While, with exceptions, I wasn’t quite convinced by the collection Cold Hand in Mine, I decided to keep at it and start at the beginning. These were “The Trains” and “The View,” the only stories from the 1951 collection We Are for the Dark I could lay my hands on without paying outrageous prices at eBay; followed by “The Visiting Star” and “Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen” from 1952 and 1953, respectively; and finally “Ringing the Changes” from 1955 and “The Waiting Room” from 1956, the former first published in the 1964 collection Dark Entries.
Aickman gets more entertaining if you stop expecting a tight narrative with a final twist and instead start enjoying the often meandering details of the narrative—to be enjoyed even more if a story happens to have all these details connected in the end and/or has a final horrific twist, or at least doesn’t leave you utterly dumbfounded. Or, it could be the clever horrific twist itself that leaves you terminally puzzled, so beware.
Anyway, “The View” is the best from this batch in terms of composition, with a very tight story structure and an ending that, as unforeseen as it comes, is expertly foreshadowed and makes a lot of sense; “The Train,” in contrast, also has a lot of foreshadowings but drowns them first in ephemera and then in confusing events and is structurally less coherent (but has by far the punchiest ending of the lot). “The Visiting Star” is interesting but quite opaque if you don’t want to go full psychoanalysis in your reading. “Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen” attaches offhand opaqueness again to many of its details, but its weirdness in terms of technology and how people get entangled with it reads like a premonition of Philip K. Dick’s motifs ten years later. (Plus, I still don’t understand the “Che gelida manina” La BohĂ©me reference.) “Ringing the Changes,” however, is a blast, and it doesn’t need any final twist anymore after slowly working its horror up into a frenzy. “The Waiting Room,” well—it’s very atmospheric and has a nice twist within the expected twist at the end, but don’t expect it to be a rocket like “Ringing the Changes”—rather, take it as a delightful cafĂ© gourmand to close Aickman’s oeuvre from the 1950s.
Aickman, Robert, and Elizabeth Jane Howard. We Are for the Dark: Six Ghost Stories. Jonathan Cape, 1951.
Aickman, Robert. Dark Entries: Curious and Macabre Ghost Stories. Collins, 1964. Reprint Faber & Faber, 2014.