The British writer Robert Aickman is something of a legend among horror writers, because there has been no one writing like him since or even quite a while before him. His closest antecedents might be Franz Kafka, Isak Dinesen, and Algernon Blackwood--yet none of them are quite the same. His stories always feature very memorable atmospherics and a constant sense of the uncanny; yet although undeniably supernatural events often occur within them they are only rarely named or made explicable. The sense of them is like the dread you find when reading the great creepy stories by Roald Dahl or John Collier or even Rod Serling, but they (happily) lack the simple and too-satisfying "twist" explanations at the end.
Neither of his two novels are currently in print, and most of his story collections have not been; for now the three editions from Faber Finds, rife though they are with proofreading errors, are all that are in print. THE WINE-DARK SEA is certainly the place to begin, seeing as it has some of his very best stories and what Peter Straub calls in his preface Aickman's masterpiece, "Into the Wood." While this superior story about being specially chosen (and alienated) may well be his most profound piece of writing, it's certainly not Aickman's creepiest: that award might well belong to two other little gems in this collection, both of which involve his characteristic set-up of travelers going exactly where they shouldn't. "The Inner Room," an allegory of responsibility, reads like a supernatural version of an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel; it's repulsive in the best of senses. "The Trains" may be his most unsettling story, and involves a walking journey of two women through the English countryside that ends up at a manor house where both the house and its inhabitants are not what they appear to be (and are never fully explained). Even the less shattering pieces in the collection, like the title story and "The Fetch" (the most overt ghost story in the collection), are worth your time for the unresolved questions they provoke. Robert Aickman deserves much better critical and popular recognition: these three collections from Faber Finds are a great step in that direction.
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