A Review of Aickman's Heirs, Edited by Simon Stranzas

Toronto, Canada: Undertow Publications, 2015. Trade Paperback. 278 pp.

Jim Rockhill

Fiction can often be characterized by the elements in a story it stresses or de-emphasizes. Thus who a character is may be emphasized by where or when they lived, what actions they have taken, how they accomplished those actions and why they felt those actions were necessary. If placed into an equation, the product may lead to Who, How, or Why with What affecting how each interacts with the others and When or Where affecting the results to varying degrees. Much mainstream fiction focuses on Who or Why, just as much science fiction emphasizes How such an event could have occurred. Supernatural fiction tends to eschew the How in favor of Why, often through the pursuit of revelations related to Who is either creating or witnessing events.

Robert Aickman’s Strange Stories fit into a special category, because although they are frequently classified as supernatural stories, the one quality in them that remains most consistently elusive is precisely that enticing Why. Aickman’s use of detail lends such concreteness to his locations, familiarity to his characters, and realism to the events he describes that the reader has little difficulty believing in, say, the transformation of a home into a horrible cuckoo clock at the end of “Wood” or the harmless passage of blades through the complaisant woman in “The Swords”.  Given their careful description and elaborately managed contexts, How these things happen seems plausible enough if we could only determine Why they happened. There is a dream-logic operating in these stories which creates a network of possibilities, which can shift when experience changes the manner in which we interact with the deepest levels of our own consciousness. If as Heraclitus says, “No man steps into the same river twice,” no person experiences Aickman’s fiction in quite the same way, even if the difference between those persons is merely a matter of years rather than flesh.

Fortunately, the editor and contributors to this volume recognize and embrace the challenge set by these highly refined, decidedly idiosyncratic, and deeply moving tales. Strantzas states in his introduction that “the only hope we have to fully understand [Aickman’s work] is what we bring to it ourselves,” and set out to create a collection that would not pastiche Aickman, but emulate him by creating works in which the authors “mine their own personal psychology, tap their own subconsciousness . . . and create works that were impossible from another’s pen.”

The stories themselves live up to the promise Strantzas delivered in his closing paragraph: “You may not understand what follows. But you will remember it.” After reading reams of pages devoted to forgettable encounters between soap opera characters and shambling zombies/vampires/aliens/serial-killers/current-threat-of-the-month seasoned with adolescent angst, graphic sex and even more graphic violence in prose that ranges from purple to purulent, it is refreshing to encounter so many stories whose events, characters and imagery elicit such a variety of emotional responses, and demand the reader’s full attention long after the act of reading has ceased and these persistent, almost eidetic images should have faded.

This is a protean world, reshaped by fear, love, cupidity, and any number of different emotions. If one considers the two stories that open the book, changing shapes, shifting details, and odd resemblances run through Brian Evenson’s “Seaside Town” in quite a different manner than they do in the places, characters, and artifacts that make up Richard Gavin’s “Neithernor”, summoning equally intense yet different feelings of unease. John Howard follows with “Least Light, More Night”, successfully melding an array of uncanny motifs including hunts of the rampant logo in Joel Lane’s “Blue Train”, the cultists from Aickman’s “Larger Than Oneself”, the seductive persistence of Conrad Aiken’s “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” and perhaps Charles L. Grant’s “Coin of the Realm” into a fascinating rendezvous with the occult that even boasts an apt epigraph from the book Aickman quoted to preface Cold Hand in Mine—Sacheverell Sitwell’s For Want of the Golden City.

David Nickle, a writer with whom I had not been familiar, produces one of my favorite stories in the book. The disquieting, mythic “Camp”, with its gay couple, ostensibly friendly retirees, its animal-shaped cluster of lakes and tortuous journey by kayak has a mythic feel similar to the best work of Blackwood. It is an excellent example of an author following Aickman’s lead in leaving enough evidence to make it clear What happens, while leaving the Why hauntingly open.  

The book would be worth reading simply on the strength of those first four stories—each ambiguous without feeling in any way incomplete, just as each is unique in theme, style, and development—but there is considerable chilling pleasure in the remaining eleven stories as well, since narrative voice, structure, and source of inspiration vary considerably from one story to the next. D. P. Watt’s “A Delicate Craft” offers the most straightforward plotline in a story reminiscent of Charles L. Grant in the way it depicts the intersection of age and youth. Nadia Bulkin’s “Seven Minutes in Heaven” seems to accept cues from Ray Bradbury’s “Skeleton” and Karl Edward Wagner’s “Cedar Lane”, offers a complete contrast, with a plot that loops in and out of a perceived present affected by echoes of the past and glimpses of the future, innocuous details at one moment taking on terrifying significance the next. In Lynda E. Rucker’s “The Dying Season”, on the other hand, the references to horror films about home invasion tend to serve simultaneously as conscious distractions and unconscious reinforcements of the threats the protagonist feels within her toxic home environment.

Among many other fine stories in the book, John Langan creates an interesting riff on two of Aickman’s most sexually charged stories—“The Swords” and “Ravissante”—by choosing the female’s viewpoint instead of the male’s and channeling it through a raw narrative tone closer to the work of David J. Schow and Stephen King’s “The Road Virus Heads North” (itself an homage to M.R. James) than to Robert Aickman. The shock is rather similar to that produced when Schow inverted Fritz Leiber’s “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” in his celebrated and much more sexually explicit story “Red Light”. The new creation is not only worthy in its own right, it also forces us to re-examine the work(s) that inspired it.

As with any anthology, not all of the stories will appeal to all readers, but Strantzas must be congratulated for having the foresight and restraint necessary to allow each of these authors to heed their own anxieties and find their own way of expressing them. Over the past few years, Aickman’s fiction and quirky autobiographies have finally started to reach the larger audience they deserve. This fine anthology is a welcome step towards that reawakening.