Intrusions: Strange Tales

by Robert Aickman

Una muta corrispondenza tra una donna misteriosa e un portalettere, un tranquillo picnic ai confini del mondo conosciuto, streghe e fantasmi che aleggiano dalle brume scozzesi, orribili e infestanti visioni che si annidano ai piedi di una chiesa, un torrente che compare all’improvviso nel retro di una casa di campagna.

Intrusioni rappresenta il canto del cigno di Robert Aickman, pubblicato nell’agosto del 1980, sei mesi prima della morte dell’autore, e contiene alcuni dei suoi racconti più inquietanti, tra cui “Il guanto”, “L’altra radura” e “Lettere al postino”, quest’ultimo oggetto nel 2022 anche di una trasposizione cinematografica.

Gli animali gli erano quasi addosso e lasciavano pochi dubbi sulle loro intenzioni, ammesso che questa sia la parola adatta. In men che non si dica, erba e animali si ricoprirono di sangue, e di qualcos’altro di peggio del sangue. Subito dopo tutto fu quiete assoluta, ma il prato era visibilmente calpestato e rivoltato. Le code erano ritte, gli occhi insolitamente selvaggi. Ma la mandria, con la sua semplice massa, probabilmente nascose il peggio a Millicent. (“Il guanto”)

“Una storia di fantasmi, per essere efficace, deve aprire una porta laddove nessuno aveva mai notato la presenza una porta; e poi lasciarla aperta, o solo socchiusa.” (Robert Aickman)

Genres: Horror, Short Stories

216 pages, Hardcover

First published August 14, 1980

About the author

Author of: close to 50 "strange stories" in the weird-tale and ghost-story traditions, two novels (The Late Breakfasters and The Model), two volumes of memoir (The Attempted Rescue and The River Runs Uphill), and two books on the canals of England (Know Your Waterways and The Story of Our Inland Waterways).

Co-founder and longtime president of the Inland Waterways Association, an organization that in the middle of the 20th century restored a great part of England's deteriorating system of canals, now a major draw for recreation nationally and for tourism internationally.

Grandson of author Richard Marsh.

Reviews

[mark monday · Rating 4 out of 5]

the word "story" is too small to describe what can encapsulate a person's whole life. lives are not stories and yet the stories of Intrusions describe and encapsulate entire lives, in moments small and large and metaphorical and phantasmagorical and eerily, uncomfortably ordinary. Aickman, as ever, resists the urge to turn a life into a pat story, a series of events and decisions into a reliable narrative, an individual person into something that can be understood in 50 pages or less. his ambiguity is both a disturbance and an homage to the slippery spaces, the liminal, the movements so slow or so fast that they barely register as change, all the things that make a person's life so indescribable that in the end, words can but fail to be of use when portraying that life. ah, the eerie ordinariness of our prosaic lives, the shallows that contain secret depths. these lives, our lives, like intricately constructed but poorly running clockwork never showing the right time, or a play whose central player has forgotten their lines but the show must go ever on, or a happy empty house disturbed by the intruders that have entered it, insisting that they live there, that they know each other, that they even know themselves.

"Hand in Glove" - how does one deal with the death of love? is it a death due to a lover that infantilizes, a bullying boy to your adult woman? must the lover, or the loved one, die - to confirm if it was ever love at all?

"No Time is Passing" - how does one know a happy life is happy? is it not your beautiful house, is this not your beautiful wife? what if there is a dirty, dreamy place beyond that will neither confirm nor deny that happy life, but will make you wonder - how did you get there after all?

"The Next Glade" - how does one imagine a different husband, a different home, a different life altogether? is it just a step or a death away? will financial ruin confirm that dreams must stay dreams while life goes on after all?

"The Fetch" - This story about a wraith whose appearance presages the death of one of the narrator's loved ones is only the second traditional tale of the supernatural that I've read by Aickman. As with the first - the sublime vampire story "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal" - the fact that the author could have written perfectly accomplished and straightforward albeit old-fashioned horror fiction is fully illustrated. Although I saw few layers here, except perhaps autobiographical ones that contemplate Aickman's own relationships with women, that doesn't take away in the least from the strange, dislocating mood created and the sense of a man adrift in life, only anchored by the women whom he will eventually lose. The story is flawless.

"The Breakthrough" - how does one guard their inner self? is it by hiding the past, hiding from the past, compartmentalizing ourselves, creating new versions of ourselves, erasing our secrets so that our new selves can achieve a certain calm? what shall happen when our pasts and our inner selves break through, haunting us, showing themselves as quite alive after all?

"Letters to the Postman" - how does one recognize true love? is it what you have built in the mind or is it what you will make in the moment? when dreams come true and you learn that reality is not a dream, what will you do with that truth - one that confirms that even love is transactional after all?

"The Strangers" - how does one truly connect with another? is it by hook or by crook, by chance or misadventure, on the bed or in the heart or in an indescribable feeling for which words seem too small, words like love or friendship or connection? is our destiny to always be as dreams or as strangers to each other after all?

These are 7 fascinating, allegorical stories; 6 are gems and 1 imperfect. That less than pleasing story is "Hand in Glove" - the lessons learned felt unearned, showing a strangely petty side to Aickman, who is not an author I expected to deliver a grim twist simply to deliver a grim twist.

But the 6 that follow are so much better. Fulfilling yet still tantalizing after their finish. They were built for rereading. "No Time Is Passing" and "The Next Glade" bend both space and time in their portrait of unknowable places that exist in the woody park across the street and in the backyard past the creek, spaces that represent our dreams and fears, time that is passing too quickly to realize those dreams have gone and only fears remain. "The Strangers" and "The Breakthrough" feature hauntings: in the first, our drab lad is haunted by those he should know and love best; in the second, our urbane gent is haunted by manifestations that exist to upend the carefully predictable lives that he and his neighbors have so carefully constructed. "Letters to the Postman" portrays a wistful fantasy of love crushed by prosaic reality - one so unlike the fantasy that it achieves its own unreality in our naïve hero's mind, incapable of understanding what is obvious to all around him. My favorite of all, and somehow the most straightforward: "The Fetch" - which ends in media res. Which, in a way, makes it the most Aickman-esque of all these tales, as perhaps all of the stories that Aickman told are ones that describe just that state: "in the midst of things."

4.5 stars

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this collection with slight misgivings because I am coming very close to the point now where there will be no more new Aickman stories for me to read. That will be a sad occasion for me tempered perhaps by the fact that his stories are so endlessly re-readable; one always notices something else upon subsequent re-readings.

This is actually one of his better collections and that caught me by surprise as I wasn't expecting it. I had already read "The Fetch" and "The Next Glade" previously but all other others stories were strong making this of top quality throughout.

Several of the stories in this collection are concerned with faithlessness. "Hand in Glove" focuses on a woman trying to recover from an abusive relationship. In "No Time is Passing" a man is sheltered by a nebulous guardian angel like figure in order to protect him from having to come to terms with his philandering wife. "The Next Glade" focuses on a woman who is unsatisfied with her marriage and loses herself to fantasies. And "Letters to the Postman" features a man, romantically inexperienced, who only needs a tiny spark of encouragement to fully form a romantic fantasy about a women who he has never actually met that is bound to lead to disappointment.

There is also a couple of almost conventional ghost stories: "The Fetch" and "The Breakthrough" although I don't think conventional is every truly applicable to anything Aickman wrote.

I'll now take a short break before moving on to his final collection Night Voices.

[Chris M · Rating 2 out of 5]

Heard good things about this guy. I dunno know, man! Maybe I chose the wrong book to start.
When they say ‘Strange Tales’, they literally mean literally strange literally. These are not horror stories. These are just strange. The stories are filled with dream logic and weird stuff like all of sudden there is a tiny sphinx in a bird cage.
But also it’s boring. It doesn’t take three verbose paragraphs to tell me the guy is a postman holy shit!
Not my bag. It was interesting at the very least. I’m sure at the time this was written this stuff here was crazy. Not anymore.

PS. I’m the only person to give this book under four stars in all of goodreads so maybe don’t listen to me.... but i didn’t love it. I might try his other stuff.....

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps I'm being biased by giving this five stars, but I doubt many of the few who have read it would tell me I'm being unreasonable. If you have the money to buy this, then don't resist. It costs, but rewards. This is weird, supernatural fiction as art at its highest degree. Even the final story, Letters to the Postman, despite being the least supernatural of the six, has a devastating final few pages. (Also, not that it helped convince me to purchase it, but the book has the sleekest, most strikingly attractive cover I've ever seen.)

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's Robert Aickman, so I have trouble giving it anything less than 5. Most of the stories here aren't as well known because they weren't reprinted as heavily. The Tartarus edition even tacks on a cool unreleased story called "The Strangers" that he held back because he was afraid the real people he based the characters on would get wise to it. There are a couple of slightly more straightforward haunt stories, but these may be some of Aickman's most complex, focusing on human relationships and unfulfilled longings that manifest themselves into bizarre occurrences.