Aickman's Heirs

Robert Aickman wrote ghost stories. He preferred the term ‘strange stories’ and I think that’s a far better description because, as someone once remarked, trying to understand them was like trying to pick up smoke with a fork. Yet they all had a unique, unsettling atmosphere that made the best of them crawl under your skin and stay there, like a half-remembered dream impossible to shake off.

Here is a book of unsettling stories all ‘inspired’ by Aickman, who died in 1981. A lot of them don’t work; for me, at least. They’re too subtle for their own good and they read as though the writers were going out of their way to be deliberately obscure. Aickman could certainly be obscure, but I never had the feeling he was doing it on purpose; it was as though his pen and the story had taken him over and dictated where they wanted to go.

Yet for all that I love this book. Not just for the haunting illustration on the cover and the actual size and feel of the heavy paper; it feels like a real book. I love it for the fact that in a world with so many writers and publishers chasing the ever-elusive bestseller chart, this slim volume is filled with writing happy to try something different. I applaud it wholeheartedly for that.

And the final story, by Lisa Tuttle, is a 5-star knockout!