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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Painted Devils, 14 Nov 2005
By A Customer
I didnt know what to expect exactly from Aickman, he was reccomended to me as a macabre writer, well known by followers dedicated to "undergroud" horror, & I picked up a copy of painted devils. I was expecting something like Lovecraft or Machen. This is nothing like them though. I was nothing short of astonished at the opening story "Ravissante", I hand't read anything like it previously. Yes this is horror, but not the in your face type.. its subliminal, & like the subliminal mind and nightmares themsleves, at times irrational. These stories are the sort that once read arnt easily forgotten. I would reccomend anyone to track down copies of any of Aickmans collections which are mostly out of print - if youve got the money there is a gorgeous pair of tombes with the collected stories done by tartarus press, but at a hefty price. On the basis of this book, Im definately going to make the investment.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Few of His Best, and Some Others, 26 Jun 2009
This book, published in 1979, was the first reprint collection of Aickman's short stories, and the only one published in his lifetime. It contained nine pieces published originally between 1951 and 1977, with the majority from the 1960s. The pieces were drawn from five of his eight original short-story collections.
During his lifetime, Aickman published 47 short stories, and two more have come into print since his death in 1981. For this reader, the best of his short works from throughout his career succeeded in balancing four elements: hypnotic developments and action, mesmerizing and dreamlike imagery that captured a character's inner life, an uncovering of the ways people behave toward each other, and a haunting and open-ended conclusion. Model stories combining these things included "The Trains" (1951), "Ringing the Changes" (1955) and "The Swords" (1969). Almost as good were "The Inner Room" (1966) and "The Hospice" (1975), despite extra layers of obscurity or developments bordering on parody. By comparison, many other pieces by the author often contained something memorable but felt lacking in one element or another; particularly from the late 1960s, the pacing of many seemed to grow increasingly deliberate, the text longer and the prose heavier.
Another type of worthwhile story from this writer expressed something more of what might be called his philosophical outlook, and for me the best of these was "The Wine-Dark Sea" (1966). Others were "Into the Wood" (1968) and "The View" (1951).
The present reprint collection contained two of the stories just named: "Ringing the Changes" and "The View." The former, among Aickman's best, strangest and most widely published stories, might be taken to concern mortality, the distance between people and the tragedy of loss. The latter might be seen as a too-lengthy description of an overly rational narrator's entry into and expulsion from a paradise.
The other works in this collection, for me, were in the category of "memorable but not his very best," lacking something in depth and power. The best of these was "Marriage," which followed a man torn between several women, was straightforward and had something striking to say, though it lacked the imagery of something more complex like "The Inner Room." Published in 1977, it was set in the England of the late 1940s/early 1950s and was one more of the more salacious of the author's stories read so far. "The School Friend" contained a ghost or projection of a character's unconscious and seemed to concern the relation between parents and children and the weight of the past.
"The Houses of the Russians" and "The Waiting Room" were ghost stories, more or less; the former involved a good-luck charm and was set mainly in Finland, the latter felt particularly tame and inconsequential. "Ravissant" involved a failed artist interviewing an enigmatic woman and confronting the question of his identity. It was a frame tale, like "The Houses of the Russians." "My Poor Friend" seemed liked it might have drawn on the author's visits to England's Houses of Parliament during his work in support of preserving the nation's waterways. A memorable image in it was of a large number of rooms in the Palace of Westminster, many of which hadn't been entered for years.
Currently the cheapest options for assembling a large sample of Aickman's short stories are the original collection Cold Hand in Mine and the reprint collection The Wine-Dark Sea (New York edition), which with Painted Devils contain 28 pieces altogether, including all of the pieces named above. In my opinion, Wine-Dark Sea and Painted Devils are good places to start, while Cold Hand is for those who are looking mainly for the writer's later, more deliberate tales.
Some excerpts from the collection:
"There was nothing inside but blood."
"The central lobby, as it is called, of the Houses of Parliament is about the last place in London really to recall Hogarth."
"The sheer oddity of life seems to me of more and more importance, because more and more the pretense is that life is charted, predictable, and controllable."
"He seemed eager to welcome me and reluctant to let me go, but entirely unable to make a hole in the wall that presumably enclosed him, however long he punched. Nor . . . can his wife be said to have been much help. Or, at least, as far as one could see. Human relationships are so fantastically oblique that one can never be sure."
"He sank into her being . . . . He had sailed into port. He had come home. He had lost and found himself."
"Suddenly, something dark and shapeless, with its arm seeming to hold a black vesture over its head, flitted, all sharp angles, like a bat, down the narrow ill-lighted street, the sound of its passage audible to none."
"In those previous seconds [he] had become aware of something dividing them which neither of them would ever mention or ever forget."
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by Robert Aickman
by Robert Aickman
by Robert Aickman
