Reading: Robert Aickman - Dark Entries

What I'm reading very often shapes how I'm writing, and what I'm writing very often shapes what I choose to read.

In recent months, I've been reading Susan Hill's ghost stories (thanks to a recommendation from author Dmetri Kakmi) as well as treating myself to the occasional Raymond Chandler.  Reading Chandler's prose is like wallowing in warm water; so delicious and comfortable I'd happily drift along with it until I was no good for anything else.  However, my interest in Susan Hill's writing is a little less self-indulgent, reflecting as it does my current immersion with the ghosty-ghouly genre. OOooooh!

Her style of writing in these short novels is pleasantly (and deliberately, I imagine) reminiscent of Victorian ghost stories, although they're often set in an indistinct and less-easily identifiable period of time that might fall anywhere from the 1920s onwards.  In reading her, I'm reminded of some old favourites: W.W.Jacobs' The Monkey's Paw, Charles Dickens' The Signal-Man and an anthology of ghost stories I read as a teenager.  But, in turn, reading her has led me to the work of  Robert Aickman, whose name I wasn't previously familiar with.

Aickman's 'strange stories', as he preferred to call them, are masterful in creating unease and warping the reader's sense of normality.  Each story in his first collection 'Dark Entries' generates the feeling that not everything is what it seems to be and that innocence can transform into menace all too easily.  There's a surreal quality about these stories too, and by the time I'd finished reading them I found myself thinking about another old favourite - Angela Carter (particularly Fireworks, Heroes & Villains, The Bloody Chamber) - but also looking for new directions: M.R.James, H.P.Lovecraft, Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake perhaps.