Dark Entries

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The Waiting Room" is the least interesting, still worth reading but definitely one of his minor stories. This was my personal favourite in this collection, an unusual zombie story in which a dance with the dead allows a young wife a glimpse into something that is more alive than anything her husband might offer her will ever be. When a cacophony of bell-ringing – apparently an annual custom – strikes up, Gerald becomes increasingly convinced they must leave.

Aickman starts of with great, atmospheric descriptions and set ups that then kind of dwindle away, leaving the reader often with open endings and always without any kind of explanation or even a sense of why this story had to be told. it has empty spaces at the heart of it, the gap between love and the reality of living, the excruciating smallness of minds that are obsessed by small things - things like money, class, a name, an appearance, poverty, wealth.

The story is a tightrope walk between the real and the surreal and Aickman slips in and out of both these with consummate ease.

It always seems that Aickman’s fiction shows the limitations of rating books out of five stars: I enjoyed this more than some of the other collections; here, he has not yet honed his ability to make the reader profoundly uncomfortable. R. James in his understanding that ghost stories are stories of place, of the semantic range of the word "haunt". The story revolves around DC Comics character John Constantine, a street-savvy exorcist and con man. Indeed, sex is what leads people astray in almost all the stories in Dark Entries, a collection originally published in 1964 and now appearing in a new edition as part of a reissue by Faber of Aickman’s books to mark his centenary.the meaning is hidden between the sentences, implicit never explicit, a teasing game for the author, a puzzle for the reader to work out. Rankin has won numerous awards, including the Edgar Award in 2004 and is joined in this graphic novel by Italian artist Werther Dell’Edera, the illustrator of a number of American comics – mostly notably Vertigo’s LOVELESS.

Like James, Aickman was a cultured aesthete, delivering scares in a precise, somewhat lofty style as though addressing the reader from behind a veil of erudition. But overall I thought this was an excellent story with a very shadowy, almost "haunted house" atmosphere to it. My second favourite story, dealing with Carfax, a convalescent young man, who accepts a young woman’s invitation to her house which is situated on an island. This is a fine example of the craft involved when it comes to writing an unsettling tale for the horror is in watching on helplessly as things start spiralling out of control. Robert Aickman (1914–1981) was the grandson of Richard Marsh, a leading Victorian novelist of the occult.For me, ‘Choice of Weapons’ was a dud: messy and overlong, seeming to veer all over the place without ever reaching any sort of. And altough I thoroughly enjoyed most of the tales in this collection (the only one I have so far read from Aickman), I found most of them to be just little more than slightly original takes on old genre tropes - that show little courage when it comes to give us a proper eerie finale.

Aickman’s ‘strange stories’ (his preferred term) are constructed immaculately, the neuroses of his characters painted in subtle shades. There are few way-markers here, and the story roils in on itself, much as the house in which it takes place and the hostess of the house baffles the protagonist. My favourites were ‘The School Friend’ and ‘Ringing the Changes’, with ‘The View’ in close contention. I was especially impressed with "The School Friend," "Bind Your Hair," and "The View," all of which are tales of psychological ambiguity melded with supernaturalism that end with what I can only guess is an Aickman trademark: the subtle twist, usually just a sentence or two, that leaves the reader simultaneously perplexed, surprised, intrigued, and most importantly, unnerved.The school friend : A quintessential Aickman story that it will make you wonder days after you read it and eventually you will read it again. And while that particular tale does not appear in Dark Entries, I was pleased to discover a similar tone with the stories in this collection.