Re: A good weird/horror/sci-fi book to recommend
Posted by:
Dale Nelson (IP Logged)
Date: 8 November, 2019 12:27PM
Aickman was, for me, an exciting personal discovery about 35 years ago. Living in a university town, I was able to get hold of books of his stories that had been published in the UK but not here, and, while I didn't read everything he had published, I read a lot of it. I don't own his books, but I remember liking The Houses of the Russians, The Same Dog, The School Friend, Ringing the Changes, The Inner Room (that's the one about the doll-house, right?), Into the Wood (the Swedish sanitarium one -- insomniacs), The Hospice (which seemed quite funny), and others. But when I get his books from a library now, I find the stories seem quickly to pall on me. There's that mannered prose and a sameness of his rather futile characters. If one is asked to name a Lovecraft character of particular interest,* one probably won't be able to come up with much -- quick, Albert Wilmarth? (I think he is a Lovecraft character.) But for Lovecraft's type of story this is not necessarily a problem, since though they too often start with trite accounts of persons who are deemed mad but, hideously, are not -- even so, his stories are not really stories of character, or not much. But Aickman does want you to be interested in the psychologies of his characters. The weird stuff that happens to them typically seems to be related in some way to the characters' deficiencies. And frankly this gets tiresome, to me. Aickman is certainly not an indispensable author, so far as I'm concerned, though I expect I'll read him occasionally (and I did go to the trouble of copying "The Houses of the Russians" and "Into the Wood").
*I'm not counting characters who are bizarre creatures such as Wilbur Whateley, the possessed wife in "Thing on the Doorstep," etc.