At first glance, horror fiction does not appear to be a genre well suited to authors enamored of travel. Certainly, heroic fantasy has produced many authors who specialize in transporting their readers to uncharted lands, both of this earth and far removed from it. One only has to summon up a few familiar names: Lord Dunsany, J. R. R. Tolkien, H. P. Lovecraft, Michael Moorcock--these are only the barest beginning. Horror and "ghostly" fiction, however, have rarely produced authors who can not only deliver chills, but can also induce this kind of magical transportation of the reader.It is, therefore, a delight to discover in the works of Robert Aickman (1914-1981) that the twentieth century has produced an author of this kind. Aickman, who lived most of his life in London and its surrounding areas, managed with great effectiveness to combine a love of travel with horror fiction. Aickman utilized travel as a recurring motif in so much of his work that it is obvious that he had a broader goal in mind than merely providing his readers with "ghost" stories.
Aickman was not interested in mere travelogue, or in setting his stories in foreign places simply for the sake of novelty, although he himself was from youth a widely travelled person. Even as a child, Aickman had experience with both railway travel and travel on foot, accompanying his family on many such journeys.
While other children might have considered such a life burdensome, Aickman learned to love these impromptu journeys, and this love continued into his adulthood. He also mentions being fascinated with railways and railway travel, considering it much more civilized than any other mode of transportation. It is therefore no surprise that this affinity for travel would find its way into his adult writing.
Other aspects of Aickman's later life support both his love of travel and the preservation of the natural beauty in his native England. It is commonly known that Aickman was the founder and Chairman of the Inland Waterways Association, one of England's earliest active environmentalist organizations.
As he points out in his autobiography, The Attempted Rescue (1966), "Travel, the art of travel, is the great impersonal passion of my life, though personal also, because I need a perfect companion, and cannot make art without" (AR 89). Avoiding shallow travelogue, Aickman set out to accomplish something much loftier, making many of his characters' travels the focal point of the tale--even to the point of making the journey more important than the final destination. Elsewhere in The Attempted Rescue, Aickman notes that "I still feel that the supernatural, Freud's Unheimlich, can give one at least a sensation of knowing oneself and the world that otherwise can be found (equally rarely) only through poetry, music, travel, and love" (AR 55).
In the several stories to be discussed here, Aickman's characters undergo their journeys as a form of self-discovery. Indeed, the discovery is often painful (and sometimes tragic, as in "The Wine-Dark Sea"), but it always involves some vision of a different or higher reality, heretofore hidden from the character.
Christine Pasanen Morris describes the relationship between Aickman's characters and the unconscious world of dreams, symbols, and spectres of Freudian (and Jungian) psychology: "Aickman knows . . . that an unremarkable appearance may cover a surprising interior of memories, hidden dreams and repressed or suppressed frustrations, angers, and urges" (Morris 56). This description of the psychological underpinnings of Aickman's stories is an apt one, but it does not go far enough. His genius was in striking a balance between the dreams, fancies, and phobias of his characters, and the larger space of the outside world in which they exist. In most horror tales, the horror begins when the weird actually manifests itself to the characters. In Aickman this is sometimes the case, but it is often unclear whether the manifestation is a concrete one or simply a delusion or psychosis of the characters involved.
Another point that deserves to be addressed about Aickman is his attitude toward travel in his stories. Many other modern horror authors have their characters discovering almost nothing but horror on their journeys; one thinks here of F. Paul Wilson, Stephen King, the early Robert R. McCammon, and many others. Travel for these authors usually involves some peril or other that their characters must either conquer or flee from. As we shall see, Aickman takes a wholly different direction.
In either case, Aickman's crucibles are the remote settings into which he tends to thrust his characters. Rather than staring into a void, their often unspoken motivations and fears are projected into the unknown territory being explored. For Aickman, it is the clash between a character's often unstable psychological state and the unfamiliarity of his/her remote locations that produces the desired eerie effect.
In Aickman's fiction, travel is nothing less than a spiritually transforming agent. Although characters in his stories meet horrific and delightful ends in decidedly unequal measure, the one constant is that they are always changed irrevocably by the end of the tale. As S. T. Joshi points out in his study of Aickman, to be included in his forthcoming The Modern Weird Tale, "In virtually every story the intrusion of the weird depends upon the protagonist travelling to some unfamiliar locale--not necessarily remote or intrinsically anomalous, but simply some realm other than one's own."
It is no surprise, then, that the narrator of "The Swords" and Maybury of "The Hospice" meet similarly nasty and confused ends. In both tales, the two men discover strange, off-the-beaten-path establishments that put both characters through mind-bending experiences.
For the narrator of "The Swords", the setting is a carnival sideshow that turns into a ghastly sexual awakening. The tale is both one of Aickman's travel stories and a disturbing allegory of a man's first sexual experience. The unnamed narrator tells his story in flashback, describing a youthful period when he worked for his Uncle Elias as a door-to-door salesman. On his travels through the rather dull town of Wolverhampton, the narrator happens upon a curious carnival, with a sideshow titled simply "The Swords". In a fit of curiosity, he attends the show, populated as usual by a small crowd of leering men. The show itself turns out to be an impossible display of a man plunging several swords into a passive, pretty woman seated in a chair. Whether this is a parlor trick or something more sinister, the narrator is alternately intrigued and repelled by the sight. Aickman's narrator sets the mood right away with a description of Wolverhampton:
There was absolutely nothing to do. Nowhere even to sit and watch the telly. All you could think of was to go out and get drunk, or bring someone in with you from the pictures . . . I was strolling about the streets of Wolverhampton, with all the girls giggling at me, or so it seemed, when I came upon a sort of small fair. Not knowing the town at all, I had drifted into the run-down area up by the old canal. (CHM 3-4).The narrator describes himself as being naive, shy, and self-conscious as a youth. These qualities are not at all rare in a young person, but in the narrator's case they turn out to be fatal flaws. When he mentions "all the girls [were] giggling at me", we are led to believe that he has not yet learned to deal effectively with members of the opposite sex of his own age. And yet, he is quite attracted to the girl in the sideshow, presumably because she seems more exotic and therefore unattainable.The disturbing climax comes when the young man makes a deal with the sideshow barker to have Madonna, as she is called, appear at his seedy boarding house room for some kind of private show. For a few pounds, she will do as the narrator pleases for several hours. The girl goes through with the bargain, and lets him have his way with her, although the experience is curiously unsatisfying and empty. He describes her as feeling "queer and disappointing--flabby might be almost the word". Elsewhere she is described as pale, suggesting the pallor of the undead, and the narrator also wonders if she has been hypnotized in some way. Finally, the narrator grasps her hand, only to have it detach from her arm (CHM 28).
Words need hardly be wasted on what Aickman intended to be very obvious sexual symbolism. That a fear of the mysteries of sex is at the root of the tale seems clear, but more puzzling is how Aickman unsettles the reader's sense of reality in "The Swords". The earnestness of the narrator's confession, very much like one of Lovecraft's doomed narrators, suggests that his experiences are to be taken seriously, and not as a satire. The frisson of terror comes when we realize that the preceding events are meant to be taken as hard fact, and not as a product of the narrator's possible psychosis. The reader, however, may also see the tale as another kind of allegory, more closely related to the prevalent theme of sexual apprehension. Aickman's narrator here explores several worlds simultaneously: the concrete one of his squalid Wolverhampton surroundings; the no less squalid , but more amorphous, territory of the sexual frontier; and finally the mysterious female form itself. The generally drab and nondescript town of Wolverhampton masks something far more bizarre under the surface, a society that makes a great effort to remain nearly asexual.
Aickman's character searches for excitement, only to find terror in his first encounter with the opposite sex. The author succeeds well in describing the combination of exhilaration and fear that always comes with that first experience, and "The Swords" remains one of the few successful meldings of horror and eroticism to date.
For Maybury in "The Hospice", the strange discovery is the title boarding house where someone dies unexpectedly. Maybury's car has broken down, and he is thus forced to wait out the night in very uncomfortable circumstances. Finally, he is given a ride out of town in what turns out to be the dead man's funeral hearse:
Maybury was compelled to travel with the coffin itself, because there simply was not room for him on the front seat, where a director of the firm, a corpulent man, had to be accommodated with the driver. The nearness of death compelled a respectful silence among the company in the rear compartment, especially when a living stranger was in the midst. (CHM 162)"The Swords" is the most effectively frightening of the two tales, but "The Hospice" is a classic example of Aickman having fun with his travellers. Maybury winds up at the strange hospice because he forgets to gas up his car on the way back from a business appointment, every motorist's nightmare come true. Predictably, Maybury's perception of reality goes haywire the minute he sets out to look for civilization: something he thinks is a cat runs out of a hedge and takes a bite from his leg with no provocation at all. Finally, he happens upon the hospice, but it offers no relief for Maybury, being populated with the strangest gathering of people he has ever encountered.Aickman is clearly poking fun at business travellers in general when he says that Maybury "was one, who, when motoring outside his own territory, preferred to follow a route 'given' by one of the automobile organizations, and . . . he had found reasons to deplore all deviation" (CHM 123). Viewed in this way, "The Hospice" becomes a darkly humorous satire on people who see no adventure, but only the possible danger, in travelling.
Although travel figures prominently in many of Aickman's stories, there are several in particular that seem best to represent what he was attempting to accomplish with this theme. The first of these is "The Wine-Dark Sea", a tale that starts off as a kind of travelogue and rapidly becomes something totally removed from that limited form.
The tale begins with the protagonist, Grigg, on vacation somewhere off the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, either at a Greek or Turkish fishing village. In fact, the protagonist himself is unsure, after the fact, of exactly what the name of the town was. Right from the outset, Aickman sets the tone of dislocation that continues for the remainder of the tale:
Off Corfu? Off Euboea? Off Cephalonia? Grigg would never say which it was. Beyond doubt it was an island relatively offshore from an enormously larger island which was relatively inshore from the mainland . . . From the waterfront one could see the offshore island, shaped like a whale with a building on its back, or, thought Grigg, like an elephant and castle. (WDS 13)Grigg becomes entirely bored in the town where he is staying. Longing for adventure and a break from routine, as most people do on vacation, Grigg has instead been spending his time sitting around in a local cafe, drinking ouzo. He becomes captivated first by the island itself, and later by a boat which appears to be sailing from the island. The boat is anomalous, since the island is supposed to be uninhabited.For Grigg, the captivation turns into an obsession, whereas for the local people the boat and the island are a source of unspoken superstition. When Grigg questions a local waiter about the island and its possible inhabitants, the latter replies, "The fishermen do not like the island . . . they give it, as you say, a wide berth" (WDS 14).
Eventually, the siren song of the island becomes too great for Grigg, who finds a borrowed boat and rows out to it. There he discovers a kind of castle stronghold carved out of rock and, soon after, the inhabitants of the island, also the owners of the strange boat spotted earlier.
It is at this point that Aickman exhibits his greatest storytelling genius. The three women that inhabit the island--Lek, Vin, and Tal--appear to be the living embodiments of the Sirens of Greek mythology. As the sirens of legend were famous for calling seafaring men to their deaths, the reader expects as much from Aickman's tale, but this is not what he delivers.
Instead, the three women take Grigg on as a guest of the island, as long as he does not interfere in their affairs. Aickman takes a great risk in attempting to update a classical Greek myth to the present day, and proves that the risk is well worth the effort. Actually, the author does not make it entirely clear that his sirens are the actual sirens of myth (perhaps they are only distant relations), but the implication is strong. He confronts the matter directly early in the story, when Grigg asks the women to "Sing me the song the sirens sang", and they comply (WDS 35). Aickman succeeds so well here because he has effortlessly transformed a timeworn myth into a modern romantic story. "The Wine-Dark Sea" becomes one of Aickman's longer meditations on the rift between ancient myth and modern man. The author made no secret that he found modern civilization wanting in both mystery and cultivation, and in this tale Grigg acts as Aickman's mouthpiece.
Grigg's conversations with the sirens are often both hilarious and tragic. His hosts complain about the ancient as well as the modern Greeks, dismissing both as near-barbarians with equal venom. Grigg ends up having many of his preconceived notions of paradise dismissed by the sirens. He sees the island as the perfect escape from his boring modern existence, a source of spiritual nourishment that he has lacked his entire life; but the sirens are far too pragmatic to encourage Grigg's ambitious fancies:
"It is very mystical," said Grigg. "Where is this life to be found?"The denouement of the tale is mirrored directly in Lek's statement regarding the destruction of life. Grigg survives happily on the island for a short time, giving no thought to returning to what he once conceived to be civilization. One evening a stranger appears on the island, moving too quickly for Grigg to catch. Grigg neglects to warn the sirens about the visitor, a fatal mistake. The entire ocean becomes blood-red for miles, and the sirens inform Grigg that someone has "killed" the spirit inhabiting the island."Here," said Lek, simply. "And it is not mystical at all. That is a word invented by those who have lost life, or destroyed it." (WDS 29)
Grigg's ultimate fate is that he is compelled by the sirens to swim back to civilization; he cannot possibly have any future with them as they depart their dying island. It appears upon first reading that Grigg's sojourn on the island has been a cruel kind of torture; i.e., the man craves magic and novelty, and gets a taste of them, only to be thrust back into the plastic and uninspiring twentieth century. Again, however, Aickman's knack for the transformation of his characters is in evidence. The author leaves the final results of Grigg's odyssey to the imagination. We can only surmise that Grigg will return to civilization, albeit with a point of view far removed from that of most human beings. This, in the end, is the final fruit of Grigg's life among the sirens.
Aickman returns to a seaside motif, although backhandedly, in the tale "Ringing the Changes", thought by many to be his masterpiece. Not surprisingly, it too hinges on the travels of its protagonists; in this case to a remote seaside town somewhere in England. The tale's plot device has much in common with a tale discussed earlier, "The Hospice". Aickman's victims this time are a newlywed couple, Gerald and Phrynne Banstead. Phrynne is much younger than her new husband, a fact that does not seem relevant at first, but becomes so toward the terrifying climax of the story. Aickman is careful to convey the sense that Gerald is somewhat intimidated by Phrynne's radiant youth and beauty, and also suffers from a sense of inadequacy. The couple decide to honeymoon in the remote town of Holihaven, both because of its reputation for romantic charm and because it is far removed from the frenzy of London. The curious nature of the town is evident to the couple immediately. Aickman makes reference to the fact that London express trains have "since gone elsewhere" (PD 88). The general mood of Holihaven is not necessarily one of neglect; rather, the local residents seem to enjoy being far removed from the rest of civilized southern England.
The town's most curious feature soon becomes evident: the two travellers cannot escape the sound of bells ringing, apparently from every church steeple in town. Instead of going off after a short time, the bells continue to ring. Gerald and Phrynne inquire about the bells, and are told that the churches are "practicing". More than this the local people will not reveal, leaving the couple to explore what they are led to believe is the nearby beach. The "beach" turns out to be strangely non-existent, more like a moor than a traditional beach. When they both complain of a strange, overpowering smell, and Phrynne steps into something unidentifiable, it is clear that something is very wrong in Holihaven.
Mrs. Pascoe, the proprietor of their hotel, is friendly to the travellers but seems reluctant to impart any information about the town. To make matters worse, she appears to be in hysterics, resulting from a disagreement with her husband. Finally, Commander Shotcroft, a lodger at the hotel, joins Gerald and Phrynne in the hotel lounge and explains what the true purpose of the bells are. Shotcroft tells the two, "They're ringing to wake the dead," assuring them that in Holihaven this is meant literally. Shotcroft implores Gerald to take Phrynne away from the town and abruptly leaves them to contemplate the seemingly impossible prospect of the town's dead arising to meet them.
The tale's subtext is clearly allegorical, describing Gerald and Phrynne's fall from innocence regarding death and what may lie beyond it. Another, less obvious, but clearly related conflict is the fact that Gerald is substantially older than Phrynne: he is both closer to death and more mature than she is. Phrynne is still young enough to be imbued with that false sense of immortality associated with youth.
Aickman refuses to show his readers "the monster", even toward the conclusion when the bells stop and the undead are presumably walking the streets of Holihaven. Instead, the vacationers' hotel room is invaded by the singing throng of revelers, and Phrynne is apparently carried away for a brief time, although no physical harm comes to her. It is never explained whether any of the revelers are actually undead themselves, or whether they are simply the living residents of Holihaven in "celebration" of the dead coming to life. The couple notice the horrible smell first encountered on the beach, but no actual walking dead are seen in the hotel.
As Gerald and Phrynne depart from Holihaven the next morning, they seem to have quickly forgotten the shock of the bizarre events of the previous night. However, the final shock is still to come. The two are still marked by the experience of their "dance with the dead" in vastly different ways, and this becomes apparent when the couple come upon undertakers burying bodies at a cemetery on the outskirts of the town:
In the mild light of an autumn morning the sight of the black and silent toilers was horrible; but Phrynne did not seem to find it so. On the contrary, her cheeks reddened and her soft mouth became fleetingly more voluptuous still.As before, Aickman's characters have undergone an experience both horrifying and inexplicable. Either the maddeningly unseen dead really did arise, or the curious inhabitants of Holihaven are simply playing a cruel, elaborate joke on Gerald and Phrynne. Aickman may have written the story deliberately to achieve exactly this effect of playful ambiguity. In either case, "Ringing the Changes" is easily one of the eeriest and most terse tales in the author's canon, and may eventually be considered one of the classics of modern weird fiction.. . . Gerald had become aware of something dividing them which neither of them would ever mention or ever forget. (PD 115)
Just as Aickman's characters make journeys into strange territory, the author himself made such a journey in the writing of his fiction. There is a distinct progression evident in the period of time between a tale like "Ringing the Changes" and the final one under discussion here, "Into the Wood". First collected in the volume Sub Rosa (1968), the latter tale is very similar to Aickman's earlier work, but because of its novella-size length is much more ambitious than most of its predecessors.
In "Into the Wood", all of Aickman's recurring themes are present, with the central travel theme binding them together. Perhaps the tale's only fault is its length, which at times seems to belabor the author's point. In other regards Aickman's powers are at their height, and he is highly successful in transporting the reader into another reality. Peter Straub, in his introduction to The Wine-Dark Sea, offers his opinion that the tale is "the masterpiece of this collection" (WDS 9). Straub goes on to suggest that the entire story is a metaphor for Aickman's existence as a sensitive artist. While Straub may be stretching the point, "Into the Wood" is certainly more than just an unnerving story. It is in fact Aickman's longest and most accomplished commentary on the creative process, and it includes many autobiographical elements as a result.
Just as in "Ringing the Changes", Aickman's focus in the tale is on two travellers. In this case, we are introduced to Harry and Molly Sawyer, a happily married Manchester couple with three children. Harry is summoned by his work to Sovastad, a small town in Sweden. Margaret decides to accompany her husband to the town, presumably as a vacation of sorts for herself. On one sightseeing trip led by some of their hosts, Margaret is shown a peculiar local landmark, located across the river from the town proper. The landmark turns out to be the "Jamblichus Kurhus", a sanitorium/rest home for a very select group of patients, with a very common malady--they all suffer from a severe and chronic type of insomnia.
Margaret ignores the Kurhus for a while, until her husband goes away on business and she has trouble finding a rentable room in Sovastad. She is forced to venture to the sanitorium to stay for several days. It is here that she receives an initial shock from the realization of what the inhabitants of the Kurhus suffer from. Margaret has previously lived a placid, modern existence in England, and has never had trouble sleeping before; the very thought of such an illness is alien to her:
With the other well-to-do Manchester wives, [Margaret] strove for domestic realization among an ever growing assembly of lesser monsters, all whirring, spinning, and chopping, in kitchen, washroom, and lounge . . . but until one night in Sweden, she would have rejected the idea that she was positively unhappy. (WDS 273)Aickman is once again having a grand time poking fun at modern society and the mechanistic trap that a life ruled by electronic conveniences becomes for many people. Certainly, Margaret is a happy housewife in the sense that she and her family's basic needs are being met. However, as with Grigg in "The Wine-Dark Sea", there is still a fundamental artistic and/or spiritual longing that will never be fulfilled by modern society. Deep down, Margaret knows this, but she is unable to express her needs until her trip to Sovastad.Aickman has ably selected his subject for this tale, as he knows that insomnia is often common among artists and that the creative process is sometimes caught in between. Anyone who has ever suffered from a bout with insomnia will know that it can occur for many different reasons: chief among them are sickness, stress, and overstimulation by drugs or other substances. In any case, the disorder can often cause a total disruption in the subject's daily life cycle. To most of us, this condition is merely a temporary annoyance. For a sensitive artist, however, it can reveal sides of his/her personality that would otherwise never be held up to the light. Aickman's insomniacs have seen more of "the truth" than the rest of us, and thus are feared and shunned by mainstream society, just as artists of all kinds often are.
For the inhabitants of the Kurhus, however, the usual causes of insomnia are not necessarily the deciding ones. One resident of the place explains the situation to Margaret: " 'As I say, much less sleep is required physiologically than people choose to think . . . That,' said Mrs. Slater, 'is the plight of the true insomniac. He is one who has little need for sleep at any time; or none' " (WDS 283).
At the Kurhus, the patients require almost no sleep at all. Instead, they sip coffee and talk during the afternoon, and spend their nights wandering the maze of woods located around the sanitorium grounds. Margaret is also told that some residents, having found their own higher truth, sometimes wander into the woods and never return.
At first, this behavior is repellent to Margaret, but it becomes more understandable after she explores the woods herself one afternoon, almost becoming lost. Any careful reader will detect a faint underpinning of the vampire myths in this tale, but Aickman is always one step ahead. When Margaret queries Colonel Adamski about this, he replies, "Few of the night-walkers actually bite. And certainly we should never bite a lovely lady like you" (WDS 303). Aickman finally implies, through the utterances of Colonel Adamski, that insomnia was perhaps a root cause of many artistic triumphs of the past:
"Shakespeare complains often of not sleeping, but see how much he owes to it! Even the absurd local poet, Strindberg, would be still more grotesque if shafts of truth had not occasionally struck home as he lay wakeful; at one time in this very place." (WDS 301)Not surprisingly, Aickman opens "Into the Wood" with a quotation from one of Strindberg's works, "Inferno", which may have initially inspired the author with the idea for the story. The Colonel's statements are in line with the widely held belief that for an artist to produce art, he or she must undergo some sort of suffering. In opposition to this is the fact that, at the Kurhus, most of the residents are not artists of any kind.Finally, it must be surmised that the Colonel's remarks are meant to jar something loose in Margaret's mind. Perhaps she has the potential to be such an artistic person, if only she could reach the individual "limit" that Adamski mentions earlier in the tale.
Margaret's transformation becomes evident only when she leaves the Kurhus to find more traditional lodging. Eventually, her husband returns from his business, and the two can make preparations to return to England. This is precisely the point at which Margaret begins to suffer from interrupted sleep herself. After two sleepless nights, she decides to tell her husband of her experiences in the Kurhus, and that she will now have to stay there for a time.
Aickman's tale ends with Margaret telling Henry, "I'll let you know immediately I get out of the wood . . . It's one of those things you have to live through to emerge the other side" (WDS 313). Aickman leaves us in suspense as to what will happen to his heroine in her second stay at the sanitorium, and if she will ever find her own "limit".
What finally will happen to Margaret is not necessarily irrelevant, but her final utterance in the story is all-important. Aickman has, quite succinctly, boiled down his own theory of weird fiction into two sentences. For Margaret, as for Aickman's other hapless travellers, a trip to an unfamiliar place becomes a voyage of self-discovery. All the reader really knows of Margaret's discovery is that a happiness she never knew before could exist. More than this, only Margaret herself could ever reveal.
Although few of us could ever hope to have experiences as fantastic as Aickman's characters do in his fiction, we still sympathize with their adventures in a visceral way. At the risk of oversimplification, it can be said that Aickman chose travel as the basis for much of his best work for two reasons: not only for its universal appeal, but also because of the inherently unsettling nature of travel itself.
Under Robert Aickman's masterful hand, his characters' journeys become revealing for the spectator as well, and his art becomes a psychological mirror held up to the reader. He or she is left to discover whatever might be lurking behind its surface. It is hoped that Aickman's literary stature will soon grow beyond the small cult-following he now enjoys, and that more readers will choose to accompany him on his travels.
Works Cited
Aickman, Robert. The Attempted Rescue. London: Victor Gollancz, 1966 (AR)
-----. Cold Hand in Mine. 1975. New York: Berkley, 1979. (CHM)
-----. Painted Devils. New York: Scribner's, 1979. (PD)
-----. The Wine-Dark Sea. New York: Arbor House, 1988. (WDS)
Crawford, Gary. "The Poetics of the Unconscious: The 'Strange' Stories of Robert Aickman." In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction II, ed. Darrell Schweitzer. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1988, pp. 43-50.
Joshi, S. T. "Robert Aickman: 'So Little Is Definite.' " The Modern Weird Tale (forthcoming). [also in Studies in Weird Fiction, 18; Winter 1996]
Morris, Christine Pasanen. "The Female Outsider in the Short Fiction of Robert Aickman". Nyctalops No. 18 (April 1983): 55-58.
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Used with the kind permission of Scott Briggs.
"Robert Aickman: Sojourns into the Unknown" originally appeared in Studies in Weird Fiction, 12; Spring 1993. Published by Necronomicon Press.