{"id":6713,"date":"2026-05-21T17:20:48","date_gmt":"2026-05-21T15:20:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/?p=6713"},"modified":"2026-05-21T17:36:05","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T15:36:05","slug":"intrusions-by-robert-aickman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/2026\/05\/21\/intrusions-by-robert-aickman\/","title":{"rendered":"Intrusions<\/em> by Robert Aickman"},"content":{"rendered":"

Intrusions<\/em> is Aickman\u2019s last original collection before his death in 1981, and here, my Aickman reading journey starts to get spotty: the short story \u201cThe Breakthrough\u201d remains stubbornly unretrievable.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Breakthrough\u201d was never published in magazines nor, to my knowledge, translated into other languages, and both Gollancz\u2019s Intrusions<\/em> from 1981 and Tartarus\u2019s The Collected Strange Stories<\/em> Vol. II from 1999, where it was included, are unavailable even in public or university libraries within a 100-mile radius of where I live. What\u2019s more, both collections were hardback exclusives, with a print run of the latter of 500 copies (plus 250 for a corrected edition in 2001), and both have been out of print now for ages. The only place where they pop up from time to time is on eBay for stratospherically extortionist prices. Thus, sadly, I have to make do without it for this review.<\/p>\n

Well. <\/p>\n

\u201cNo Time Is Passing\u201d has a handful of moments where reality cracks and terror flickers up, but all in all it\u2019s a kind of trippy trip one can\u2019t follow without substances similar to those the protagonist enjoys.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Fetch\u201d starts out as Aickman\u2019s most Oedipal exercise yet, a field where previous stories have earned him high marks already, after which it segues into a Scottish folk horror motif. It could have been a gripping story if it weren\u2019t for two weaknesses: Aickman\u2019s apparent endeavor to cram a door-stopping nineteenth-century Gothic novel tome into a modern novelette, and the rushed and comprehensively bungled preparation\/stage-setting the ending requires, whose intended impact therefore is considerably deflated.<\/p>\n

For \u201cLetters to the Postman,\u201d two or three twists earn it some credits in the horror department, but beyond these the novelette is psychologically fully predictable from the start and from there not particularly interesting to follow.<\/p>\n

But!<\/p>\n

\u201cHand in Glove,\u201d first published in 1979, is an excellent piece of psychological horror, where its initially soothing and dreamlike environment slowly turns out to have been beset by nightmare terrors all along, with great use of symbols and props to foreshadow each click of the ratchet. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe Next Glade,\u201d finally, might in the end not quite lead anywhere, but it pulls the rug of reality out from under the protagonist and the reader, incrementally and thoroughly, into a kind of \u201cfantasy\u201d indeed. While the naming of the protagonist and her two kids, Noelle and Agnes and Judith, respectively, is evocative of Christian myths, it seems to be rather a displacement and an\u2014increasingly failing\u2014suppression of archaic folk beliefs and fairy tales underneath. For the latter, elements of the various Sleeping Beauty versions come to mind in terms of what\u2019s penetrable and what\u2019s deadly when and for whom. Also, while the kids are not twins, there\u2019s a point where their behavior becomes inverted as if they had swapped their respective ages. Talking of which, without aspiring to reverse-engineer the novelette\u2019s theme at this point, \u201cinversion\u201d seems to be constantly played upon as an important motif, with the inverted building and the antipodal weapon as two of its most prominent markers.<\/p>\n

Both \u201cHand in Glove\u201d and \u201cThe Next Glade\u201d don\u2019t indulge in dainty minutiae but skillfully tell gripping stories where everything counts.<\/p>\n

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

Aickman, Robert. Intrusions<\/em>. Golancz, 1980. Reprint Tartarus Press<\/a>, 1999 and 2001<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\ud83c\udfac Only the slightest spoilers that won\u2019t hurt.<\/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-6713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-archive","h-entry","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6713","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=6713"}],"version-history":[{"count":78,"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7039,"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6713\/revisions\/7039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}