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Another collection of stories that, although not quite of the same consistantly high standard as those in Cold Hand in Mine, was still remarkably good. You see the thing about Aickman is that even when the stories aren't quite as interesting and gripping as the others (such as "Growing Boys", "The Fetch" and "Never Visit Venice"), they are still a pleasure to read because his prose is so engaging. I whole heartedly agree with S.T. Joshi when he said: "There are few writers who are as purely plea...
The Inner Room (5 stars)Aickman’s most chilling and memorable story in my opinion. A doll’s house stands as substitute for a Europe whose spiritual neglect by the allied victors of WW2 means its utter ruination. Never Visit Venice (5 stars)One of the most right-wing stories ever written. A scathing attack on egalitarian man, with a nod of respect to Mussolini at the end.Growing Boys (5 stars)Aickman’s most laugh-out-loud funny story, although it deals with a serious issue. Phineas Morke is what
What a fun and thought provoking book.I thought that I would be annoyed because I had heard that many of his stories were left open ended but found the opposite was true.The open endings left room for further thought on the stories that I still coninue to think about even though it's been a while since I read this book.I would classify his stories,for the most part,as fantasies as well as horror stories.He is very good at descriptions of people and places so that you feel that you are connected
This is just the kind of book I love to read in my cosy living room on dark and wintry rainy days, when the howl of the wind blows up from the bay and the now bare silhouetted trees sway violently back and forth outside my window. And illuminated by my reading lamp is the comforting creamy glow of an extra-large glass of Bailey’s, which I sip from every three or four pages to ponder over events in Aickman’s misty world.I’ll say yet again what I always say about Robert Aickman, it is truly not ov...
Having been a one-time lover of traditional stories by some of the greats of the last century or century and a half, I was much more at home with these tales than I might have been otherwise, assuming that I was in for tales of horror and the macabre.What we have here are subtle tales that evoke more with atmosphere and themes of travel and disturbing discoveries than outright hack and slash.My personal favorite was a retelling of Death in Venice with a particularly fantastical bent and no sign
Having just written a review of Cold Hand in Mine, a book I read some years back, I realized I had this volume and, oddly enough, had never read it. And so, with the first substantial winter's snow piling up outdoors, I draw my down comforter around me and began. Curiously, the title story was my least favorite in the book. I didn't read the eight longish stories (averaging 30-40 pages each) in sequence but as the mood took me. The last four tales I found the most intriguing, especially "Never V...
She seemed still to be looking up at him, and suddenly he waved to her, though it was not altogether the kind of thing he normally did. She waved back at him. Stephen even fancied she smiled at him. It seemed quite likely. She resumed her task.He waited for an instant, but she looked up no more. He continued on his way more slowly, and feeling more alive, even if only for moments. For those moments, it had been as if he still belonged to the human race, to the mass of mankind.These stories from
Average rating for the entire collection - 2.4 starsGiven the high ratings for this collection, I was hoping to enjoy these stories more than I ultimately did. Some of them took some discussion with a fellow reader to help understand what was going on, so I got more out of them than I would have on my own. However, there were only a few that I marked up because I really enjoyed the uneasy atmosphere and situations the characters found themselves in. My favorite above all of them was The Inner Ro...
Some of the stories in this collection were very twisted. I actually went back and re-read parts to make sure that I wasn't missing anything. Try and find a copy and read these unforgettable and unsettling stories.
I had read that Aickman possessed a style similar to that of Thomas Ligotti; with my completion of The Wine-Dark Sea I can definitely see certain parallels (but equally as many disparities), especially in the dichotomy between the elegantly placid and nonchalant narrative style and the uncanny, eerie unfolding of strange and spectral events on an Earth that is slightly out-of-tune to our own daily experience. With all of the unearthly unease generated by Aickman's closet-and-attic imagination, t...
I came across this selection of Robert Aickman’s short stories and it really knocked me out. The stories are strange, atmospheric, and thought-provoking. My favorites were ‘ Into the Wood’, ‘Never Visit Venice’, and ‘The Inner Room’, but I pretty much enjoyed all of them. The stories in ‘The Wine-Dark Sea' are difficult to categorize. They are certainly not horror, nor are they weird fiction. It’s probably best to say that they are just strange stories that satisfy.
Robert Aickman was not one of the big names in horror during his lifetime and he remains an unfairly neglected author. He won the World Fantasy Award for his story Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal, which is, ironically, one of his weakest stories (in my opinion, although others seem to like it more than I did). Aickman did not write stories that would make you jump out of your seat in terror. He wrote stories that leave the reader disturbed, with a sense of having had a brush with the uncanny.
These Stories Did Not Work for MeThe Wine-Dark Sea is the third collection of “strange tales” by Robert Aickman that I read, and the strangest thing about them was how little I liked them this time, given that my preceding two experiences were highly enjoyable. I don’t know whether the tales included in this collection were early stories of the writer or belonged to a later period of his literary career, but they were somewhat different from what I had so far read by Aickman in that the style wa...
The master of the literary weird. No one, not even M. R. James, can create such an atmosphere of elegant unease.
The last time I read a Robert Aickman book - his most famous short story collection, Cold Hand in Mine - I felt conflicted. I appreciated and admired the stories, but found the anticlimatic, deliberately ambiguous, and often abrupt endings to be problematic, making several of the stories feel either incomplete or simply disappointing. I think perhaps my more positive reaction to this collection was due to adjusted expectations, knowing more about what I would get; but my assessment of Cold H...
If you want to hear a lot of my thoughts on this amazing book, check out the Lit Century podcast episode I did with Catherine Nichols & Elisa Gabbert:https://lithub.com/how-robert-aickman..."Very good horror writers often demonstrate that ordinary life can be horrific and tedious at once for the sensitive person, and one suspects it was for Aickman" (Straub 8)."(The only other story here as explicit as that, apart form 'The Fetch and its family spectre, is 'The Wine-Dark Sea,' a forthright alleg...
Dipped into this short story collection as the mood struck me. Each story was 30-40 pp. of horror, called more exactly supernatural or "strange". Each concerns a character or characters who meet with a strange, otherworldly person, thing or events and their reactions to what they come upon. Endings are open-ended, not neatly tied up. The horror is subtle and creeps up on you. Aickman is a master in this genre; not for him the bloodfests of recent horror literature and movies. The writing conveys...
Yet another superb collection, tho one that will hardly satisfy those who view Aickman as a writer of what is nowadays seen as “weird“/dark fiction. “The Wine-Dark Sea” - being the opening, titular story - is a gorgeous, melancholy piece. Herein are set both the tone and theme of this collection. This story is centred around the journey to "...the island surrounded by the waters, the rock, the unshakable stone... symbols of inviolability and inaccessibility; the invisible or not-to-be-found cast...
I'm starting to think that the Serbian horror edition from this particular book publisher is actually choosen well.I am very picky with the horror genre, and I tend to feel indifferent with reading short stories;I was sure that this can't be the second short story horror book that I gave 5 stars in 2019- but alas, it was.And the Serbian edition is beautiful.The thing with these stories is that they don't have a definitive ending, it leaves more than one possibile ending and that actually mak...
This posthumous collection showcases too much of what I don't enjoy in Aickman's work (the diffuseness and aimless wordiness, the snobbishness, the narcissism, the whingeing about the modern world) for me to give it a higher rating, but there are a few stories here that are worth reading, two of those truly remarkable. "The Inner Room" is a creepy, beautifully imagined dolls' house tale that will appeal instantly to any reader who ever obsessed over a miniature home of her own. Aickman appears t...