More than I generally like to pay for old paperbacks, a copy of Cold After years of fruitless search myself, I recently bought, for a few dollars Obscure in recent years his reputation has grown and grown, and his books have been brought back into print by several publishers. You might not be surprised when I suggest Aickman is a bit of an acquired taste.Īickman has long been a favorite of adventurous readers who search highĪnd low for the forgotten or the overlooked, the challenging and the

Only time and chance and that what might be called fate. Identify himself, because we aren't sure there's a killer at all, but Odd occurrences do not add up the killer does not remove a mask and Another word I'd use to describe his stories is ' uncanny,' since they rarely adhere to generic conventions but instead move subtly around them, hinting at unconscious drives, highlighting how the real world and the real people in it may be illusions obscuring darker forces at work. While his stories have been featured for decades in a myriad of horror fiction anthologies, I believe he was uncomfortable with confining his output to any single tradition Aickman preferred to label his works as 'strange stories.' To me, this seems right and apt. Much more idiosyncratically inveigling are a phoneless hotel where everyone eats ravenously and never leaves (except by hearse) a lady-in-the-Bavarian-lake who takes a Jaws-like bite out of one brother but isn't truly satisfied till another brother surrenders, boat and all a German war bride in England who collects cuckoo clocks and entertains an elusive clock repairman an enormous yellow dog that kills a schoolgirl-or a schoolgirl who runs off with an enormous yellow dog? Aickman writes far richer, subtler prose than most super-horror practitioners in place of terrifying climaxes and satisfyingly releasing denouements (which many will miss), he offers inventions that puzzle-and sometimes confuse-from beginning to end and don't really frighten unless and until their unanswered questions creep back into consciousness.It is probably a mistake to label Robert Aickman (1914 - 1981) a horror writer. The weakest entry-and, unfortunately, one of the longest-is the diary of an Anglo lass who is traveling en famille through Italy when Byron was the rage it takes far too many girlish burbles before she's met the dashing gent who claims to be ''very, very old'' and leaves her with the all-too-expected wound on the neck and appetite for other necks.

Eight ''strange'' stories-the best of which leave their weird happenings utterly unexplained, with some supernatural (or perhaps paranoiac) force clearly at work but none that can be tagged with a source or a genre.

Cold Hand in Mine by Robert Aickman