{"id":6478,"date":"2026-04-26T01:09:18","date_gmt":"2026-04-25T23:09:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/?p=6478"},"modified":"2026-04-26T01:26:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T23:26:09","slug":"dark-entries-and-powers-of-darkness-by-robert-aickman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/2026\/04\/26\/dark-entries-and-powers-of-darkness-by-robert-aickman\/","title":{"rendered":"Dark Entries<\/em> and Powers of Darkness<\/em> by Robert Aickman"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reading Aickman\u2019s stories from the mid-sixties this time\u2014\u201cChoice of Weapons,\u201d \u201cBind Your Hair,\u201d and \u201cThe School Friend\u201d from the original collection Dark Entries<\/em>, published in 1964, and \u201cMy Poor Friend,\u201d \u201cLarger than Oneself,\u201d \u201cA Roman Question,\u201d and \u201cThe Wine-Dark Sea\u201d from the original collection Powers of Darkness<\/em>, published in 1966. (There\u2019s one story from the 1950s in Dark Entries<\/em> I already commented<\/a> on).<\/p>\n

\u201cChoice of Weapons\u201d 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\u2019s 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). \u201cBind Your Hair,\u201d 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. \u201cThe School Friend,\u201d finally, strikes me as both overmotifed and underplotted, but I like how it conceals in broad daylight strong motifs of repression and arrestation.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy Poor Friend\u201d is an excellent read where the horror lurks menacingly in both Kafkaesque parliamentary procedures and the genre-coded attic. \u201cLarger Than Oneself,\u201d 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 \u201cIblis\u201d to be revealed as the story\u2019s hidden horror, but alas. The last two, \u201cA Roman Question\u201d and \u201cThe Wine-Dark Sea,\u201d both connect to classical philology and myth, the former riffing on Plutarch, the latter on Homer. They\u2019re my favorite stories from this collection, and they couldn\u2019t be more different. The eye-watering surrealness of \u201cA Roman Question\u201d is embedded in a combination of acutely English-sounding menacing decorum and debilitating inefficiency, while the looming threat in \u201cThe Wine-Dark Sea\u201d lies in unspectacular sereneness\u2014like 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.<\/p>\n

As before, I have mixed feelings about Aickman\u2019s stories. But they\u2019re always enjoyably challenging, and there are terrific gems among them, so I decided to keep going.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

Aickman, Robert. Dark Entries: Curious and Macabre Ghost Stories<\/em>. Collins, 1964. Reprint Faber & Faber<\/a>, 2014<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Aickman, Robert. Powers of Darkness: Macabre Stories<\/em>. Collins, 1966. Reprint Tartarus Press<\/a>, 2011<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\ud83d\udcda Mild spoilers you will have forgotten by the time you pick these stories up.<\/p>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6478","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-archive","7":"h-entry","8":"hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6478"}],"version-history":[{"count":67,"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6553,"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6478\/revisions\/6553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}