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Because it’s the season for spooky stories I decided to finally get around to reading the copy of Dark Entries by Robert Aickman that I bought a while back.
Robert Aickman was a British short horror story writer who wrote almost exclusively strange tales. They’re not quite horror stories, more weird and spooky then horrific. He’s not super well known but they republished his stuff recently in a couple of volumes, one of which is pictured above.
His style is hard to describe but overall he’s pretty good. He really has a unique way of telling a story. He’s a bit different from most writers of weird tales. Most writers of the weird tend to really create an atmosphere through description of setting. Lovecrafts overwrought prose and Poe’s purple prose are kind of good examples of this.
Aickman is a bit different where the sense of strangeness and tension tends to almost come more from the characters, their relations, and the built environment. Something kind of feels ‘off’ in his stories in a twilight zone kind of way where it’s like the main character has woken up and everything is the same but something is different and only the main character notices it. It also makes his stories feel very British, especially mid-century 1950’s British, where you can tell the characters have a strong sense of what’s ‘proper’ and different class divisions and societal relations. So when something does seem ‘off’ it becomes very magnified because of British culture.
When I say ‘off’ I don’t mean anything obvious like the character looks like a scoundrel and is probably the guy you’d pick out in a police lineup as the murderer.
Additionally, his stories aren’t completely moralistic where you have a bunch of normal characters and then one quirky character not following the rules who’s existence is supposed to give a lesson on society. I also don’t mean ‘off’ in this manner either.
I mean ‘off’ in the the sense that the occurrence of the strangeness makes us realize how much we rely on social norms to grant context to what’s happening before us. Where it brings to light the artificiality or arbitrariness of a lot of ingrained social things.
For example, imagine you had to visit the doctor, a doctor you’ve never seen before, and you go to his office and find that it’s in the basement of a building where you have to go down a set of stairs into the unit. And then once in the unit instead of white walls, they were carpeted with shag green carpets.
Now these two things, location in a basement, green shag carpet walls, there’s nothing really wrong with them, nor is there really any reason why a doctors waiting room couldn’t be these two things. But all the same, if you were sitting in that doctors office you’d probably thing, hey, this doctors office is kind of weird.
I think it would feel this way because based on everything you’ve learned about doctors offices in the past; your experiences, seeing them on tv, you have a certain unconscious idea of what one is and isn’t, of how the receptionist should and should not treat you. Additionally, our entire middle class corporate modern society has been built up, more and more, around an idea of sameness where we expect all doctors waiting rooms to look the same, all restaurants to feel the same, all receptionists to follow the same script.
When it’s not like that, it feels weird and you begin to wonder why and flounder about a bit. You sense an artificiality of things, begin to become aware of your own biases.
Aickman’s stories are kind of like this. A lot of them tend to have fairly conventional plots. One story is basically a zombies attack a town story, another a ghost story, etc. However, what makes them weird very often isn’t the actual most blatant supernatural thing that’s occurring. Very often the supernatural thing that happens kind of happens offscreen. What makes them weird is feeling of a break in reality, the creation of a liminal space, due to the small details in things seemingly being ‘off’.
Additionally, a lot of his stories tend to end ambiguously. Where we know something happened in the end, probably have a good idea of what happened, but still aren’t quite sure why or what exactly happened. A lot of them kind of left me scratching my head being like huh? WTF just went down? Now with most writers I find the ambiguous ending more often than not feels unsatisfying. The stories feel unfinished or things in them symbolic in an unmotivated fashion.
However, with Aickman’s stories this didn’t really happen. The ambiguous endings weren’t that frustrating. Partially because of the simple plots, where at the end of the zombie story they escape, etc. at the end of the ghost story he continues out of his train station on his way, etc. Where overall you know what happened. But all the same, there’s an ambiguity to cause and effect in his stories, to the strange characters, to the odd little details.
It’s an ambiguity that made me want to re-read some of his stories and I’m normally not a person who likes to reread stories. I find what makes them so compelling in this manner is the strangeness of the little details makes you wonder if there is some kind of hidden motivation or reason to things. Is something sinister afoot? Is the shag green carpet walls of the doctors office the way they are because it hasn’t been changed since the 70s? Is it the way it is because the doctors office recently took over the building and hasn’t had time to renovate? Is it because of the personal taste of the doctor? Are such walls hygienic? Should I be concerned?
I find it no wonder that Robert Aickman (based on a description of his life in the forward) was probably what is best termed a lifelong small ‘c’ conservative. You know the type of person. The guy who enjoys being part of a historical society in his country, who likes routine, who probably has a boring office job but is kind of the cornerstone of the office, who likes to order the same meal every time he goes out at the same restaurant. In fact, in many ways I don’t think the stories he wrote could have been written by another type of person because he is keenly, keenly aware of the unconscious societal expectations we have around relationships and our built environment and how disconcerting they feel if they’re off.
As the truth of the matter is, I think we all have a different tolerance for unexpected weirdness in this way, no matter how accepting we may claim to be. Like at what point would you leave that doctors waiting room? Would it be the green shag carpet walls? Would it be a lack of any other patients waiting? Would it be a fish tank bubbling away with nothing inside? Would it be a much too friendly receptionist? I think that as you begin to add on more and more compounding things that are ‘off’ (without any context or explanation) there reaches a point where all of us would just be like, this doesn’t really feel like a doctors office, I’m leaving.
In our own way we are all just simple animals living in a built environment of brick and concrete, of glass and upholstery. And like any animal removed from it’s natural habitat, we react with confusion and startlement, feel the depths of the weird.
