Just noticed that Amazon has three Robert Aickman collections for the Kindle. I bought all three even though I have two in hardback already. Aickman was a British writer of horror stories. He preferred to call them "Strange Stories" and they do tend to be unreal, elliptical, subtle and rarely explaining things outright. They are more unsettling (sometimes very unsettling) than scary.
"Pages From A Young Girls Diary"(which won a World Fantasy Award) in Cold Hand in Mine is the most straight forward horror story in the bunch.
He also edited the first eight "Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories."
From Peter Straub's introduction:
Quote:
|
Unlike nearly everybody writing supernatural stories now, Aickman rejected the neat, conclusive ending. He was, you might say, Stephen King’s opposite. In his work there are no climactic showdowns, in part because his work uses almost none of the conventional imagery of horror. Aickman was sublimely uninterested in monsters, werewolves, worms, rats, bats, and things in bandages. (He did, however, write one great vampire story.) Absent from this list of horror conventions is ghosts, because Aickman was interested in ghosts, at least in a way – in the atmosphere a ghost creates, the thrill of unreality which surrounds it. Aickman was a queerly visionary writer, and ghosts, which are both utterly irrational and thoroughly English, would have appealed to him.
|