Cold Hand in Mine

These are truly strange stories but I can't really say I enjoyed reading this anthology of Robert Aickman's works. As was mentioned in the Afterword by Jean Richardson, Aikman's style of writing has the feel of having been written by someone from the late 19th or early 20th century, even though it is made clear that one of the stories is set after WWII, “The Clock Watcher.” This is not always bad, and very Lovecraftian, except when the writer, through the story's characters, embellishes or drones on upon minor occurrences or details that don't appear to add any substance to the meat of the story (perhaps I'm just missing some symbolic significance). The thing I'm finding reading much of strange fiction is that though the stories are somewhat unsettling, they never seem to go anywhere. It's often frustrating. The one exception in this anthology would be “Pages From a Young Girl's Journal”; a vampire story told from the naïve written perspective of the vampire's young, and I might say parentally neglected, victim. Its significance is that, with tweaking, the story could be written as an account from the diary of a pedophile victim from today. However, in the majority of cases the protagonists seem to be overly self absorbed and strange in their own right. One wonders if they are in need of psychiatric help and if what befalls them or what they experience is just a manifestation of their own psychosis. Okay, that's strange, but strange and weird happenings can really grip a reader when the main protagonist is relatable to the reader. I just didn't find that here and so the weirdness in a way felt false.

Robert Aickman's stories in this collection to me was far scarier than anything I've ever read thus far. His style of the ‘Unwritten Horror' succeeded in making me feel uneasy when I read his stories. As nothing is explained in the end, it provided me with plenty of rooms to create my own sense of dread. The story ‘The Same Dog' is the ultimate experience in creepy.