There’s Something Wrong with Almost Everything

Patrick Collins delves into the haunting stories of Robert Aickman.

When you live entirely among madmen, it is difficult to know how sane you are.

—Robert Aickman

As a child, I had the disquieting thought that an alien was at times disguised as my mother, my father, my teacher. How could I know? Would I be next? The questions haunted me for years, making learning difficult: If dear teacher might be something other than she seemed, how could you listen to her? In time, peers fell under suspicion when they followed classroom instruction, accepting the entire baffling scene as normal (which, of course, it was).

As with many childhood fancies, I grew out of this one. Best to put away childish thoughts and get on with the business of living. But the experience, once arrived, can never fully be escaped. Such misgivings are similar to those evoked by British writer Robert Aickman (1914–1981). Aickman’s stories are creepy. Weird. Strange is the word he preferred. And they are quite unlike traditional supernatural stories.

The thrills of ghost and ghoul are largely absent in Aickman’s work, though the surface of his tales might mimic the genre. What we encounter are fairly regular people leading fairly regular lives. Then, something happens. Something not quite expected, not quite right. That something invariably goes unexplained, leaving the reader to sense that it might be unexplainable or, worse, open to all sorts of explanations.

Aickman’s tales involve attempts to know the unknown, and the problems therein. “Haven’t you noticed by this time that everyone’s lives are full of things you can’t understand?” asks a character in “The School Friend.” “The exceptional thing is the thing you can understand.” “It is almost as if the nearer one approaches to a thing, the less it proves to be there, to exist at all,” writes the narrator of “Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal.” “Answers are almost always insufficient. They are almost always misleading,” Aickman writes elsewhere.

Against the bizarreness of existence, we build conventions—signposts to keep us sane. As the narrator in “The Real Road to the Church” remarks, “Conventions are, indeed, all that shield us from the shivering void, though often they do so but poorly and desperately.” Our modern conventions grew in part from our peculiar way of seeing the world—of sorting and mapping and categorizing, excluding that which cannot be grasped. What matters is matter. The unexplainable is not mysterious, but insane.

And yet: “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.” In this, Aickman could be counted among those who fear the modern dissection of the world’s mechanics has severed us from the mysterious, the numinous, the transcendent. But there’s little comfort in Aickman’s peek behind the veil. What shines forth is the unexpected that unsettles us. The comfortable recedes: “There’s something wrong…. There’s something wrong with almost everything.”

Most of Aickman’s strange tales were reissued in four volumes by Faber & Faber in 2014: Cold Hand in Mine, Dark Entries, The Wine-Dark Sea, and The Unsettled Dust. New York Review of Books Classics’s Compulsory Games (2018) collected stories omitted from these volumes, adding four unpublished during Aickman’s life. Aickman also wrote a short novel, a novella, and two memoirs. I recommend starting with the Faber editions—any of them—and read on from there.

Patrick Collins

Production editor