Reading Aickman’s stories from the mid-sixties this time—“Choice of Weapons,” “Bind Your Hair,” and “The School Friend” from the original collection Dark Entries, published in 1964, and “My Poor Friend,” “Larger than Oneself,” “A Roman Question,” and “The Wine-Dark Sea” from the original collection Powers of Darkness, published in 1966. (There’s one story from the 1950s in Dark Entries I already commented on).
“Choice of Weapons” is interesting, but not in the way a horror story is supposed to. Too many outlandish events happen to sustain a gripping story, but it might be a clever doubling-down treatment of Lacan’s mirror phase with several other psychoanalytic classics thrown in, culminating in a deferred but imminent effacement (which becomes visible only after rereading, or rather retracing, the final pages). “Bind Your Hair,” my favorite from this collection, also has its deep mytho-psychoanalytic undercurrents, but its dark and perhaps inexplicable secrets are focused around more accessible folk-horror motifs that make them easier to integrate into a coherent story. “The School Friend,” finally, strikes me as both overmotifed and underplotted, but I like how it conceals in broad daylight strong motifs of repression and arrestation.
“My Poor Friend” is an excellent read where the horror lurks menacingly in both Kafkaesque parliamentary procedures and the genre-coded attic. “Larger Than Oneself,” with its sudden viewpoint switches, intrusive auctorial insights at some times but not others, rough ellipses, and dialogue tag ambiguities, seems astonishingly subpar for a technically accomplished writer like Aickman; also, I was kind of hoping for “Iblis” to be revealed as the story’s hidden horror, but alas. The last two, “A Roman Question” and “The Wine-Dark Sea,” both connect to classical philology and myth, the former riffing on Plutarch, the latter on Homer. They’re my favorite stories from this collection, and they couldn’t be more different. The eye-watering surrealness of “A Roman Question” is embedded in a combination of acutely English-sounding menacing decorum and debilitating inefficiency, while the looming threat in “The Wine-Dark Sea” lies in unspectacular sereneness—like a dream that, ambiguously, could either be a waking or a lucid one, located right at the impossible boundary between letting go and taking action.
As before, I have mixed feelings about Aickman’s stories. But they’re always enjoyably challenging, and there are terrific gems among them, so I decided to keep going.
Aickman, Robert. Dark Entries: Curious and Macabre Ghost Stories. Collins, 1964. Reprint Faber & Faber, 2014.
Aickman, Robert. Powers of Darkness: Macabre Stories. Collins, 1966. Reprint Tartarus Press, 2011.