Robert Aickman.
Last Friday I went along to the British Library for “Even Stranger Things”, an evening of talks and discussion about Robert Aickman, whose unsettling and beautifully written horror stories (though he preferred the term “strange stories”) were reissued by Faber here in the UK a couple of years ago, with a new collection set for publication in the States next year.
It was frequently remarked by several of the speakers – who included the horror writer Ramsey Campbell, who knew Aickman, and Reece Shearsmith and Jeremy Dyson of the League of Gentlemen – that Aickman’s stories are like waking dreams (or nightmares). The author Fritz Leiber called Aickman a “weatherman of the subconscious”, which is a wonderful phrase, and he certainly has the rare knack of conjuring the atmosphere and unbalanced logic of a dream, without resorting to cliché or pretentiousness.
I keep a sporadic dream diary, and for particularly memorable or evocative dreams it can be fun trying to identify a “plot” or through-line amidst all the craziness. And that fleeting, liminal space between waking and sleeping can produce some extraordinary and surprising ideas (and sometimes whole sentences). But I’ve never been able to hover there for very long. Soon the sharp elbows of reality barge their way in. But I always try and keep a channel open to my subconscious, to that intuitive part of my imagination, in the hope that something good – or scary, or interesting – will come to call.
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