Forrest’s Reviews > Dark Entries > Status Update

Ramsey Campbell's reminisces about Aickman are interesting, intimate, and quite touching. Aickman doesn't sound like the sort of person I would want to spend a lot of time with, but I admire him. It's a nice ending (is "colophon" the right word?) to send the reader off looking for more of Aickman's work.

Aickman descends into decadence with "Bind Your Hair," a story about one innocent's introduction to what really goes on in a rural English village. This is folk horror with an Aickman touch - the ending leaves us at a precarious point as to what to expect for the heroine; this unpredictability engendering a more lasting dread. Fear for her safety and innocence continue to rise after the last word is read. 5*

"The View" is winsome and absolutely heart-rending. It has caused in me a genuine fear of growing old, something I have never really felt before. This is more from the sense of things past and lost than worry about decrepitude. This is the empty hole at the center of nostalgia, a true existential dread. Five feeling wholly rotten stars. Ugh, this story has bitten deep.

. . . he . . . did not risk another of those so natural interrogatives she so lightly made to seem so heavy and unnecessary.

Only Aickman could use the word "chiaroscuro" twice in the same sentence and have it sound like the most natural thing in the world. Reading his sentence-craft is like watching the painting of a masterpiece.

Left completely baffled by "Choice of Weapons". Is it a story of mesmerism? Vampirism? Hallucinatory madness? All of these? None? Lust and unrequited love, or a test of love, are at the heart of it, though there is an overtly political element to it, with its emphasis on caste and class. An engulfing story, especially at its twisted, unresolved ending. My brain is now churning. I love this vortex. Or maybe it's lust?

"Ringing the Changes" must have had a profound effect on David Lynch. Awkward, stilted conversation, the growing presence of a looming something, the unspoken, willfully-unacknowledged terrors felt by strangers in a community that seems to have "gone wrong," and the permanent, but unknown changes that come to those who have experienced true horror, are all Lynch's hallmarks. They are all present here.

Her expression indicated that she was one of those people whose friendliness has a precise and never-exceeded limit.

This is the sort of description that I love. I don't know that I could physically describe that expression, but I feel it.

I love that Aickman sees no need to explain Sally's "baby" in "The School Friend". This makes the reader split their fear between the lack of knowledge about the nature of the baby, the spectre in the house, and Mel's ambivalence about her decision to move or not to move to the Cyclades (not to mention whether or not she could trust Sally to remain sane). Splitting the horror causes gaps, and in those gaps is fear.

I'm waiting for a jump.scare, but I haven't known Aickman to do jump scares. But I am getting creeped out about, well, everything. The house, Sally, the mutilated stuffed animals. It all makes me nervous. Amazing how Aickman can suggest that something is wrong at just the right moment, in just the right way, but so subtley that you forget he's done it until the sense of wrong grows again. Literary "cancer".