Cold Hand in Mine

Description

Cold Hand in Mine was first published in the UK in 1975 and in the US in 1977. The story 'Pages from a Young Girl's Journal' won the Aickman World Fantasy Award in 1975. It was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1973 before appearing in this collection. Cold Hand in Mine stands as one of Aickman's best collections and contains eight stories that show off his powers as a 'strange story' writer to the full, being more ambiguous than standard ghost stories. Throughout the stories the reader is introduced to a variety of characters, from a man who spends the night in a Hospice to a German aristocrat and a woman who sees an image of her own soul. There is also a nod to the conventional vampire story ('Pages from a Young Girl's Journal') but all the stories remain unconventional and inconclusive, which perhaps makes them all the more startling and intriguing. 'Of all the authors of uncanny tales, Aickman is the best ever . . . His tales literally haunt me; his plots and his turns of phrase run through my head at the most unlikely moments.' Russell Kirk

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Customer Reviews

Strange stories, indeed...
No matter how well-versed in horror fiction you are, nothing can really prepare you for Robert Aickman. The great man wisely termed his own tales "strange stories" to distinguish them from other works in the genre, and they remain some of the most original, intriguing, and haunting narratives ever to be gathered under the horror-fantasy umbrella.
You've probably guessed that there are no exploding heads or dripping intestines being devoured by zombies in Aickman's world, so fans of that particular brand of horror need not apply. But if you admire Henry James and Walter de la Mare, I think you'll respond well to these stories. In the writing of Aickman, unsettling possibilities abound. Loose ends are not tied into a pretty knot. Characters see strange, inexplicable things--or do they only imagine that they see them? I can't stress this enough: if you crave a neat resolution at the end of a story, you should probably avoid Aickman altogether. Ambiguity was his byword.
What's interesting about Robert Aickman's work is that the first couple of stories might not leave much of an impression on you. But when you've gotten through a few more of them, you'll find that they have an insidious, cumulative effect--so that, by the time you read 'The Same Dog' (the sixth in this collection of eight tales), all it takes to send a chill down your spine is a modest sentence like, "One day they were badly frightened." Sheer genius!

2009-04-23 | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 4

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Casts an unnerving spell
Robert Aickman's term for his stories is "strange," and indeed they are, but I tend to think of them as "disquieting." His fiction takes me places that are not merely macabre or frightening; I find myself as adrift as his characters, not quite sure what is real. Much is left to my own imagination, and the most disquieting part is how I choose to fill in the gaps.

I am a great fan of weird and unsettling fiction. Things that don't fall into neat categories please me. And Aickman's ability to render atmosphere -- what I'd consider the essence of weird fiction -- is incomparable.

A favorite story in this collection is ""Niemandswasser." Anyone who has rowed a small boat over an expanse of cold, dark, deep water will feel the pull of this somewhat fanciful tale, set in Austria before the first world war. The title translates as "No Man's Water," and it has touches of the seafarer's tale to it, but it also reminded me a bit of Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales, at least in terms of time and aristocratic setting.

Reading Aickman requires a good deal of patience, or should I say a somewhat passive approach. When I read Aickman in a "normal" manner, marching along sentence by sentence, trying to connect things rationally, I grow impatient. But when I allow the sentences to weave themselves around me, like tendrils, I find myself entrapped in Aickman's universe. Perhaps there is something essentially masochistic in this process. It doesn't feel particularly healthy, but like any addict, I come back for more.

There are sexual undertones, but there's far more at work than a dark yearning or the frisson of the taboo. There is no trace of the sneering goth or woozily sexy vampire story about Aickman. As previously mentioned, there are touches of Dinesen-like grotesqueness, but most of Aickman's effect is achieved very quietly. His stories seem to work mostly on a subconscious level, and understanding why they work is quite beyond me. Or perhaps I simply don't want to examine the "why" too closely. It's like seeing something in the periphery of my vision, but dreading to turn my head and look at whatever it is directly.

2008-12-14 | Avid reader and traveler (Maryland) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 4

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Hard to judge
I have a difficult time judging the "strange tales" of Robert Aickman, particularly with respect to this curious little collection. At one moment I find myself in thrall to his literate, ominous subtleties; and just a few pages later I find myself dozing off. I've been enthralled by even the wordiest and most ridiculously well read of writers, and it isn't his excessive verbiage that bothers me at all; it simply seems that sometimes Aickman can't decide whether he's writing sophisticated soap opera or really great horror. In many of his tales--"The Clock Watcher" is a case in point--he waits far too long to deliver the proverbial punch, deluging the tale with unnecessary subplots and reminiscences on the part of the narrators. This is the case with three other very long stories in the collection. The supernatural forces at work in his fiction must have great patience to restrain themselves, I guess, as the author constructs a veritable tower of paragraphs filled with precisely nothing. The reader must have a great deal as well. I can tell when a writer, particularly of the macabre variety is building a mood, and this isn't what he's doing. He just goes off on tangents.

Which isn't to say that there isn't a great deal to recommend him; when he delivers, he really delivers. This is precisely what frustrates me about him. One senses the potential talent of an M.R. James wasted in certain stories. "The Hospice", which the most recent reviewer of this product cited as so stunning, is precisely the tale I had the biggest problem with; it is all suggestion and no substance. I think anyone who has read this story would think of the protagonist, "He's already dead", which would have been pretty hackneyed; but even that would have satisfied me more than the sorry excuse for an ending Aickman actually provides. It doesn't provide some philosophical meditation on mortality, it just ends inconclusively.

I would recommend "The Wine Dark Sea" over this collection. The genuinely chilling little tale, up there with the greats as far as I'm concerned, "Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen", shows what he could do when he put the convoluted stuff aside. "Cold Hand" is more for collectors.

2006-08-23 (New York) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 3

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Take it and hold on tight
Along with Sub Rosa, one of the twentieth century's two or three greatest collections of weird fiction, Cold Hand in Mine stands among Aickman's best books. It contains eight "strange stories", his preferred term for his own works and a very apposite label: more ambiguous and more inclusive than the usual "ghost story" rubric, and much more appropriate to Aickman's achievement, which in his best stories is less that of a teller of ghostly tales than that of the ghost itself. "The Hospice", in which a man spends a night at the establishment of the title, is a brilliant example. The surroundings are luxurious, the food plentiful and rich, the staff polite and obliging; yet the guests (inmates?) are prone to strange moods and night-time excursions - and at least one of them is chained to the wall during dinner. The protagonist leaves the Hospice in the morning, physically unharmed but riding in a hearse which has come for one of the residents. Sexual unease and perversity pervade several of the tales, most spectacularly "The Swords", in which a beautifully described, tatty circus act is the instrument of a young man's fall from innocence; and "Niemandswasser", one of the best in this best of collections, in which a German aristocrat, alone in the unclaimed, desolate middle of an icy lake ("no man's water"), meets a dreadful female apparition with a mouth of spiny, fishlike teeth. More conventional and far more civilised is the vampire story "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal"; but that's the only nod to genre conventions you're likely to find here. "The Same Dog", with its weird deja-vu plot; "Meeting Mr Millar" with its narrator's haunted neighbour; "The Clock Watcher", which is partly, perhaps, about the triumph of time over love; and "The Real Road to the Church", in which a woman witnesses a strange ceremony, then meets, and flees from, the image of her own soul, are all exquisitely written, startling and haunting. An encounter with a real ghost could hardly be more unsettling than an encounter with one of Aickman's stories.

2000-11-11 | Helpful Votes: 11 | Rating: 5

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Some interesting stories
"Cold Hand in Mine may not be Aickman's best, yet it contains one excellent story: "The Hospice". Nothing is explained, all is guessable about what is transpiring when a traveller unexpectedly find himself in a quasi-hotel, where,fed an incredible amount of food he does not actually want, he notices the odd deportment of the guests. He is awoken by a scream in the night: someone has died, and he, next morning, departs (living) with the hearse. It is surprising that he leaves at all. It is possible that "The Hospice" is a half-way house between the living and the dead. But one imagines Aickman would have, if asked, refused to commit himself in order to let the reader decide.

2000-08-27 | opusv5 | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 3

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The Unsettled Dust

Description

Robert Aickman, the supreme master of the supernatural, brings together eight stories where strange things happen that the reader is unable to predict. His characters are often lonely and middle-aged but all have the same thing in common - they are all brought to the brink of an abyss that shows how terrifyingly fragile our piece of mind actually is. 'The Next Glade', 'Bind Your Hair' and 'The Stains' appeared together in The Wine-Dark Sea in 1988 while 'The Unsettled Dust', 'The House of the Russians', 'No Stronger Than a Flower', 'The Cicerones' and 'Ravissante' first appeared in Sub Rosa in 1968. The stories were published together as The Unsettled Dust in 1990. Aickman received the British Fantasy Award in 1981 for 'The Stains', which had first appeared in the anthology New Terrors (1980), before appearing in the last original posthumous collection of Aickman's short stories, Night Voices (1985). 'We are all potential victims of the powers Aickman so skilfully conjures and commands.' Robert Bloch

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The Wine-Dark Sea

Description

Peter Straub called Robert Aickman 'this century's most profound writer of what we call horror stories'. Aickman's 'strange stories' (his preferred term for them) are a subtle exploration of psychological displacement and paranoia. His characters are ordinary people that are gradually drawn into the darker recesses of their own minds. First published in the USA in 1988 and in the UK in 1990 The Wine-Dark Sea contains eight stories that will leave the reader unsettled as the protagonists' fears and desires, at once illogical and terrifying, culminate in a disturbing yet enigmatic ending. For fans of the horror genre Robert Aickman is a must read. As Peter Straub notes in his introduction 'Aickman's originality was rooted in need - he had to write these stories, and that is why they are worth reading and rereading'. 'Superb tales of suspenseful unease . . . a contemporary master of the genre.' Publishers Weekly 'Aickman's effects are so concentrated you'll be well advised not to read more than one story at a time.' Books

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Customer Reviews

Writ in water?
Robert Aickman was a writer of what he called 'strange stories', but of the eight stories in this collection 'The Fetch' is the only piece resembling a traditional ghost story. Aickman's work contains acute psychological insight; he is master of a unique and very modern form of horror where the protagonist often doesn't know what he or she has done to bring about disaster. This is seen at its starkest in 'The Inner Room' (the first story I read by Aickman and still my favourite - a truly haunting piece which will stay with me for as long as I live), and in the title story, where protagonist Grigg allows "the last living rock" be killed...but doesn't actually know what he did to let it happen.

The twentieth century was a time of disorientations, when Europeans were walking "on overgrown paths" as Knut Hamsun famously put it. So how is one supposed to act in such situations? There is something, a hidden room, to which we don't have access...

Aickman reveals subtle and ambiguous sympathies for fascism and Nazism in this book - admittedly far more ambiguous than those of Hamsun. In the final story of this volume, 'Into the Woods', a Polish officer asserts there was "darkness on both sides" in what Aickman describes elsewhere ('The Inner Room') as "the late, misguided war". And in 'Never Visit Venice' Aickman mentions an inscription left "by the previous regime" (i.e. Mussolini's) to the effect that a minute as a lion is preferable to a lifetime as an ass. This has been left up, not just for difficulty of access but also apparently for deeper reasons.

In 'Your Tiny Hand is Frozen', the central character Edmund St. Jude is a member of an old, aristocratic family, and an authority on obscure 18th century poets. St. Jude (named for the patron saint of lost causes?) struggles to fit in with his contemporary surroundings. This mirrors Aickman's own deep suspicion of modernity. In another story, a character observes that "the Greeks used to decorate their houses with flowers and sing songs. Now they buy tinsel from shops and listen to radios."

'Never Visit Venice' demonstrates Aickman's antipathy to the modern world at its starkest. Mass tourism has made the world into "a single place, not worth leaving home to see." The protagonist Henry Fern has something inside him which makes him different, something indefinable which he would like to be rid of, yet at the same time which he is sure is the best thing about him. This undefinable something acts as a barrier between Fern and other people, and holds him back in his career. He feels work and relationships are largely a charade, and one girlfriend accuses him of being "too soulful". He dreams of a woman with whom he attains understanding and affinity. But that woman turns out to be...Death.

"The city fathers are all dead. Everyone in Venice is dead. It is a dead city. Perhaps it died when 'Tristan und Isolde' was composed here." Aickman feels cut off from the feminine, something which emerges more explicitly in a story of his not included in this collection, 'Ringing the Changes' (which itself is something of a tribute to H.P. Lovecraft's 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth').

Aickman is not without humour, though, as shown in the grotesque and hilarious 'Growing Boys'. The boys' repulsive father, a hypocritical, Guardian-reading leftist called Phineas Morke, is seen by his own wife as resembling "an immensely long anchovy, always with the same expression at the end of it."

'Into the Woods' delves into more esoteric regions. This tale of insomniacs (read: initiates) whose knowledge makes them feared by the general populace is an allegory about finding the true Self, which very few ever do. The forest, or Self, has "no beginning or ending", similar to Jung's description of the Self as a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. This Self cannot be quantified, but contrary to the claims of certain totalitarian empiricists, it most definitely exists...and no one knew this better than Robert Aickman, the finest supernatural writer of the twentieth century.

2010-02-05 | In Van Diemen's Land (Tasmanian Autonomous Zone) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Clive me a break
I open this tasty looking collection with great anticipation. On the first page of Peter Straub's introduction I find a quotation mark that is never closed - most distracting - another (obviously nothing to do with the first) that is back to front, and - also on this first page - a reference to "Give Barker". I have no doubt that Peter Straub, a great scholar of the strange tale, originally wrote "Clive Barker". Does the once distinguished house of Faber no longer employ copy editors or proof readers? I am for the moment too scared to continue reading. But not for the intended reasons.

2009-08-02 (Toronto, ON) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 1

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Some of His Best, and Some Others
This book, the second of the four reprint collections of Aickman's short stories, was published in New York in 1988 and London in 1990. The London edition--the one I read--contained eight pieces published between 1951 and 1980, drawn from six of his eight original collections of short stories. The New York edition contained an additional three pieces, "Bind Your Hair," "The Next Glade" and "The Stains," and drew from one additional original collection.

During his lifetime, Aickman published 47 short stories, and two more pieces have come into print since his death in 1981. For this reader, the best of his short works from throughout his career succeeded in balancing four elements: hypnotic developments and action, mesmerizing and dreamlike images that captured a character's inner life, an uncovering of the ways people behave toward each other, and a haunting and open-ended conclusion.

Model stories combining these things included "The Trains" (1951), "Ringing the Changes" (1955) and "The Swords" (1969). Almost as good were "The Inner Room" (1966) and "The Hospice" (1975), despite extra layers of obscurity or developments bordering on parody. By comparison, many other pieces by the author often contained something memorable but felt lacking in one element or another; particularly from the late 1960s, the pacing of many seemed to grow increasingly deliberate, the text longer and the prose heavier. Another type of worthwhile story from this writer expressed something more of what might be called his philosophical outlook, and for me the clearest of these was "The Wine-Dark Sea" (1966). Others were "Into the Wood" (1968) and "The View" (1951).

The present reprint collection--London edition--contained four of the stories just named: "The Trains," "The Inner Room," "The Wine-Dark Sea" and "Into the Wood." "Into the Wood" and the rest of the works in this collection, for me, were in the category of "memorable but not his very best," lacking something in depth and power. These pieces contained situations with ghosts or projections of a character's unconscious ("Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen," "The Fetch"), and/or expressed something about the position of an artist or alienated individual in conventional society ("Into the Wood," "Never Visit Venice") or the horrors of the modern world and the relation between parents and children ("Growing Boys").

The editor of this collection, Peter Straub, has written: "Unconscious forces drive these characters, and Aickman's genius was in finding imaginative ways for the unconscious to manipulate both the narrative events of his tales and the structures in which they occur . . . . After the shock of the sheer strangeness fades away, we begin to see how the facts of the stories appear to grow out of the protagonists' fears and desires . . . the power over us of what we do not quite grasp about ourselves and our lives."

Currently the cheapest options for assembling a large number of Aickman's short stories are the original short-story collection Cold Hand in Mine and the reprint collection Painted Devils, which with the New York edition of The Wine-Dark Sea contain 28 pieces altogether, including all of the pieces named above. In my opinion, Wine-Dark Sea and Painted Devils are good places to start, while Cold Hand is for those who are looking mainly for the writer's later, more deliberate tales.

Some excerpts from the present collection:

"Downstairs the trains had seemed to become more and more frequent, here they seemed to become slowly sparser."

"A perceptive traveler in Hellas comes to think of the Parthenon as quite modern; to become more and more absorbed by what came earlier. Soon, if truly perceptive, he is searching seriously for centaurs."

"For men and women there is to everything a limit, beyond which further striving, further thought, leads only to regression. And this is true even though most men and women never set out at all; possibly are not capable of setting out. For those who do set out, the limit varies from individual to individual, and cannot be foreseen. Few ever reach it. Those who do reach it are, I suspect, those who go off into the further forest."

"It is amazing how full a life a man can lead without for one moment being alive at all, except sometimes when sleeping."

"For years, then, Fern teetered along the tightrope between content and discontent; between mild self-congratulation and black frustration; between the gritty disillusionment of human intimacy and travel . . . and the truth and power of his dream . . . . Two or three years passed, while the land steadily receded beneath his tightrope."

"Dreams . . . are misleading, because they make life seem real. When it loses the support of dreams, life dissolves."

"It was a photograph of myself when a child, bobbed and waistless. And through my heart was a tiny brown needle."

2009-06-11 | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 3

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c'mon a my house, my house
aickman's stories in 'the wine dark sea' are cataloged as `supernatural' and also described in a publishers' weekly review as `tales of suspenseful unease'. both descriptions strike me as accurate. his stories aren't quite horror stories, that is, not the horror story of violence visited upon the innocent, the unexpected, or the over confident person caught off guard by perpetrators lacking remorse who believe themselves outside society's rules. there are a couple of horror stories in this collection, just as there are ghost stories, but aickman, even at his most grisly, is a pedestrian writer, pedestrian being, admittedly, a loaded word. not only is aickman's style a pastoral prose walk in the woods of great britian, with two trips to rural switzerland and to venice, his characters are tireless walkers who encounter problems when they stop walking, as in the story, 'never visit venice' when henry fern ends his peregrinations of the watery city by stepping into a gondola, or when stephen hooper in 'the stains', halts his solitary walks to talk with nell, a strange girl in the woods.

some of aickman's characters live in cities, usually london, but they find reason to travel to rural areas. once within the wooded surroundings there's usually a house from which the character leaves for a long walk, or a house found during a long walk. even in 'never visit venice' the water becomes a grid for the dense woods in his other stories.

aickman's few chosen objects, woods, houses, as well as children, and the activity of walking, establishes a familiarity of place found in classic childhood fairy tales that for odd reasons, with their poisoned apples, conniving dwarfs and wives with carving knives, children are expected to sleep. such places aickman revisits as an adult, after all the happy endings believed to have happened fall flat. with aickman's adult tales there is that unease of lessons which should had been learned, perhaps some step not taken, and the step that should had been taken. in the story, 'the inner room', a doll house, a child's toy, provides a frightful lesson in responsibility regarding the importance of play, as well as becoming symbol for the adult houses throughout aickman's stories.

high marks for good writing and good storytelling not busied by blazing effects and the blare of screeching vehicles out of control.

2009-03-05 (CT USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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crepuscular
Aickman is the best "horror story" writer you've never heard of. Those who prefer head-on, go-for-the-throat type terror will not like Aickman. Though beautifully atmospheric, and yes, haunting, his prose is often thorny, and as one reviewer noted, challenging to read. Aickman's frequent use of the passive voice can be slightly irritating at times, but no doubt he used it purposely. Sometimes the subject is not important, and in any case the reader is often not sure who or what is performing the action. No doubt Aickman intended it this way. More oblique than direct, his stories are often like something glimpsed from the side of the eye. Though it isn't in this collection, "The Hospice" is an excellent example. It also features Aickman's dry English wit.
"The Stains" (in this collection) is especially creepy, with beautiful descriptions of the English countryside.Believe me, you'll never look at mosses and lichens in the same way again.
"The Fetch" is more straightforward, but not a story to read alone at night. Aickman bloodless, finely wrought tales appeal to the mind, not the gut. It's a shame there aren't more of his kind on the horror circuit today.

2008-12-21 (new orleans, LA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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COLD HAND IN MINE: The Swords; The Real Road to the Church; Niemandswasser; Pages from a Young Girl's Journal; The Hospice; The Same Dog; Meeting Mr Millar; The Clock Watcher

Description

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Robert Aickman: An Introduction (Gothic Chapbooks)

Description

Robert Aickman was one of the most important writers of ghost stories in the last century. His personal, deeply felt tales were consummately poetic. Very much feeling a sense of twentieth century Angst, Aickman wrote elegant, moving tales of subtle terror. Aickman also founded The Inland Waterways Association in Britain, which upgraded Britain's rivers and canals. He was a drama and film critic as well as on the boards of opera and ballet companies. This book is an overview of the man writer Fritz Leiber hailed as "the weatherman of the unconscious."

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Customer Reviews

a biographical & literary introduction to Aickman
This book is 76 pages, the last 12 pages of which are dedicated to bibliography. The production is fairly basic, with a front cover featuring a detail from the cover illustration of Aickman's THE RIVER RUNS UPHILL. The book is staple-bound, which unfortunately means that there is no readable spine--hence, the book is not destined for the bookcase.

The book's first chapter, "The Life," runs 20 pages and pulls together a biographical sketch of Aickman, synthesizing threads from such sources as Aickman's THE ATTEMPTED RESCUE and THE RIVER RUNS UPHILL and David Bolton's THE RACE AGAINST TIME : HOW BRITAIN'S WATERWAYS WERE SAVED. For those who have not read these books, this chapter will be especially interesting.

The remaining chapters seem to touch briefly on all of Aickman's published fiction--the two novels and 48 short stories. Crawford is particularly interested in Aickman's aesthetic proximity to surrealism and in Aickman's distinctive gender themes.

Among the portions of the book I found particularly interesting are the helpful bibliography and the personal letters Crawford received from Aickman's acquaintances in the early to mid 1980s, in the years following Aickman's death. Crawford quotes extensively from other sources throughout the book, but twice he shares large portions from these letters. In one instance nearly two pages of the book are given over to a letter from Barbara Balch, Aickman's long-time personal secretary. In another case close to three pages are taken up with an essay-letter from Aickman's friend Valerie Butler. Crawford also draws occasionally from sources as recent as the 2002 memoir by Elizabeth Jane Howard, SLIPSTREAM (where Aickman pops up as a former lover of E.J.H.).

2003-05-12 | awalter (Lynnwood, WA USA) | Helpful Votes: 23 | Rating: 3

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Cold hand in mine: Strange stories

Description

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Customer Reviews

If You're Looking for an Intro to Aickman, There Are Better Places to Start
This book was published in 1975 and was the fifth of the eight original collections of the author's short stories. The works in it have been dated between 1969 and 1975; all but one were from the early/mid-1970s, near the end of the author's career.

During his lifetime, Aickman published 47 short stories, and two more pieces have come into print since his death in 1981. For this reader, the best of his short works from throughout his career succeeded in balancing four elements: hypnotic developments and action, mesmerizing and dreamlike images that captured a character's inner life, an uncovering of the ways people behave toward each other, and a haunting and open-ended conclusion.

Model stories combining these things included "The Trains" (1951), "Ringing the Changes" (1955) and "The Swords" (1969). Almost as good were "The Inner Room" (1966) and "The Hospice" (1975), despite extra layers of obscurity or developments bordering on parody. By comparison, many other pieces by the author often contained something memorable but felt lacking in one element or another. Another type of worthwhile story from this writer expressed a bit more of what might be called his philosophical outlook, and for me the clearest of these was "The Wine-Dark Sea" (1966). Others were "Into the Wood" (1968) and "The View" (1951).

The present collection contained just two of the stories named above: "The Swords" and "The Hospice," works about sexual initiation and death, and which were mainly what made this collection worthwhile. The rest of the later pieces here, for me, were in the category of "not his best," comparatively lacking in depth and power; they were from a period when the pacing of his stories seemed to grow increasingly deliberate, the text longer and the prose heavier. "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal," set in Italy in the early 1800s, was a rare story for Aickman in that it contained a vampire, but felt overly obscure and didn't come close to rivaling something like LeFanu's "Carmilla."

Currently the cheapest options for assembling a large number of Aickman's short stories are the reprint collections Painted Devils and the New York edition of The Wine-Dark Sea, which together with the present collection contain 28 pieces altogether, including all of the pieces named above. In my opinion, Wine-Dark Sea and Painted Devils are better places to start, while Cold Hand is for those who are looking mainly for the writer's later, more deliberate tales. It's a pity that Cold Hand in Mine is the cheapest, most widely available collection for Aickman; it's not the most representative collection of work throughout his career.

Some excerpts:

"Life, as we know it, could hardly continue if men did not soon slay the dreamer inside them. There are the children to think of; the mothers who breed them and thus enable our race to endure; the economy; the ordered life of society."

"Men's dreams, their inner truth, are unheimlich also . . . . If any man examines his inner truth with both eyes wide open, and his inner eye wide open also, he will be overcome with terror at what he finds."

"Daily life is entirely a matter of the pattern men and women impose upon it . . . . None the less, reality lies far behind, and is unchangeable: is ritual, in fact."

"We control nothing of importance that happens to us."

"'Who am I?' whispered Rosa. 'And who are you?' 'I am your soul,' replied a remote voice she did not know."

2009-06-11 | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 2

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Stunningly Different Fantasy
I picked up this book and one other ("Painted Devils")at a garage sale, having heard good things about the author. I had thought they were more on the order of ghost or horror stories. Instead, this book is a cross-genre jewel that really can't be pushed into any easily recognized template. Each story involves somebody getting into a situation where something strange is happening, but can't seem to realize the danger until they are fully involved. Each story is so radically different that in some cases, it's like they were written by a different person. Out of the ten or so stories, there are one or two that don't fully work, but those that do are as original and wonderful as anything I've read in the field. Aickman shouldn't be considered anything less than a master, in spite of the fact that he's not as well known as some of his contemporaries of lesser talent.

2007-07-12 | Scholar born 300 years late. (Snellville, GA United States) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

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Take Aickman's cold hand into a strange literary world
Robert Aickman (1914-1981), though he wrote plays and was active in the preservation of England's waterways, is best know for what he referred to as his "strange stories". Those seeking easy genre labels will, no doubt, insist on filing these stories away in the horror section. While this is not a completely inappropriate classification, it is more often than not misleading. At their best, Aickman's "strange stories" often possess many of the qualities of the horror genre (being weird, eerie, grotesque, etc.) while also sidestepping the conventional trappings of the field. My favorite Aickman stories leave me with a sense of unease and grim wonder beyond the ability of any other author I have ever read, the "horror" springing from subconscious realms and working upon those same areas in the psyche of the reader. Themes of alienation, squandered time, and sexual tension seem to be common in Aickman's work and "Cold Hand in Mine" contains elements of all three.

The book contains eight pieces:

"The Swords", "The Real Road to the Church", Niemandswasser", "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal", "The Hospice", "The Same Dog", "Meeting Mr. Millar" and "The Clock Watcher".

The most conventional piece in this collection, and thereby the most atypical for Aickman, is the award winning "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal". This is a fairly straightforward vampire narrative and, while certainly worth reading, not my favorite Aickman story.

All of the pieces in this book, in fact, are worth reading if you are interested in uncommon and literate fiction. There are, however, standout stories. For me these are (in order of appearance):

"The Swords" - An uneasy tale of sexual awakening, exploitation, and high sideshow weirdness with a strange young lady named Madonna (long before and definitely not the pop star).

"The Real Road to the Church" - A quite unconventional "ghost" story in which an unfulfilled woman comes face to face with. . .herself?

"The Hospice" - A motorist lost and low on gas spends a night in the title establishment. A tense and claustrophobic story that impresses itself upon one's mind like a bad dream.

"The Same Dog" - Love lost and cycles beyond human perception.

These four are Aickman at his unsettling and ambiguous best. You will find yourself captivated, moved and shaken by these stories and, if you are at all like me, you will not be sure what has actually happened in the narrative or why it has effected you. Rereading is almost imperative with Aickman's work if you seek to understand it.

Buy this book today if it is available (and consider yourself lucky if it is - it is a tragedy that Aickman's work is so difficult to come by).

2002-01-07 (Oakland, The Golden State) | Helpful Votes: 13 | Rating: 5

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Stunning collection of supernatural fiction
I'm currently trying to read my way through the complete Aickman canon. I'm attacking this project with relish. There is no finer writer of a supernatural story than Robert Aickman. He had the literary skills of one of the world's finest writers, and his ability to create spooky and bizarre stories was unparalleled. He is a great author, and it's a shame that his books are not readily available.

This collection is perhaps Aickman's finest. The stories in here are of a consistently brilliant quality. The highlight is the World Fantasy Award-winning novella 'Pages from a Young Girl's Diary'. This story recounts the tale of a repressed young girl who falls in with a vampire. This is Aickman's only vampire tale. He tended toward more intellectual bogeyman, but in this story he shows the world how a vampire story should be written. It is, without question, the finest vampire tale I've ever read. Yes, better than Anne Rice, better than Lumley, better than Stoker, Simon Clark, and on and on. Aickman's literary abilities shine in this story.

Other excellent pieces include 'The Swords' and 'The Clock Watcher'. 'The Clock Watcher' is a creepy tale of a woman with an affinity for clocks. Her husband isn't sure what to make of her obsession and her strange link to clocks of any kind. This story kept me entranced and bedazzled until the end. 'The Swords' is a marvelous novella. It says something about a collection if there's a story of this caliber that ISN'T the best story in the book. 'The Swords' tells the story of a bizarre carnival sideshow with a girl and a pile of swords. I won't tell any more for fear of giving too much away. 'The Swords' is the lead-off story in the collection and it sets the tone. Fabulous.

I can't recommend Robert Aickman highly enough. I'm taking it upon myself as a one-man crusade to spread his name widely. I've only recently discovered the man and I've been ensorceled by his amazing talent. He writes with the ease and flair that's normally found in writers from the 19th century. It's often jarring to find Aickman characters in automobiles or airplanes. His stories, for the most part, could just as easily be set in the 1870s as the 1970s. Aickman is my literary find of the year. Let him be yours.

2001-07-10 | human (Vacaville, CA USA) | Helpful Votes: 20 | Rating: 4

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