meant that many lost classics of the genre have become available to a new generation of readers, in editions that honour the idea of the book as a desirable object, something to keep and treasure rather than a disposable trifle to be discarded as you pass through the airport arrivals lounge.

The same could be said of Robert Aickman’s horror stories. Robert Aickman was the grandson of the Victorian novelist Richard Marsh, who wrote the 1897 gothic classic The Beetle. He was not what you would call a prolific writer, but the forty-eight ‘strange stories’ he did produce are works of such originality and maverick genius that they have earned him an unassailable place in the canon of twentieth century horror fiction. There was nothing quite like them before – the importance of M. R James and Arthur Machen notwithstanding – and he reshaped the landscape of weird fiction for those that came after.

Aickman published eight collections of strange tales altogether, of which Cold Hand in Mine was the fifth. Like all maverick geniuses, he was never afraid to buck a prevailing trend. Cold Hand first came out in 1975, just one year after James Herbert’s first novel, The Rats, and therefore in an ideal position, you might suppose, to cash in on the new craze for horror that was sweeping British bookstores. Yet Aickman never became that widely known, and a writer more different from Herbert it is difficult to imagine.

We British are famous for our love of ghost stories, but while horror writers across the Atlantic were quick to adopt and subvert the gaudy glamour of the pulp magazines and the B-movie ‘creature features’, English horror found it harder to shake off the dust of the nineteenth century. We have, as a rule, always preferred keening wraiths to axe-wielding maniacs. In a country where we were out ghost hunting before the American constitution even existed, perhaps an obsession with decay and junk and old things generally is only natural. But our horror fiction inevitably suffered under the accusation of being too genteel.

The ‘horror boom’ of the seventies and eighties seemed to be a reaction against that, at least on the surface. It wasn’t just the American imports – horror fans soon had a huge variety of home-grown films and magazines to feed their frenzy (with Starburst itself first seeing print in 1978), and writers like Brian Lumley, Guy N. Smith and James Herbert were bashing their readership’s brains out with a new kind of horror. This was a horror that showed stuff close up and wasn’t in the least concerned about getting its hands dirty, a horror in which an awful lot of people got killed. A horror, one might say, that just wasn’t cricket.

You might be forgiven for thinking that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre had finally caught up with The Innocents, with gut-strewing results, that in the age of the zombie apocalypse and the serial killer thriller, the more sedately atmospheric British brand of horror was proving to be too dry, too elliptical and too elusive to please a wide audience. James Herbert’s books sell millions, after all, while Robert Aickman is still one of English literature’s best kept secrets.

I would argue something quite different: that Robert Aickman’s stories are the ‘missing link’ between the Victorian ghost story and modern horror, between the fireside tales of M. R James and Algernon Blackwood, and the novels of writers such as Stephen King and Ramsey Campbell. That it was Aickman, in fact, who kicked off the psychological trend in horror literature and opened the way for younger writers to explore and flex their imaginative muscles.

Aickman wrote the quintessential modern zombie story, ‘Ringing the Changes,’ four whole years before Romero’s Night of the Living Dead shambled out of the darkness, and his preoccupation with the ‘new terrors’ of identity crisis, sexual repression and emotional alienation moved the English weird tale into a completely new place. What is more, his influence on the next generation was considerable, and in spite of his relatively small output (you could fit Robert Aickman’s total word count into Stephen King’s about a thousand times over) his work has been as crucial to the development of horror literature as the work of Lovecraft and Poe a generation before.

My first encounter with Aickman, believe it or not, was on Hallowe’en. The BBC has always been good at Hallowe’en – the British love their ghost stories, remember – and for Hallowe’en in the year 2000 Radio 4 put out an hour-long adaptation of Aickman’s ‘Ringing the Changes’ by Jeremy Dyson and Mark Gatiss, who were just starting to become famous for The League of Gentlemen. I felt certain this production would be my kind of thing as soon as I heard the trailer, and to say I enjoyed the broadcast would be something of an understatement. The only disappointment was not being able to get hold of Aickman’s original text. Thank heavens for Tartarus, that’s what I say.

‘Ringing the Changes’ really is a zombie story, no holds barred. Gerald and Phrynne are to spend their honeymoon in the Norfolk coastal resort of Holihaven. It is October, and the place seems deserted. Gerald is worried his new young wife will be bored. Phrynne assures him she doesn’t mind in the least – they came here for the peace and quiet, after all. Unfortunately for them their stay is not a pleasant one. The hotel staff are drunk, there’s a stench of rotting meat polluting the seafront and the autumnal tranquillity is soon shattered by the mother of all bell-ringing practices. The bells clamour on for hours, cutting Gerald’s nerves to shreds and casting Phrynne into a sinister species of rapture. The only other guest at the inn, a Commander Shotcroft, warns Gerald he must get Phrynne away from the town immediately but there are no means of leaving, and finally we learn the dreadful truth: the bells are ringing to raise the corpses from their graves. The deserted streets of the faded resort are the setting for an annual bacchanalia of the dead.

As a horror story ‘Ringing the Changes’ packs a mean punch. The scene where Gerald enters Commander Shotcroft’s room to find him collapsed in ecstatic dread before the open window has about it the queasy ambivalence of certain sequences from Picnic at Hanging Rock or Don’t Look Now. And as with all the best horror fiction there is more going on in the story than meets the eye. Gerald is twenty years older than Phrynne, and his visions of the dead are a manifestation of his own fear of growing old and losing his powers, rotting and becoming ugly in her eyes. Commander Shotcroft, it turns out, has been cast out of the army for some terrible past misdemeanour. He is a husk of a man, a ruin – this vile little town, the only place that will take him in, is a hell of his own making. The name of the town – holy haven – is a hollow and hideous joke at the reader’s expense.

I might add that ‘Ringing the Changes’ has a particularly strong resonance for us Britishers because Holihaven is a place we all recognise. Imagine Lowestoft or Cromer on a Sunday in October, the damp wind whipping into your clothes and everything closed. You might feel tempted to wake the dead just to liven things up.....

But ‘Ringing the Changes’ is more than just a lament for middle England. The story has an archetypical quality that grants it universal appeal. Stephen King, in his introduction to his collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes, describes this archetype as ‘the peculiar little town,’ and readers of this wonderful collection will find Aickman’s influence hard at work in King’s story ‘Rainy Season.’ The pattern it follows is almost identical to that of ‘Changes’: a young couple arrive in the picturesque hamlet of Willow, Maine, ready to begin a three-month work sabbatical that is in the nature of a second honeymoon. They are soon confronted with the increasing realisation that something is badly wrong in the town, something all the locals appear to be in on. The garage proprietor tells them earnestly that once every seven years the town gets inundated by a rain of toads and they should leave immediately. Elise is upset and thinks they should find another place to stay; John insists it’s just a rather tasteless joke and they should brazen it out.

But as it turns out, they really should have followed the garage man’s advice.

Like Aickman, King uses the story’s external action to highlight internal tensions between the couple. Unlike the less accomplished writers of the eighties horror boom, King understands that horror stories have no lasting value unless we care about the characters. Killing people in revolting ways is never enough.

Rereading Aickman for this article I couldn’t help noticing that a lot of his work makes sinister use of a British national stereotype, often parodied but stubbornly true, that thoroughly British dislike of making a fuss. Near the beginning of ‘The Swords,’ the opening story in Cold Hand in Mine, the narrator finds himself an unwilling participant in a nasty little carnival sideshow in which disreputable men appear to inflict certain injuries on a defenceless girl. The narrator’s instinct is to leave immediately, an action he finds impossible because of his greater desire not to seem rude:

“Two bob,” said the young man, dropping the dirty flap, and sticking out his other hand, which was equally dirty. He wore a green sweater, mended but still with holes, grimy grey trousers, and grimier sandshoes. Sheer dirt was so much my first impression of the place that I might well have fled after all, had I felt it possible. I had not noticed this kind of griminess about the rest of the fair.

Running away, however, wasn’t on. There were so few people inside. Dotted about the bare, bumpy ground, with bricks and broken glass sticking out from the hard earth, were twenty or thirty wooden chairs, none of them seeming to match, some of them broken or defective in one way or another, all of them chipped and off-colour. Scattered among these hard chairs was an audience of seven.

Our hero would rather put himself in peril than cause offence. For anyone who’s ever wanted to leave a party early but not wanted to upset the host this scene rings hideously true. We have a similar situation in ‘The Hospice.’ A travelling salesman, Maybury, takes an unfamiliar road home. Lost and with his car engine running on empty, he knocks on the door of a guest house called The Hospice. He feels uncomfortable about the place more or less as soon as he steps through the door (the word ‘hospice’ had to be a clue here, surely?) Indeed the guest house and its inmates are so creepy our collective brains start flashing like one big warning light. But instead of bidding a swift adieu our narrator is mainly concerned with not upsetting the management.

It is only in the grim small hours, confined to a room he cannot get out of, with a scream of unknown provenance echoing through the corridors and a shuddery little room mate who appears to have aged fifty years during the night that Maybury allows himself to dwell on the inherent dangers of his situation. In a passage that constitutes the very essence of Aickman’s philosophy, Maybury begins to question not only the nature of reality but the reality of his own existence:

Maybury began to wonder whether something had gone wrong with his own time faculty, such as it was; something, that is, of medical significance. That whole evening and night, from soon after his commitment to the recommended route, he had been in doubt about his place in the universe, about what people called the state of his nerves. Here was evidence that he had good reason for anxiety.

Aickman takes pity on Maybury in the end – he gives him a lift out of The Hospice in a passing hearse. This came as a relief to me, because in spite of his timidity I kind of liked him; less tender hearted readers may feel the little milksop deserved to get his comeuppance. Other writers certainly have found nastier ways of resolving similar situations. I found plenty to admire in Ramsey Campbell’s dark gem of a story ‘The Entertainment,’ and plenty you could describe as Aickmanesque. Perhaps it is Campbell, more than any other modern British horror writer, who is the true heir to Aickman. Campbell has the same talent for turning everything in a story – weather, landscape, dialogue, even the furnishings of a room – to the service of the central idea, leaving the reader with the impression that the world itself is coloured by jealousy, or evil, or fear, that there is no escape for the protagonist, because escape will only lead him deeper into his fate.

‘The Entertainment,’ with sharp echoes of Aickman’s ‘The Hospice,’ tells the story of a man whose car breaks down in a rainstorm making an emergency call at an old people’s home. All he wants to do is use their telephone, but what follows is a descent into hell. A lesser writer would have had monsters lurking in the basement. Ramsey Campbell, however, has a unique talent for showing us that there is nothing more desperate or horrific than being stripped of what we might think of as ordinary freedoms. ‘The Entertainment’ is so good and so horrible, one of those stories mired so deep in truth it’s impossible to completely banish it from your mind.

While it’s true that Aickman’s stories belong to that subsection of the genre that has come to be known as ‘quiet horror,’ what they are most decidedly not is tame. Thinking about Aickman leads me again and again to a feeling of surprise at how shocking these stories are, how audacious in their unmasking of emotions and proclivities so often smothered beneath the varnish of social convention. ‘The Swords,’ truly one of the weirdest and most brilliantly sordid little stories I have ever read, might just be about the genesis of a human monster. In ‘Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal,’ which won Aickman the British Fantasy Award in 1975, we watch the transformation of a demure young lady into a vampire – from the girl’s point of view. Here is what Dracula might have been if Stoker had decided to tell it from the point of view of Lucy Westenra. This child is glad to be seduced, debased, to slough off her humanity. But the process is so gradual, so subtle that we’re barely aware of what is happening until it’s too late. The word that might best sum up Aickman’s writing, here as elsewhere, is insidious.

Aickman’s prose is deceptive, I think, precisely because it is so beautifully wrought. The language is clear and lucid and expertly fashioned. There is little use of slang or profanity. It has what you might call classic lines. There is a sense, perhaps, that nothing truly nasty or shocking could happen in stories that are so elegantly told. All the more shocking then to have it slowly dawn on you that you’re slap bang in the middle of a story about rape or moral degeneracy or paedophilia. All the more unsettling to find yourself wandering away from the known world and into the midst of an inescapable nightmare.

Entering a story by Aickman is like walking into a house with rotten floorboards; you have to be very careful where you tread.

If you were to ask me why Robert Aickman is so important I’d say that it is because he was committed to writing horror that is also literature. He did not just leave us with tales that are genuinely frightening; he paid painstaking attention to the craft of writing, constructing stories that act like prose poems upon the imagination.

Like all good maverick geniuses he was never afraid to carve out his own path.

Cold Hand in Mine 9781905784349 by Robert Aickman is available from Tartarus Press priced at £32.50. A rather cheaper but less sumptuous edition 9780571244256 is published as part of Faber’s print on demand line, Faber Finds.