Customer Reviews

Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories

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I'm currently trying to read my way through the complete Aickman canon. I'm attacking this project with relish. There is no finer writer of a supernatural story than Robert Aickman. He had the literary skills of one of the world's finest writers, and his ability to create spooky and bizarre stories was unparalleled. He is a great author, and it's a shame that his books are not readily available.

This collection is perhaps Aickman's finest. The stories in here are of a consistently brilliant quality. The highlight is the World Fantasy Award-winning novella 'Pages from a Young Girl's Diary'. This story recounts the tale of a repressed young girl who falls in with a vampire. This is Aickman's only vampire tale. He tended toward more intellectual bogeyman, but in this story he shows the world how a vampire story should be written. It is, without question, the finest vampire tale I've ever read. Yes, better than Anne Rice, better than Lumley, better than Stoker, Simon Clark, and on and on. Aickman's literary abilities shine in this story.

Other excellent pieces include 'The Swords' and 'The Clock Watcher'. 'The Clock Watcher' is a creepy tale of a woman with an affinity for clocks. Her husband isn't sure what to make of her obsession and her strange link to clocks of any kind. This story kept me entranced and bedazzled until the end. 'The Swords' is a marvelous novella. It says something about a collection if there's a story of this caliber that ISN'T the best story in the book. 'The Swords' tells the story of a bizarre carnival sideshow with a girl and a pile of swords. I won't tell any more for fear of giving too much away. 'The Swords' is the lead-off story in the collection and it sets the tone. Fabulous.

I can't recommend Robert Aickman highly enough. I'm taking it upon myself as a one-man crusade to spread his name widely. I've only recently discovered the man and I've been ensorceled by his amazing talent. He writes with the ease and flair that's normally found in writers from the 19th century. It's often jarring to find Aickman characters in automobiles or airplanes. His stories, for the most part, could just as easily be set in the 1870s as the 1970s. Aickman is my literary find of the year. Let him be yours.

Robert Aickman (1914-1981), though he wrote plays and was active in the preservation of England's waterways, is best know for what he referred to as his "strange stories". Those seeking easy genre labels will, no doubt, insist on filing these stories away in the horror section. While this is not a completely inappropriate classification, it is more often than not misleading. At their best, Aickman's "strange stories" often possess many of the qualities of the horror genre (being weird, eerie, grotesque, etc.) while also sidestepping the conventional trappings of the field. My favorite Aickman stories leave me with a sense of unease and grim wonder beyond the ability of any other author I have ever read, the "horror" springing from subconscious realms and working upon those same areas in the psyche of the reader. Themes of alienation, squandered time, and sexual tension seem to be common in Aickman's work and "Cold Hand in Mine" contains elements of all three.

The book contains eight pieces:

"The Swords", "The Real Road to the Church", Niemandswasser", "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal", "The Hospice", "The Same Dog", "Meeting Mr. Millar" and "The Clock Watcher".

The most conventional piece in this collection, and thereby the most atypical for Aickman, is the award winning "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal". This is a fairly straightforward vampire narrative and, while certainly worth reading, not my favorite Aickman story.

All of the pieces in this book, in fact, are worth reading if you are interested in uncommon and literate fiction. There are, however, standout stories. For me these are (in order of appearance):

"The Swords" - An uneasy tale of sexual awakening, exploitation, and high sideshow weirdness with a strange young lady named Madonna (long before and definitely not the pop star).

"The Real Road to the Church" - A quite unconventional "ghost" story in which an unfulfilled woman comes face to face with. . .herself?

"The Hospice" - A motorist lost and low on gas spends a night in the title establishment. A tense and claustrophobic story that impresses itself upon one's mind like a bad dream.

"The Same Dog" - Love lost and cycles beyond human perception.

These four are Aickman at his unsettling and ambiguous best. You will find yourself captivated, moved and shaken by these stories and, if you are at all like me, you will not be sure what has actually happened in the narrative or why it has effected you. Rereading is almost imperative with Aickman's work if you seek to understand it.

Buy this book today if it is available (and consider yourself lucky if it is - it is a tragedy that Aickman's work is so difficult to come by).

I picked up this book and one other ("Painted Devils")at a garage sale, having heard good things about the author. I had thought they were more on the order of ghost or horror stories. Instead, this book is a cross-genre jewel that really can't be pushed into any easily recognized template. Each story involves somebody getting into a situation where something strange is happening, but can't seem to realize the danger until they are fully involved. Each story is so radically different that in some cases, it's like they were written by a different person. Out of the ten or so stories, there are one or two that don't fully work, but those that do are as original and wonderful as anything I've read in the field. Aickman shouldn't be considered anything less than a master, in spite of the fact that he's not as well known as some of his contemporaries of lesser talent.

This book was published in 1975 and was the fifth of the eight original collections of the author's short stories. The works in it have been dated between 1969 and 1975; all but one were from the early/mid-1970s, near the end of the author's career.

During his lifetime, Aickman published 47 short stories, and two more pieces have come into print since his death in 1981. For this reader, the best of his short works from throughout his career succeeded in balancing four elements: hypnotic developments and action, mesmerizing and dreamlike images that captured a character's inner life, an uncovering of the ways people behave toward each other, and a haunting and open-ended conclusion.

Model stories combining these things included "The Trains" (1951), "Ringing the Changes" (1955) and "The Swords" (1969). Almost as good were "The Inner Room" (1966) and "The Hospice" (1975), despite extra layers of obscurity or developments bordering on parody. By comparison, many other pieces by the author often contained something memorable but felt lacking in one element or another. Another type of worthwhile story from this writer expressed a bit more of what might be called his philosophical outlook, and for me the clearest of these was "The Wine-Dark Sea" (1966). Others were "Into the Wood" (1968) and "The View" (1951).

The present collection contained just two of the stories named above: "The Swords" and "The Hospice," works about sexual initiation and death, and which were mainly what made this collection worthwhile. The rest of the later pieces here, for me, were in the category of "not his best," comparatively lacking in depth and power; they were from a period when the pacing of his stories seemed to grow increasingly deliberate, the text longer and the prose heavier. "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal," set in Italy in the early 1800s, was a rare story for Aickman in that it contained a vampire, but felt overly obscure and didn't come close to rivaling something like LeFanu's "Carmilla."

Currently the cheapest options for assembling a large number of Aickman's short stories are the reprint collections Painted Devils and the New York edition of The Wine-Dark Sea, which together with the present collection contain 28 pieces altogether, including all of the pieces named above. In my opinion, Wine-Dark Sea and Painted Devils are better places to start, while Cold Hand is for those who are looking mainly for the writer's later, more deliberate tales. It's a pity that Cold Hand in Mine is the cheapest, most widely available collection for Aickman; it's not the most representative collection of work throughout his career.

Some excerpts:

"Life, as we know it, could hardly continue if men did not soon slay the dreamer inside them. There are the children to think of; the mothers who breed them and thus enable our race to endure; the economy; the ordered life of society."

"Men's dreams, their inner truth, are unheimlich also . . . . If any man examines his inner truth with both eyes wide open, and his inner eye wide open also, he will be overcome with terror at what he finds."

"Daily life is entirely a matter of the pattern men and women impose upon it . . . . None the less, reality lies far behind, and is unchangeable: is ritual, in fact."

"We control nothing of importance that happens to us."

"'Who am I?' whispered Rosa. 'And who are you?' 'I am your soul,' replied a remote voice she did not know."