Robert Aickman
Brividi crudeli

In Brividi crudeli, newly published by Edizioni Hypnos, we perhaps find Robert Aickman at his best: indeed, many consider it his finest anthology (though it must be said that his work is always of excellent quality). Previously this collection was published in Italy in 1990 by the late Giuseppe Lippi with the title Suspense in the Mondadori Oscar Horror series. The decision was made to rightly retain his translation, which has been revised for the occasion. The original title of this book was Cold Hand In Mine and it included 8 stories. Here, the novella The Strangers has been added: actually, this is an unpublished work that surfaced only in 2015 and was published by Tartarus Press in the volume The Stranges And Other Writings. For Giuseppe Lippi "In Robert Aickman...the real is a mosaic made up of estranged tiles, often frighteningly devoid of meaning," and this is where the charm of his narrative lies. As noted by David Tibet (a great collector of ghost stories) of the musical group Current 93, his are not classic ghost stories but something different, defined by the author himself as "strange stories". Something that is connected to the unknown areas of our unconscious: in this sense Aickman completed the evolution of weird literature. His particular stories dwell on the concept of the void in our existence. Some of the stories here, like The Swords and The Hospice, had also been anthologized in the seminal Il colore del male.

For horror writer Laird Barron, The Hospice is his masterpiece, and I honestly find myself in perfect agreement with him. The story narrates the vicissitudes of the protagonist Maybury, a dark office worker, who gets lost at night with his car in an unknown and remote area of the English countryside. After being bitten by a cat, he sees the bizarre sign of a hospice. Not knowing what to do, he decides to stay at least for dinner. But everything inside the hospice seems to have bizarre outlines: the food is served in excessive quantities, and the guests appear quite strange, as if they live in a world of their own. Entering the hospice seems like penetrating another dimension of reality, a dimension perhaps belonging to Maybury's unconscious. The macabre epilogue leaves the reader (as always with Aickman) with several possible interpretations available. In Niemandswasser (not coincidentally there is also a song by Current 93 with the same title from the album Sleep Has His House), set in Germany, we witness the vicissitudes of Prince Elmo, who finally finds the answer to his pain and alienation in the depths of Lake Constance. Diary of an English Girl is perhaps Aickman's most traditional story in the sense that it pays homage to the vampire "topos" but does so in his own way, even though the diary device is as gothic as it gets. References to Ann Radcliffe, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley are not lacking. Even in The Swords, we have the opportunity to savor his typical style: the story explores alienating eroticism with deviated contours. The aforementioned novella The Strangers (partly unfinished in some sentences) is another little gem in his typical style, and it was truly a shame that it was still unpublished. Here too, reflections on the nature of dreams and childhood are not lacking. The story is set in an autumnal London where Richard Roselink witnesses inexplicable and subtly disturbing events featuring a friend desperately seeking female companionship. It may seem like a ghost story, but, as always with the English writer, it never quite is. I believe the reader must make a small effort to enter Aickman's world, but once past the initial impact, the satisfaction is guaranteed. Available on the Edizioni Hypnos website: http://www.edizionihypnos.com/.

Robert Aickman "Brividi crudeli – Tutti i racconti fantastici – 4" Edizioni Hypnos – 435 pages – Euro 24.90 – 2021