Enter the 1970s! Two original collections by Robert Aickman were published in that decade: Cold Hand in Mine in 1975, the collection I started out with and already wrote about (though I might want to give it a rereading some time), and the collection Tales of Love and Death from 1977.
Tales of Love and Death contains two novellas, “Growing Boys” and “Residents Only”; three novelettes, “Marriage,” “Compulsory Games,” and “Wood” (the latter two originally published in magazines the year before); and two short stories, “Le Miroir” and “Raising the Wind.”
Even for Aickman’s standards, it’s a very mixed bag.
Three of the stories, “Marriage,” “Le Miroir,” and “Compulsory Games,” do nothing. “Marriage” consists of heavy-handed psychoanalytic tropes glommed together in a series of juxtapositions of the performing arts and sex. “Le Miroir” promises an intriguing riff on a well-known theme but reads like it’s been left in the draft stage with its events in search of their dramatic structure. “Compulsory Games” isn’t interesting enough to sustain its long-winded development, until finally some glimpses of terror intrude to which the ending feels either bolted on or symbolically overdetermined, depending how you look at it.
“Growing Boys” could have been, all things considered, a terrific story. All the requisites are brought into position for a repetition-break structure, but then the third section, where the curveball should have been coming, is cut short by a perplexingly sudden anticlimactic ending that the story—with its many clever asides and inconspicuous sardonic dissections—doesn’t deserve.
Compared to that, “Wood” is the exact opposite. It’s a lackluster story with, as often with Aickman, too heavy a focus on weird English etiquette and sensitivities, augmented by an overabundance of allusions to Norse and Greek myth. But then it has a rare and authentically haunting horror ending, only rivaled so far by the final reveal in “Trains,” which leaves one earnestly wishing that its dramatic development were a match for its ending.
“Raising the Wind,” again not entirely typical for Aickman, is a short, tightly constructed, whimsical fun story of the “care what you wish for” type.
What shines in this collection is “Residents Only.” While again strongly focused on bizarre manifestations of what sounds like taking place on a different planet, the absurdities of English civic and administrative procedures actually do have a function this time, being significantly intertwined with Aickman’s mesmerizing descriptions of the deterioration of both the story’s committee and the immovable in question. Everything is connected, from its beginning to its ending, from its intriguing protagonistic and antagonistic forces to its almost “generational” dramatic structure. A real gem! (Also, I learned the term “oleaginously,” which I’m pretty sure I never came across before.)
Aickman, Robert. Tales of Love and Death. Gollanz, 1977. Reprint Tartarus Press, 2012.