Robert Aickman - Cold Hand in Mine

Shortly after 3 A.M., when the September air was thinly strewn with drizzle, the young Prince Albrecht Von Ellendor, known as Elmo to his associates, because of the fire which to them emanated from him, entered the Tiergarten from the Liechtensteinallee, leaping over the locked gate; then found his way to the shore of the big lake to his left; and there, in the total darkness, made to shoot himself. (p. 44, Niemandswassser)

Cold Hand in Mine is the fifth collection of legendary author Robert Aickman, and it's one of his only volumes still available to the fan without a six figure book budget. Reading Robert Aickman is stepping into a dream. His tales are ephemeral and powerful, filled with disquieting oddities and hints of impossibility. These are subtle tales. They are not horror, but it is clear that they do not belong in the realm of the comfortable or the mundane.

Cold Hand in Mine opens with The Swords. Our narrator is adrift on his uncle’s pay, stopping mid shipping route to stay at lodgings he doesn’t chose for himself. A carnival swings on the other side of the town, and in a grimy tent, our protagonist finds men indulging in sadism and lust. The tale builds to its crescendo from Aickman’s careful handling of his protagonist, the contrast between the narrator’s measured narration and the primal desires and hesitations he’s filled with. The Swords isn’t unique in its focus on character. Aickman’s stories are about people coming, or failing to come, to grips with themselves, and his narrators’ catharsizes are bizarre and grotesque intrusions that forever alter lives. Aickman is, too, conscious of setting and its impact on characters. The Real Road to the Church shows the protagonist's increasing disconnect from her surroundings, and all surroundings. Amidst ominous hints and portents, the reader is grounded by Aickman’s ear for dialogue and the richness of localities depicted. Most of Aickman's characters have his skill at maintaining the line between profundity and pretentiousness, and they manage to discuss important concepts while retaining human warmth:

"I come here daily," he said in the end. "I like to contemplate the immensity. There is a lack of immensity in the world. Do you find that also?"

"Yes," said Rosa. "I suppose I do. but I don't look very much for it. I don't look very much for anything."

"It is perhaps odd," he continued, "that we have not met until now. I believe that you too walk along the cliff."

"Yes," said Rosa. "And I may have passed you without noticing. I do that often."

"I should think I should have noticed you," he said, as if seriously thinking about it. (p. 35, The Real Road to the Church)

The Real Road to the Church is not the only story where isolation plays a role. Many of the tales here are supremely melancholy, and many feature protagonists cut off from the main part of society. The key difference from the works of an author like Ligotti is that, in Aickman, there clearly is a world to be cut off from. There is happiness and beauty in Aickman's stories, even if we can only glimpse it from the periphery.

These are all deliberately paced, building stories. Pages From a Young Girl’s Journal and The Hospice in particular focus on the steadily accumulation of minor details. The former is, if you only look at the plot, one of the most traditional tales here, focusing on a young girl’s encounter with a vampire in an exotic locale. In actuality, however, almost none of the tale’s power comes from the direct contact with such a creature. It is, instead, a story of homesickness and adopting to one’s present conditions, and the fashion that the protagonist’s twisted love gradually overtakes the rest of the narrative is disturbing to watch. As the transformation continues and grows more obvious, the other characters shy away from the narrator, but they seem to do so more out of shame and disgust than terror as the girl’s newfound love dissolves her sense of duty and decorum. The Hospice, however, is the star of the collection. The narrator is a married man that, in the midst of his lengthy drive home, is forced to stop at an unfamiliar lodge. What’s so remarkable about the story is how disconcerting it becomes despite the total lack of obvious action. By the tale's end, every word feels prophetic, every action menacing, yet it's difficult to recall a single concrete threat in the whole thing.

The occasional tale is too deliberate. The collection’s two final pieces – Meeting Mr Millar and The Clock Watcher – are both too drawn out to retain their power. In Meeting Mr Millar,  A business moves into the building where the main character lives, and, though its employees seem supremely busy at all times, they never accomplish anything at all.  It is a coy tale that introduces hints but never connects the dots. Such an approach could work, but in a forty page story and without any particular climax, it just adds up to an unsatisfying piece. The Clock Watcher is meatier but suffers badly for its length. The narrator’s foreign wife’s obsession with the strange clocks of her homeland is an interesting concept and metaphor, and Aickman creates several unsettling scenes with the chiming of those clocks, but by the time the tale reaches its expected conclusion the reader’s become desensitized to the idea.

The prose throughout the collection is excellent and surreal, but it’s also surprisingly logical. The strangeness here comes from the oddities in the events depicted, not from any haziness depicting them. The Hospice is perhaps the best example of this, as it consists entirely of clearly described and mundane actions that add up to something that is, somehow, existentially terrifying. Near the story's beginning, our narrator describes a curious bowl of soup:

There was an enormous quantity of sup, in what Maybury realized was an unusually deep and wide plate. The amplitude of the plate had at first been masked by the circumstance that round much of its whole rim was inscribed, in large black letters, THE HOSPICE; rather in the style of a baby's plate, Maybury thought, if both lettering and plate had not been so immense. The soup itself was unusually weighty too: it had undoubtedly contained eggs as well as pulses, and steps have been taken to add "thickening" also. (p. 101)

Aickman’s characters, too, are often exceedingly rational in their approach to the impossible. After being driven away from his adult life, the distraught Prince Albrecht Von Allendorf in Niemandswasser returns to his memories of childhood and seeks to finally understand the experiences that formed him. To understand the lake that inexplicably injured his friend, NAME consults maps and testimonies before heading out to confront – and, potentially, be consumed by – his past.

Robert Aickman reads like no other writer I've yet experienced. Throughout this collection, he's far more concerned with atmosphere and character than any sort of storytelling in the traditional sense, but his skills at both of those and his urbane but effective prose keeps his stories gripping. While I can't say that every piece in Cold Hand in Mine performs flawlessly, I can say that they're all well worth trying. 

Reading in April

Yes, I'm aware that this is a tad late. As is probably fairly obvious, I've been quite busy lately, but, on the upside, my summer's shaping up to be filled with nothing but hot air and writing, redundant as the combo might prove to be. Future articles might - might - be a shade more on the timely side. In the meantime, let's bust out a time machine and figure out what I was reading two months ago.

Tau Zero boasts shallow characters, lax pacing, and a hard Science Fiction core so incredible that I'm still shaken a week after reading it. For the first time, I understand Hard Science Fiction. As it happens, there really are ideas strong enough to carry novels entirely on their own.

There's no denying that Aickman is a masterful writer. His prose is elegant, his atmospheres pervasive, his ideas fascinating. And yet I'm not sure that we're always on the same wavelength, to speak (as Robert Aickman certainly would not) in clichés. The Model felt like one of the lesser stories in Cold Hand in Mine. Masterfully done and subtle, certainly, but composed of a subtlety too urbane to bother with meaning or gratification.

Classics are always an odd experience. The light jokes of the time are, when looked at from six decades' distance and through a classic's deific airs, bizarre. The Martian Chronicles feels dated in parts, and some of the stories felt too reliant on unbelievable actions to me. That being said, there's no denying the brilliance of several of Bradbury's pieces here, including There Will Come Soft Rains, Usher II, and The Million-Year Picnic. This was my first Bradbury, but I'll be reading more for sure.

Crass, rude, and absurd, Exponential Apocalypse is a hilarious read. Review here.

Daniel Kraus's YA horror novel is equal parts grave robbing and coming of age, and both are pulled off with skill and wit. There are a few discolorations here and there, but they do little to damage the whole. Review here.

Death Poems is one of Ligotti's rarest works and getting it probably serves as a good road sign of the purchaser's loss of sanity. So, is Death Poems worth the exorbitant price (while I won't quote what I paid, I will say that most editions go for over a dollar a page)? In an objective sense, no, it's probably not. Death Poems is interesting and often highly amusing, but it is not Teatro Grottesco. This is the kind of work that's enjoyable, perhaps even thought provoking, but is certainly not life changing. And, for that price, life changing would be a fair expectation. Then again, if you're at the point where you're even considering such an insane purchase, I can almost guarantee that you'll find yourself sliding into it, wise decision or not. Ligotti becomes a bit of an obsession like that.

Like most Ligotti, I read Death Poems twice.

Kafka on the Shore has talking cats, jobs in the library, murderous corporate icons, teen runaways, and gateways to isolated dimensions, and it’s all painted in Murakami’s beautiful but understated prose. This book feels like the fulfillment of much of the man’s style, complete with the bizarre ordinary world of After Dark and the questions of identity and humanity filling Hard Boiled Wonderland. If I can ever wrap my mind around this properly, there will be a review. In the meantime: highly, highly recommended.

Black Halo improved on many of Tome of the Undergates’ flaws and proves a damn entertaining read. Review here.

Valente writes with imagery so thick it would be suffocating if it weren’t so deftly handled. Almost every paragraph here is filled with wonders, but Deathless is not just great prose. Valente manages to create a gripping plot of bizarre creatures and circumstances out of folklore and dreams. This is the rare book than can – and should – be called magical in every sense of that word.

Simply written but awesomely imaginative, Scott Westerfeld's YA steampunk novel is an engrossing read. The ending is rather abrupt, but Westerfeld twists world war one into a shape both amusing and fascinating. Recommended.

The Picture of Dorian Gray’s an interesting horror-style concept wrapped around a book of witty dialogue and fascinating ideas. There’s the occasional moment that drags – such as the seemingly endless chapter describing the minutia of our dubious protagonist’s life – but Wilde proves equally adept at making the reader laugh and think.

I won't be reviewing Historical Lovecraft due to the whole being in it thing, but I will say that it's filled with excellent stories, including Tobler's If Only to Taste Her Again, Meikle's Inquisitor, Reiss's The Chronicle of Aliyat Son of Aliyat, Joshua Reynolds' the Far Deep, and Tanzer's The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins among others. You know you're interested...

Reading in April

April was a rather slight month for me when it comes to quantity. In part, that's due to the length of some of the books, but, more, it's the result of me reading a large number of magazines (Weird Tales, Asimov's, Analog, and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine) in the middle. In an attempt to make my short story coverage more sensible, I'm no longer going to keep track of the magazines so much as the stories themselves, something that's taking far longer to do than I thought and will have to wait till next month to debut. But enough about things that nobody besides I and my I-should-be-using-Excel word documents care about. Let's get to some books…

Cold Hand in Mine was my first experience with cult horror author Robert Aickman, and it wasn't a disappointment. Aickman writes understated but magical stories, tales that aren't horrific in the slightest but are, instead, unsettling and profound from start to finish. Review coming up.

Great Expectations surprised me. Though I've often heard Di-ckens described as a clever writer, I was still expecting a dry "classics" read. Instead, I got prose that sang with wit, even if it was often bogged down. I found that the middle dragged fiercely, but the book was still quite enjoyable over all.

This is the conclusion to the Malazan series, a series that – as longtime readers know – I have quite an affinity for. I would not say that The Crippled God is my favorite volume, nor would I even say it is particularly close to that honor, but I did find it a quite satisfactory conclusion, filled with the grandeur, tension, awe, and depth that I expect when I begin one of Erikson's tomes. If there were to be no more Malazan novels, I would be sad but would not feel cheated. I will be rereading Malazan in the future, and will be covering it in some fashion, though I'm unsure exactly what shape that coverage will take.

Kiernan's writing is dark, lurid, and vivid. Her stories are composites of desire, lust, and decay, and they're filled with lush imagery that begs to be savored. Review coming.

The Wise Man's Fear functions in much the same way as The Name of the Wind. The prose is lyrical and fantastic, the story is as involving as could be, and the plot stutters and staggers over little ground. Review coming.

As always, Scalzi is amusing here. The novel is a mixture of wit, pulse pounding action, intrigue, and insightful social commentary. All that being said, there's still something holding me back from fully loving Scalzi, and I don't think it's a quantifiable thing. His writing and ideas are slick and enjoyable, but they're not something that I can fall for unreservedly. Still, this is recommended and, I think, highly unlikely to disappoint.

The Other is a powerfully written and involving horror novel. The characters and setting come to life through Tryon's prose. The reveal in the third act, and the climax, are breathtaking, though the tension before that does, perhaps, rise too slowly to be wholly effective. Still, this is an interesting and powerful read that's well worth checking out if it sounds interesting to you.