reading robert aickman

months ago I would go out for runs around 8:45pm. At night, I prefer pavement over trail. I go down a road with two lanes in each direction, a stream on one side, and the mountains on the other.

One can go for a full five minutes before a car drives by, which lets the runner hear the sounds of crickets and frogs by the creek, distant coyotes in the mountains, and himself hitting the road and breathing.

Why do I need to say this? Because that run hasn’t been the same since I read Robert Aickman. It is just a night run, and yet, just like in Aickman’s stories, there is something else out there.

It’s not a ghost or a monster. It’s not a thing. It’s a reality that cannot be seen nor described but feels present. One is now aware of it and it can or cannot be scary. It doesn’t have to be.

Back then I had finished reading Dark Entries. I am currently reading Cold Hand In Mine.

something else out there

Aickman shows a region of reality that we don’t see (or forget, or dismiss). The showing is not explicit though (it couldn’t be). And one doesn’t have to be of the superstitious type to feel this. Being human suffices.

The stories leave one wondering and swinging between specific elements (a gesture, the way a room is arranged) and a vague intuition that the supernatural occupies the same space as ordinary life.

halfway through cold hand in mine

Of Cold Hand in Mine, I’ve read The Swords, The Real Road to the Church, Niemandswasser, Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal, and The Hospice.

The Hospice is a masterpiece. I highlighted this line:

He lay there, half in and half out, for a long time. He concentrated on the thought that nothing had actually happened that was dangerous.

This somehow sums up Aickman. Nothing had actually happened that was dangerous. Maybury (the main character) recognizes that and I did too at that moment.

What is it then, in a sequence of ordinary events, that feels so dreadful and sinister? Something has gone wrong, we are sure of that, but we cannot point to anything specifically. Reality becomes uncertain for the characters in his stories.

And for the reader. And for a long time.

the only word to describe his stories is Aickmanesque

Aickman shines above any genre, and any attempt to categorize him by using the existing vocabulary (horror, uncanny, mystery) misses the mark.

The one and only word that does justice is Aickmanesque. And even that feels like an approximation.