Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Feb. 12th, 2018

poliphilo: (Default)
 The defining thing about Aickman's best fiction is that it never quite makes sense. Strange things happen and you try to explain them according to a pre-existing template- it's a ghost story, a story of mental crack-up, a re-worked myth, an allegory or fable- but there are always details that don't fit. There is coherence- but it's a poetic coherence- a unity of tone- a rhyming of one thing with another- but not the coherence of logic, of linearity, of sequence- and one is left feeling one would understand everything perfectly if only one could think in four- or perhaps five- dimensions- instead of the conventional three.

The Stains, on the face of it, is quite a simple story. Man goes walking on moors, meets girl, becomes obsessed. Is it all happening in his mind? Well, no, because others notice the outward and visible signs of his obsession. And why is his experience paralleled by what is happening- but on a  mundane level- to his brother? What is the nature of this symbiosis? How exactly are the two men linked? And does the man's dead wife- whose absence is always present- have some agency in what is going on? And why the continual banging on about time and timelessness? Is it a story of nympholepsy, of mid-life crisis, of spiritual awakening...?

The first time I read The Stains I read it as a horror story because that is how it was marketed.  And it works on that level. There are things in it that are satisfactorily disgusting and scary. But the more I read of Aickman the more I think he wants us to plough through the horror- as saints are supposed to endure the dark night of the soul- for the sake of whatever there is on the other side. Our man in The Stains comes to his peculiar end in an ecstasy of terror and erotic fulfilment. In the dark. In the absolute dark. On the brink of a terrific encounter.

Profile

poliphilo: (Default)
poliphilo

July 2025

S M T W T F S
   1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Page generated Jul. 11th, 2025 01:58 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios