An Introduction by Richard T. Kelly
Is Robert Fordyce Aickman (1914–81) the twentieth century’s ‘most profound writer of what we call horror stories and he, with greater accuracy, preferred to call strange stories’? Such was the view of Peter Straub, voiced in a discerning introduction to a previous edition ofThe Wine-Dark Sea. If you grant Aickman his characteristic insistence on self-classification within this genre of ‘strange’, then you might say he was in a league of his own (rather as Edgar Allan Poe is the lone and undisputed heavyweight in the field of ‘tales of mystery and imagination’). ‘Horror’, though, is clearly the most compelling genre label that exists on the dark side of literary endeavour. So it might be simplest and most useful to the cause of extending Aickman’s fame if we agree that, yes, he was the finest horror writer of the last hundred years.
So elegantly and comprehensively does Aickman encompass all the traditional strengths and available complexities of the supernatural story that, at times, it’s hard to see how any subsequent practitioner could stand anywhere but in his shadow. True, there is perhaps a typical Aickman protagonist – usually but not always a man, and one who does not fit so well with others, temperamentally inclined to his own company. But Aickman has a considerable gift for putting us stealthily behind the eyes of said protagonist. Having established such identification, the way in which he then builds up a sense of dread is masterly. His construction of sentences and of narrative is patient and finical. He seems always to proceed from a rather grey-toned realism where detail accumulates without fuss, and the recognisable material world appears wholly four-square – until you realise that the narrative has been built as a cage, a kind of personal hell, and our protagonist is walking towards death as if in a dream.
This effect is especially pronounced – Aickman, as it were, preordains the final black flourish – in stories such as ‘Never Visit Venice’ (the title gives the nod) and ‘The Fetch’, whose confessional protagonist rightly judges himself ‘a haunted man’, his pursuer a grim and faceless wraith who emerges from the sea periodically to augur a death in the family. Sometimes, though, to paraphrase John Donne, the Aickman protagonist runs to death just as fast as death can meet him: as in ‘The Stains’, an account of a scholarly widower’s falling in love with – and plunging to his undoing through – a winsome young woman who is, in fact, some kind of dryad.
On this latter score it should be said that, for all Aickman’s seeming astringency, many of his stories possess a powerful erotic charge. There is, again, something dreamlike to how quickly in Aickman an attraction can proceed to a physical expression; and yet he also creates a deep unease whenever skin touches skin – as if desire (and the feminine) are forms of snare, varieties of doom. If such a tendency smacks rather of neurosis, one has to say that this is where a great deal of horror comes from; and Aickman carries off his version of it with great panache, always.
On the flipside of the coin one should also acknowledge Aickman’s refined facility for writing female protagonists, and that the ambience of such tales – the world they conjure, the character’s relations to people and things in that world – is highly distinctive and noteworthy within hisoeuvre. Aickman’s women are generally spared the sort of grisly fates he reserves for his men, and yet still he routinely leaves us to wonder if they are headed to heaven or hell, if not confined to some purgatory. Among his most admired stories in this line are ‘The Inner Room’ and ‘Into the Wood’, works in which the mystery deepens upon the f
