{"id":6675,"date":"2026-05-12T21:21:02","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T19:21:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/?p=6675"},"modified":"2026-05-12T22:34:50","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T20:34:50","slug":"tales-of-love-and-death-by-robert-aickman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/2026\/05\/12\/tales-of-love-and-death-by-robert-aickman\/","title":{"rendered":"Tales of Love and Death<\/em> by Robert Aickman"},"content":{"rendered":"

Enter the 1970s! Two original collections by Robert Aickman were published in that decade: Cold Hand in Mine<\/em> in 1975, the collection I started out with and already wrote about<\/a> (though I might want to give it a rereading some time), and the collection Tales of Love and Death<\/em> from 1977.<\/p>\n

Tales of Love and Death<\/em> contains two novellas, \u201cGrowing Boys\u201d and \u201cResidents Only\u201d; three novelettes, \u201cMarriage,\u201d \u201cCompulsory Games,\u201d and \u201cWood\u201d (the latter two originally published in magazines the year before); and two short stories, \u201cLe Miroir\u201d and \u201cRaising the Wind.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even for Aickman\u2019s standards, it\u2019s a very<\/em> mixed bag.<\/p>\n

Three of the stories, \u201cMarriage,\u201d \u201cLe Miroir,\u201d and \u201cCompulsory Games,\u201d do nothing. \u201cMarriage\u201d consists of heavy-handed psychoanalytic tropes glommed together in a series of juxtapositions of the performing arts and sex. \u201cLe Miroir\u201d promises an intriguing riff on a well-known theme but reads like it\u2019s been left in the draft stage with its events in search of their dramatic structure. \u201cCompulsory Games\u201d isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cGrowing Boys\u201d 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\u2014with its many clever asides and inconspicuous sardonic dissections\u2014doesn\u2019t deserve.<\/p>\n

Compared to that, \u201cWood\u201d is the exact opposite. It\u2019s 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 \u201cTrains,\u201d<\/a> which leaves one earnestly wishing that its dramatic development were a match for its ending.<\/p>\n

\u201cRaising the Wind,\u201d again not entirely typical for Aickman, is a short, tightly constructed, whimsical fun story of the \u201ccare what you wish for\u201d type.<\/p>\n

What shines in this collection is \u201cResidents Only.\u201d 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\u2019s mesmerizing descriptions of the deterioration of both the story\u2019s 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 \u201cgenerational\u201d dramatic structure. A real gem! (Also, I learned the term \u201coleaginously,\u201d which I\u2019m pretty sure I never came across before.)<\/p>\n

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

Aickman, Robert. Tales of Love and Death<\/em>. Gollanz, 1977. Reprint Tartarus Press<\/a>, 2012.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\ud83d\udcda Mild spoilers that won\u2019t stick in your memory.<\/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":["post-6675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-archive","h-entry","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6675","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=6675"}],"version-history":[{"count":89,"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6788,"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6675\/revisions\/6788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}