Night Voices: Strange Stories

by Robert Aickman

Night Voices is the last, posthumously published collection of ‘strange stories’ by Robert Aickman (1914-1981). On the jacket of the first edition (1985) Aickman is quoted as saying, rather disingenuously: ‘I do not regard my work as fantasy. I try to depict the world as I see it.’ As Barry Humphries explains in his Introduction to this collection, Aickman’s fiction ‘... captures the very texture of a bad dream which may start, as such dreams do, beguilingly; until the dreamer (and reader) feels the first presentiment of encroaching nightmare—and cannot wake.

Contents:

The Stains (1980)
Marriage (1977)
The Inner Room (1966)
Ringing the Changes (1955)
The School Friend (1964)
Hand in Glove (1979)
Mark Ingestre: The Customer's Tale (1980)

Genres: Short Stories, Horror, Fiction, Fantasy

185 pages, Hardcover

First published June 14, 2013

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

[Glenn Russell]

"Above all, he can evoke in a few lines of concentrated prose, the tenebrous and oppressive atmosphere of a very bad and inescapable dream."

That's a quote from Barry Humphries' Forward to this collection of seven tales and one novella (The Model) by the master of the strange story, Robert Aickman. Also included in this fine Tartarus Press publication are a number of Aickman's Introductions to The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories.

To share a more specific taste of Robert Aickman's sublime storytelling, there's no substitute for the author's actual language, thus I'll link my comments to specific passages from the following sextet:

THE STAINS
"He knew bliss unequaled, unprecedented, assuredly unimagined. Moreover, the wonder lasted for longer than he would have conceived of as possible. That particularly struck him. Nell's flawed body was celestial. Nell herself was more wonderful than the dream of death. Nell could not possibly exist." So reflects main character Stephen who is now a widower following his dear wife Elizabeth's lengthy illness and passing. Stephen meets Nell when out on one of his solitary walks across the heathered uplands whilst vacationing with his elder brother and wife. Stephen's relationship with Nell deepens, although Nell's family and background is shrouded in secrets and concealed meanings, including her tending to a blind father with apparent supernatural powers. A touching Aickman tale combining love and tenderness with an eerie sense of foreboding and impending disaster.

JUST A SONG AT TWILIGHT
"On the mud road there was nothing, beyond a very occasional dirty cart, laden with inexplicable oddments, slowly dragged by a lean mule, the counterpart of its ragged driver. On each ridge was a crucifix, very fierce and bleeding; usually also far gone in rot and ants, and seeming to be little regarded. At the top of the fifth or sixth ridge, the other coastline came into sight, a fine wide panorama, though still sad, Lydia thought: with their house a half-mile or so below in the hot centre of it." Lydia and Timo, longtime Londoners, move to a rustic island to begin their life anew. They could hardly anticipate what will happen when listening to the sound of a ghost on the wind. A puzzling tale that underscores R. B. Russell's observation: "There can be no doubt that Aickman's stories succeed in causing uncertainty and unease in the mind of the reader. . . . That which is left imperfectly explained haunts the more imaginative reader, who will go over the story for clues and hints."

LAURA
"In any case, from almost the first moment that I entered the big room clutching my bottle, my attention had been riveted upon a girl who was there. I say a girl; but, in fact, she was considerably older than I was, thirty at least, I should suppose. She was very blonde and slender, almost ethereal. She had the greenest eyes I had ever seen - or have ever seen since; and the biggest too. She wore white boots which went right up under her dress." This from when the unnamed narrator, age twenty, first meets Laura. His subsequent encounters with Laura touch on what can be interpreted as either coincidence, myth, archetype or even the supernatural. There's good reason why Barry Humphries stated: "He (Robert Aickman) captures the very texture of a bad dream which may start, as such dreams do, beguilingly; until the dreamer (and reader) feels the first presentiment of encroaching nightmare - and cannot wake."

ROSAMUND'S BOWER
"There was even a lingering peacock, which screamed vindictively, and continued to scream. All its feathers were greying, so that it looked to be the oldest peacock Aylwin-Scott had ever come upon, and it seemed to be resenting to the full both that fact and his own presence. He reflected that it matters less how old and grey a peacock is when there is no observer; and that now an observer had quite irrationally intruded." Sound ominous? An old, grey peacock. Brings to mind the words of Laid Barron: "Aickman's ideas entrain the subconscious and mutate it in the fashion that transgressive art must."

THE COFFIN HOUSE
"The windows were boarded up, but there were the remains of a primitive verandah. The two women pressed themselves against the black dilapidated woodwork while the rain beat at them. It was darkening all the time with the premature-seeming darkness of Christmas Day. Suddenly Jessica noticed that the door of the hut was open. Standing in it was a very large elderly woman with grey hair drawn back into a bun, and strong bony features. She was muffled in a vague, navy-blue wrapper, and appeared indifferent, perhaps habituated, to the weather. She was looking at the two land girls from grey commanding eyes." Poetess Jessica Yarrow and her friend Bunty Baines take a long walk on Christmas day across the bulrush-green fells. Suddenly, there's a torrential rain and they seek cover in a hut. It must have been this very story that prompted Peter Straub to judge Robert Aickman "the twentieth century's most profound writer of what we call horror stories." Let me warn you, The Coffin House is truly horrifying. Pleasant dreams after taking the readerly plunge.

THE FULLY-CONDUCTED TOUR
"Since I've written quite a number of stories about strange occurrences - and, what's more, they've some of them been published, it's natural that people are always asking how many things of the kind have actually happened to me. . . . One point is that the strangeness usually takes an unexpected form, it is no good looking for something strange. It only happens when you're not looking. I'll tell you a short tale which may help to illustrate. It's one of a quite large number that have come into my life." Sounds innocent enough as Robert Aickman takes on the role of narrator here but as we learn, especially at the very end, what begins as innocence flips into a tale of terror, this time no so much of the supernatural variety as that of sheer sadism and evil. Robert Aickman has written dozens of strange tales but The Fully-Conducted Tour most certainly wins the prize for the largest number of blameless women and men (tourists, for crying out loud) cut down by the Grim Reaper.


British author Robert Aickman, 1914-1981

[mark monday · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Aickman, master of unease and creeping dread and eerie ambiguity, is primarily a literary writer. his ancestors include Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce and Algernon Blackwood; his descendants include Thomas Ligotti; his most obvious contemporary would be Joyce Carol Oates. much like Oates, his horrors are rarely visceral or even material ones - indeed, Poe is far more clear in his depiction of "horror" than Aickman is in most of their stories. both Aickman and Oates specialize in the imagining of precisely detailed, deeply characterized stories where the mundane is squarely in the foreground and various horrors scratch and whisper and moan from the edges, the outskirts, from the outside in and from the inside out. what are those horrors? intangible ones: the unknown; capture; disease; the long distance that can occur between lovers; the shorter distance between ourselves and our mistakes or even our deaths. Aickman's horrors do not spring fully-formed upon his protagonists; instead they slowly bleed into situations. what was once normal becomes something different, something disturbing, something abnormal. Aickman's horrors are usually unexplained and unexplainable. how does one go about explaining life and death? the author doesn't even try. which is why his tales are so intimately discomfiting - and so profound.

take one of the shorter stories in this impressive collection. Just a Song at Twilight is about an awkward married couple and their abrupt move to an island where they once enjoyed a vacation. Lydia and Timo barely know each other and they understand each other even less. why have they even moved here, to what end? they are not really sure. the island is not a welcoming one but it is not a particularly forbidding one either. the island is, simply enough, not their world. but the story is not about the island or their unsettling new home in this foreign country. it is about Lydia and Timo and what they don't understand about each other and about how they don't like what they come to understand. the story delineates what is their world and what is a foreign world and how they unsuccessfully attempt to navigate between the two. the horror of the story is slow to appear: an empty house... a fence that has mysteriously appeared... a stranger trying to leave the island... a song in the distance that poor Lydia can't hear but which Timo and the nervous stranger seem quite attuned to. take the opening sentence:

Up the mud road, neither old nor new, but timeless and sad as the people who built it, advanced the much battered station-wagon, far, alas, from any station.

take the closing sentence:

Then the night was on her like the curtain at the end of a play.

that's my favorite story in the collection but I don't think it is actually the strongest. that would be the nearly indescribable (a fitting description for many Aickman stories) novella The Stains. a man loses his wife to an unnamed disease. he joins his brother - a reverend and, more importantly, an expert on lichens - to get away from his grief. he meets a mysterious young lady while hiking. they fall in love. and all around them, lichens begin to grow, to surround.

why? to what end? there's no answer to that question. the story seems to have the structure of a classic horror tale: sad man with a sad history meets mysterious person with mysterious history and that mysterious history comes to get him in the end. but it is so much more than that. the nature of grief, the idea of an endless love, the unknown creeping upon the known and transforming it - or destroying it.

Aickman writes horror as symbol and metaphor, and delivers that horror in prose that is haunting yet often sharp - even sharply comic, lacerating at times - and with such sure and steady control over each story's markedly different tones and voices and visions. Aickman is a master.

____________________

musical accompaniment

His Name Is Alive: Home Is in Your Head
Chet Baker: Sings Again
Goldfrapp: Felt Mountain

[Simon · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection containing several works unpublished in the author's lifetime along with the novella "The Model", all his introductions to the various Fontana Books of ghost stories that he edited in the 60's and early 70's as well as a piece by Ramsey Campbell in which he recollects the times he had met Aickman over the years.

Certainly not a place to start with this author although there is the excellent story "The Stains" which is up there with his best work. Other stories are of a lesser standard and I just couldn't get into "The Model".

Reading his introductions to the aforementioned Fontana ghost story collections was most illuminating with regards to what Aickman saw as the proper function of the ghost story and what he tried to do in his own work. In Particular he makes it clear that his stories are not meant to be fully comprehensible and explainable. He saw ghost stories as a refuge for mankind's need for the mysterious and unknowable in an age in which everything was being rationalised. It certainly explains why, however much I feel that I can understand what is going on in his stories, there are always at least a few loose ends, facts that just don't fit in with everything else. I don't need to feel bad that I can't fully understand them, they're not meant to be fully understood.

Now to go back and revisit some of my favourites...

[Tom]

The Model is an odd novella that starts off in the style of literary realism and slips explicitly into a dreamy fairytale. To the extent that it works, it’s held together by Aickman’s acute observation of human behaviour (and when deviation from expected behaviour contributes to a strange or dreamlike feeling). Aickman normally uses his skill at this to ground his strange stories and it’s interesting to see it put to work in a different context here. I wouldn’t say it’s essential for fans of his short fiction (I think The Late Breakfasters is worth trying before this), but if you enjoy Aickman’s prose style then you’ll probably find something to enjoy here too.

The rest of the Tartarus edition is great. A few very good stories (including ‘The Stains’ and ‘The Fully-Conducted Tour’) and some lesser ones that still reward rereading (‘Just a Song at Twilight’ and ‘Laura’ are short but memorable, ‘Rosamund’s Bower’ is among his strangest). It also includes Aickman’s introductions to the Fontana ghost story anthologies that he edited. They all tend to repeat the same basic theses (ghost stories are more akin to poetry than any other literary form, ghost stories work on the unconscious rather than rational part of the mind, overindulgence in scientism has been a disaster for humanity, etc.) but it’s nice to have them all in one place. The foreword, taken from the original edition, by Barry Humphries and the afterword by Ramsey Campbell bookend the volume nicely.

[Bryan--The Bee’s Knees · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's doubtful that you've made your way to this page unless you already have an appreciation or at least an interest in the works of Robert Aickman. This slim volume of six stories with a forward by Barry Humphries is a posthumous collection filled out with at least two stories previously collected (The Stains, and The Trains, both appearing in The Wine-Dark Sea if not perhaps others), and due to the collector premium (get your copy as of 5/27/18 for $762.44 on Amazon!<--ridiculous), may not be worth seeking out to someone new to Mr. Aickman. Completists, on the other hand, may want this one if the rest of their collection lacks some or all of the other stories.

First, a personal word about Mr. Aickman's stories. This collection is subtitled 'Strange Stories', and I don't know if there really is any better way of describing them. There is always a supernatural or supra-normal element present, but there is no Sturm und Drang to them, no amateurish surprises at the end. The effect of a Robert Aickman story is more like barometric change in the weather. What was once light and ordinary becomes like an omnipresent yet intangible weight. These are stories of unease, disquiet, and fractured views.

Summarizing any story by Aickman is a ridiculous project. If one of his stories is like a piece of cake, then trying to explain it would be like force feeding someone all of the ingredients before mixing and cooking. All of the pleasure would be gone. I will simply say that the contents of 'Night Voices' is as indicative of Mr. Aickman's strengths as any of his other collections. The purpose of this review is to give out the information in the Table of Contents for those who may be interested.

Besides the introduction and the two stories mentioned before, there are four other stories.

Just a song at Twilight
Laura
Rosamund's Bower
Mark Ingestre: The Customer's Tale

Of these, I enjoyed Just a Song at Twilight the most, and Rosamund's Bower the least, though putting any story by Mr. Aickman in a list of most to least favorite really doesn't apply.

Reader's who are interested in Mr. Aickman's stories, or who enjoy supernatural stories with a more sedate presentation would be far better served to begin with The Wine-dark Sea, a larger and more comprehensive collection. The drawbacks to this volume are the two stories available elsewhere (albeit two of his best) and the cost on the used market. Four stars for the content, but only three for the packaging.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

I doubt I'll ever give Aickman five stars, but nevertheless the majority of his stories are incredible. Anyone familiar will know that the stories of his that work for you do so in ways that you'll probably never understand, but for the stories that don't work it's the same reason - you just don't know. The mystery that accompanies each story always leaves its mark, but the frustrating thing is that you imagine that if you thought hard enough retrospectively, you'd understand what you know is eluding you. But you also know that perhaps in knowing, the payoff just wouldn't be as exhilarating. The Stains and Laura are, as always with an Aickman collection, now two of my most admired short stories. Do yourself a favour and seek this man out, despite the cost. There's a reason why Aickman is expensive and James Patterson solicits himself on Tesco stalls for €4.95 a pop.

[Ross Scott-Buccleuch · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5 for the stories. Gave up on The Model, which was tedious and not at all like any of the Aickman I like.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Combines one of his best ("The stains") with one of his worst ("Rosamund's Bower"). Not really the ideal introduction.