Scarily Suburban

Dark Entries

Robert Aickman

(Faber and Faber, 2014)

Robert Aickman is probably the best writer of ghost stories you’ve never heard unless you’re a member of his growing but still fashionably exclusive band of admirers.

He takes and does remarkable things with a form where the quality of the content is sometimes stifled by its conventions, creating along the way strange tales, he didn’t much care for the term ghost story, that manage to be both powerfully unsettling and strangely suburban.

This rerelease of Aickman’s 1964 debut collection showcases his distinctive talents perfectly. In half a dozen stories we encounter a holiday resort where the dead come back to life once a year (Ringing the Changes); a haunted railway waiting room (The Waiting Room); and some sublimely creepy goings on in the Northamptonshire countryside (Bind Your Hair)

All of this is solidly spooky stuff, the sort of material from which any half competent writer working in the genre should be able to produce something scary. As always with Aickman the set- up is more powerful than the payoff; in fact the best of his stories are all set-up.

Here in the otherwise unremarkable story ‘The School Friend’ the arrival of that horror staple a funeral procession is made somehow more unsettling by being viewed through a shop window filled with cereal packets. In ‘Ring the Changes’ the, repressed of course, domestic angst of the boozy couple running the run-down hotel is more horrific than the dead coming back to life. As for the surly railway employee in ‘The Waiting Room’, he will be as familiar an exemplar of our legendarily dire customer service now as he would have been back in the sixties. ‘Bind Your Hair’, easily the best story in the collection sees Aickman in full effect, brilliantly using atmospherics to set up a single satisfyingly surreal image.

The things that make Robert Aickman so attractive to readers who ‘get’ his work tend also to be what distances those who don’t. He doesn’t hand things to his readers on a plate; he works hard to create his effects and expects them to make a similar effort.

Faber are to be praised for republishing Dark Entries along with Aickman’s two other short story collections and his brace of less successful novels. Each features reminisces by fellow writers who knew him, in this volume they are provided by Richard T Kelly and Ramsey Campbell, these suggest that Aickman would be a fitting subject for a literary biographer willing to stray away from the usual suspects. Such a book, were it written, along with these high quality reissues would do much to introduce his work to a new audience.