Robert Aickman » A Pictorial Bibliography

"There are only about thirty or forty first-class ghost stories in the whole of western literature."

And so, somewhat boldly, begins Robert Aickman's introduction to the 1964 Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories. In addition to two novels, Aickman published a total of forty-eight ghost stories himself, many of which are acknowledged as classics of the genre, so the canon of "first-class stories" must, at least in the present writer's opinion, have increased since Aickman penned that introduction. Later in the same piece, he expresses the view that ghost stories are "allied to poetry" and anyone who has read his work, or that of Walter de la Mare, will understand the alliance Aickman believed to exist. Indeed, critics have tended to compare Aickman to de le Mare and, of course, to M. R. James, but arguably his work also connects on a metaphysical level with the writings of Kafka and Beckett, two writers who portray the agony of human interactions in the context of a mechanized, and ultimately mechanising, world.

Peter Straub in his introduction to The Wine-Dark Sea: A Collection (New York: Arbor House/William Morrow 1988) argues that "[w]hat attracted Aickman to ghosts was not the notion of dripping revenants but the feeling—composed in part of mystery, fear, stifled eroticism, hopelessness, nostalgia and the almost violent freedom granted by a suspension of rational rules—which they evoked in him." Tales of love and death indeed!

Aickman's writing is enigmatic and often clinically otherworldly. In a review of the posthumous collection Night Voices: Strange Stories (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd 1985) featured in British Book News, Paul Kincaid wrote that "[Aickman] writes a precise and elegant prose, full of sharp perceptions of the ordinary, so sharp that a niggling sense of unease slowly develops without anything out of the ordinary actually happening." Frequently, his stories end—abruptly—without an entirely satisfactory conclusion, presenting the reader with a number of interpretations and leaving questions unanswered; confusion, on the part of both the reader and the tale's protagonists, is rarely far away in the more extreme examples and the expected short-story "twist in the tale" denouement is often curiously absent.

Robert Aickman by Ida Kar (late 1950s)

Robert Fordyce Aickman, born in 1914, was a British author of supernatural stories he liked to describe as "strange". He was the grandson of prolific Victorian novelist Richard Marsh, known for his occult novel The Beetle (1897), a book arguably almost as popular in its time as Stoker's Dracula. Aickman, however, is probably best remembered for his co-founding of The Inland Waterways Association, a group devoted to restoring and preserving England's inland canal system. One of his co-founders, Tom Rolt, also produced a volume of twelve superb supernatual tales: Sleep No More (London: Constable 1948). He was married to Edith Ray Gregorson from 1941 to 1957. For a full exposition of the battle for the waterways, David Bolton's book Race Against Time: How Britain's Waterways Were Saved (London: Methuen 1990) is essential.

In addition to his own stories, Aickman edited the first eight volumes of the Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories between 1964 and 1972, selecting six of his own stories for inclusion over the course of the series (the fourth and six volumes lack one of his tales). He also added insightful introductions to seven of the collections (volume six lacks any introduction). A useful commentary on these anthologies by Bill Allison and the late John Eatman (rbadac) can be found here.

In 1975, Aickman received the World Fantasy Award for short fiction for his story “Pages from a Young Girl's Journal”. This story originally appeared in February 1973 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and two years later in the collection Cold Hand in Mine: Eight Strange Stories (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd 1975). In 1981, the year he died, Aickman was awarded the British Fantasy Society prize for his story "The Stains" which had first appeared in 1980 in the Ramsey Campbell edited anthology New Terrors (London: Pan 1980). It subsequently appeared, posthumously, in Aickman's final collection of stories Night Voices: Strange Stories.

Aickman also wrote a number of plays, Allowance For Error, Duty and The Golden Round, none of which has yet been published. Two further books, a vast philosophical work entitled Panacea: A Synthesis (running to over 1000 pages in manuscript form) and a further novel Go Back At Once have never seen publication. Copies of these items are preserved, along with all of Aickman's other remaining papers, in the Robert Aickman Collection at Bowling Green State University, Ohio.

Aickman originally received his training in architecture, the profession of his father, William Arthur Aickman ("the oddest man I have ever known", according to his son in The Attempted Rescue); however, he was more naturally centred in the milieu of literature, the theatre, ballet and music. He was theatre critic for The Nineteenth Century and After as well as the chairman of the London Opera Society. He was also active in the London Opera Club, the Ballet Minerva and the Mikron Theatre Company in London.

Aickman died of cancer on 26 February 1981 and his obituary appeared in The Times on 28 February 1981.

Altogether, twelve collections of Aickman's "strange stories" have now been published. Of these books, eight are original collections and four are reprint collections (one of which—Painted Devils: Strange Stories—consists of revised versions of stories which appeared in earlier volumes). The eight collections are as follows:

The original collections of short stories, particularly the first four, all command high prices on the used book market, as does the extremely rare novel The Late Breakfasters. Abebooks is a good place to start if you are interested in tracking them down. The most accessible avenue to acquiring Aickman's stories is via the excellent two volume Tartarus Press complete edition mentioned above. In 2001, Tartarus also reissued the first volume of Aickman's autobiography, The Attempted Rescue in a handsome edition with a foreword by writer and Aickman enthusiast Jeremy Dyson, of British comedy quartet The League of Gentlemen.

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