28 Mar 2014 00:24:36
For Peter Straub, he's the 20th century's "most profound writer" of horror stories, terrifying readers with tales of haunted houses and creepy dolls, zombies and vampires. But Robert Aickman has never enjoyed a readership which extends beyond the cult. Now the literary publisher Faber & Faber is hoping to change all that, as it prepares to mark the late author's centenary year by bringing a selection of his long out-of-print novels back on to shelves.
The press is planning reissues of Aickman's novels The Late Breakfasters and The Model, both of which have been out of print for decades, to mark the centenary of the author's birth in June. Faber will also release new editions of Aickman's story collections Cold Hand in Mine, Dark Entries, The Wine-Dark Sea and The Unsettled Dust, previously only available via print-on-demand, or as limited hardback editions. The books will feature new introductions from Reece Shearsmith and the author Richard T Kelly, and afterwords by friends of Aickman, including the horror novelist Ramsey Campbell.
According to the publisher, Aickman has been rated as "an absolute master of the horror genre ... among the cognoscenti" for many years. His fans include Neil Gaiman, who once compared reading Aickman to "watching a magician work" and often not even being "sure what the trick was. All I know is that he did it beautifully." For Shearsmith, "every story you read by Aickman has something lurking within it that will stay with you long after you have finished reading it."
Aickman himself called his tales "strange stories", a description which captures the feel of a haunting tale like The Fetch, in which the protagonist is pursued by a faceless wraith, or The Hospice, in which a travelling businessman stays in a hotel for the night only to notice, while eating dinner, that "a central rail ran the length of the long table a few inches above the floor. To this rail, one of the male guests was attached by a fetter round his left ankle."
Aickman will also be honoured at this year's World Fantasy Convention in Arlington, Virginia. "He seems always to proceed from a rather grey-toned realism where detail accumulates without fuss, and the recognisable material world appears wholly four-square – until you realise that the narrative has been built as a cage, a kind of personal hell, and our protagonist is walking toward death as if in a dream," says Kelly in his introduction, adding that "so elegantly and comprehensively does Aickman encompass all the traditional strengths and available complexities of the supernatural story that, at times, it's hard to see how any subsequent practitioner could stand anywhere but in his shadow".
