Dark Entries

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Really, he's best when he's describing the most mundane things, the opening half of "Choice of Weapons" has a restaurant scene and a following scene which are full of his little unsettling asides (a boy falling off his bike) that act as a pacing tool as well as way just to convey mood. If that doesn't work for you, read the last section in here by Ramsey Campbell, who was a friend of Aickman's. Prior to this book, my only experience reading Aickman's work was "The Hospice" in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. A strange place, even stranger people, noise that makes you want to tear your hair out looking for some peace and a realization that attempting to escape would be rather futile an endeavour are all captured grimly in this tale. Although he falls in love with Ariel and finds the house idyllic, he notices some strange things about the place, in particular a number of inexplicable alterations to the landscape.

The story is a tightrope walk between the real and the surreal and Aickman slips in and out of both these with consummate ease. My favorite was the completely subtle and creepy "The School Friend," with its weird sexual ambiguities. A man stranded at the end of the line stays in an old waiting room, and witnesses more than a few apparitions. I was effortlessly drawn into nearly every story within a few sentences and held in thrall almost the entire time – wonderful!

The ending of the story remains a riddle to me, as much as the strange workings of the seemingly benevolent Dr. Rereading it also gave me an excuse to reread ‘A Change of Scene’, the even-better sequel Nina Allan wrote for the anthology Aickman’s Heirs (and then I ended up reading the rest of the anthology too). The School Friend - I thought this was a masterpiece, a truly frightening haunted house story with Aickman's vague, somewhat open-ended implications at their creepy best.

And while that particular tale does not appear in Dark Entries, I was pleased to discover a similar tone with the stories in this collection. In perhaps the best-known and most anthologised tale in the collection, “Ringing The Changes”, Gerald Banstead and his new, much younger wife Phrynne are honeymooning in a remote East Anglian seaside town where the church bells peal insistently one night a year. Who but Aickman could use the word "chiaroscuro" twice in the same sentence and make it feel like it's the most natural, sensible thing in the world? It is, as a number of Aickman stories are, about a man suddenly falling in love with a beautiful woman and becoming embroiled in dubious situations in his pursuit of her. The strange local ritual builds to a horrifying climax which seems to leave the couple divided in unspoken ways.I loved all six of these, but the standout was The View, in which a mid-life civil servant and amateur painter boards a ferry in Liverpool (as I used to, and bound presumably for the Isle of Man) and finds himself on a version of Circe's island, time liquefying and the days accumulating blurrily like impasto — and all the fuckedupnesses of life, work, love, creation, and the basic question of what gives our days meaning somehow leach out of the gauzy, indeterminate atmosphere.