Customer Reviews

Cold Hand in Mine

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Along with Sub Rosa, one of the twentieth century's two or three greatest collections of weird fiction, Cold Hand in Mine stands among Aickman's best books. It contains eight "strange stories", his preferred term for his own works and a very apposite label: more ambiguous and more inclusive than the usual "ghost story" rubric, and much more appropriate to Aickman's achievement, which in his best stories is less that of a teller of ghostly tales than that of the ghost itself. "The Hospice", in which a man spends a night at the establishment of the title, is a brilliant example. The surroundings are luxurious, the food plentiful and rich, the staff polite and obliging; yet the guests (inmates?) are prone to strange moods and night-time excursions - and at least one of them is chained to the wall during dinner. The protagonist leaves the Hospice in the morning, physically unharmed but riding in a hearse which has come for one of the residents. Sexual unease and perversity pervade several of the tales, most spectacularly "The Swords", in which a beautifully described, tatty circus act is the instrument of a young man's fall from innocence; and "Niemandswasser", one of the best in this best of collections, in which a German aristocrat, alone in the unclaimed, desolate middle of an icy lake ("no man's water"), meets a dreadful female apparition with a mouth of spiny, fishlike teeth. More conventional and far more civilised is the vampire story "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal"; but that's the only nod to genre conventions you're likely to find here. "The Same Dog", with its weird deja-vu plot; "Meeting Mr Millar" with its narrator's haunted neighbour; "The Clock Watcher", which is partly, perhaps, about the triumph of time over love; and "The Real Road to the Church", in which a woman witnesses a strange ceremony, then meets, and flees from, the image of her own soul, are all exquisitely written, startling and haunting. An encounter with a real ghost could hardly be more unsettling than an encounter with one of Aickman's stories.

No matter how well-versed in horror fiction you are, nothing can really prepare you for Robert Aickman. The great man wisely termed his own tales "strange stories" to distinguish them from other works in the genre, and they remain some of the most original, intriguing, and haunting narratives ever to be gathered under the horror-fantasy umbrella.
You've probably guessed that there are no exploding heads or dripping intestines being devoured by zombies in Aickman's world, so fans of that particular brand of horror need not apply. But if you admire Henry James and Walter de la Mare, I think you'll respond well to these stories. In the writing of Aickman, unsettling possibilities abound. Loose ends are not tied into a pretty knot. Characters see strange, inexplicable things--or do they only imagine that they see them? I can't stress this enough: if you crave a neat resolution at the end of a story, you should probably avoid Aickman altogether. Ambiguity was his byword.
What's interesting about Robert Aickman's work is that the first couple of stories might not leave much of an impression on you. But when you've gotten through a few more of them, you'll find that they have an insidious, cumulative effect--so that, by the time you read 'The Same Dog' (the sixth in this collection of eight tales), all it takes to send a chill down your spine is a modest sentence like, "One day they were badly frightened." Sheer genius!

Robert Aickman's term for his stories is "strange," and indeed they are, but I tend to think of them as "disquieting." His fiction takes me places that are not merely macabre or frightening; I find myself as adrift as his characters, not quite sure what is real. Much is left to my own imagination, and the most disquieting part is how I choose to fill in the gaps.

I am a great fan of weird and unsettling fiction. Things that don't fall into neat categories please me. And Aickman's ability to render atmosphere -- what I'd consider the essence of weird fiction -- is incomparable.

A favorite story in this collection is ""Niemandswasser." Anyone who has rowed a small boat over an expanse of cold, dark, deep water will feel the pull of this somewhat fanciful tale, set in Austria before the first world war. The title translates as "No Man's Water," and it has touches of the seafarer's tale to it, but it also reminded me a bit of Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales, at least in terms of time and aristocratic setting.

Reading Aickman requires a good deal of patience, or should I say a somewhat passive approach. When I read Aickman in a "normal" manner, marching along sentence by sentence, trying to connect things rationally, I grow impatient. But when I allow the sentences to weave themselves around me, like tendrils, I find myself entrapped in Aickman's universe. Perhaps there is something essentially masochistic in this process. It doesn't feel particularly healthy, but like any addict, I come back for more.

There are sexual undertones, but there's far more at work than a dark yearning or the frisson of the taboo. There is no trace of the sneering goth or woozily sexy vampire story about Aickman. As previously mentioned, there are touches of Dinesen-like grotesqueness, but most of Aickman's effect is achieved very quietly. His stories seem to work mostly on a subconscious level, and understanding why they work is quite beyond me. Or perhaps I simply don't want to examine the "why" too closely. It's like seeing something in the periphery of my vision, but dreading to turn my head and look at whatever it is directly.

"Cold Hand in Mine may not be Aickman's best, yet it contains one excellent story: "The Hospice". Nothing is explained, all is guessable about what is transpiring when a traveller unexpectedly find himself in a quasi-hotel, where,fed an incredible amount of food he does not actually want, he notices the odd deportment of the guests. He is awoken by a scream in the night: someone has died, and he, next morning, departs (living) with the hearse. It is surprising that he leaves at all. It is possible that "The Hospice" is a half-way house between the living and the dead. But one imagines Aickman would have, if asked, refused to commit himself in order to let the reader decide.

I have a difficult time judging the "strange tales" of Robert Aickman, particularly with respect to this curious little collection. At one moment I find myself in thrall to his literate, ominous subtleties; and just a few pages later I find myself dozing off. I've been enthralled by even the wordiest and most ridiculously well read of writers, and it isn't his excessive verbiage that bothers me at all; it simply seems that sometimes Aickman can't decide whether he's writing sophisticated soap opera or really great horror. In many of his tales--"The Clock Watcher" is a case in point--he waits far too long to deliver the proverbial punch, deluging the tale with unnecessary subplots and reminiscences on the part of the narrators. This is the case with three other very long stories in the collection. The supernatural forces at work in his fiction must have great patience to restrain themselves, I guess, as the author constructs a veritable tower of paragraphs filled with precisely nothing. The reader must have a great deal as well. I can tell when a writer, particularly of the macabre variety is building a mood, and this isn't what he's doing. He just goes off on tangents.

Which isn't to say that there isn't a great deal to recommend him; when he delivers, he really delivers. This is precisely what frustrates me about him. One senses the potential talent of an M.R. James wasted in certain stories. "The Hospice", which the most recent reviewer of this product cited as so stunning, is precisely the tale I had the biggest problem with; it is all suggestion and no substance. I think anyone who has read this story would think of the protagonist, "He's already dead", which would have been pretty hackneyed; but even that would have satisfied me more than the sorry excuse for an ending Aickman actually provides. It doesn't provide some philosophical meditation on mortality, it just ends inconclusively.

I would recommend "The Wine Dark Sea" over this collection. The genuinely chilling little tale, up there with the greats as far as I'm concerned, "Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen", shows what he could do when he put the convoluted stuff aside. "Cold Hand" is more for collectors.