The Unsettled Dust (Audible Audio Edition) Robert Aickman Reece Shearsmith Audible Studios Books
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Robert Aickman, the supreme master of the supernatural, brings together eight stories in which 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 brought to the brink of an abyss that shows how terrifyingly fragile our piece of mind actually is.
The Unsettled Dust, The House of the Russians, No Stronger Than a Flower, The Cicerones and Ravissante first appeared in the Sub Rosa collection in 1968, but the stories were published together as The Unsettled Dust in 1990. Aickman received the British Fantasy Award in 1981 for The Stains, which first appeared in the anthology New Terrors (1980), as well as the posthumous collection of Aickman's short stories, Night Voices (1985).- The Unsettled Dust
- The Houses of the Russians
- No Stronger Than a Flower
- The Cicerones
- The Next Glade
- Ravissante
- Bind Your Hair
- The Stains
Robert Fordyce Aickman was born in 1914 in London. In 1951, he published his first ghost stories in a volume called We Are the Dark, written in conjunction with Elizabeth Jane Howard, then went on to publish eleven further volumes of horror stories, two fantasy novels and two volumes of autobiography. Dubbed 'the supreme master of the supernatural', he won a World Fantasy Award and British Fantasy Award for his short fiction, and also edited the first eight volumes of The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories. Aside from his writing, Aickman was passionate about preserving British canals and founded the Inland Waterways Association in 1946. He died in February 1981.
Reece Shearsmith is a talented actor and writer. He is most famous for co-writing and starring in the award-winning The League of Gentlemen, along with Steve Pemberton, Mark Gatiss, and Jeremy Dyson. In 2009, Shearsmith and Pemberton won Best New Comedy at the 2009 British Comedy Awards for Psychoville. Reece Shearsmith has just finished filming Ben Wheatley's horror A Field in England, out in July 2013.
The Unsettled Dust (Audible Audio Edition) Robert Aickman Reece Shearsmith Audible Studios Books
After finishing a Robert Aickman story, his readers are often left feeling unsure of what has just happened, but certain that there should be an explanation (if only they knew what it could be) and that the writer has manipulated them as masterfully as possible. Faber Finds has reissued three collections of these stories, and though THE UNSETTLED DUST has more proofreading errors than in even the other two collections, it has some of his finest stories. One of his very best, "Ravissante," is here, but it requires considerable patience on the part of the reader: its elaborate and seemingly wandering beginning pays off in the unreal description of its later events (which are like those of Henry James' "The Aspern Papers" but as experienced in a nightmare) and one of his very greatest creepy endings. "The Same Dog" and "The Stains," two of his other finest stories, are also here, as is the brief but disturbing "The Cicerones."Product details
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The Unsettled Dust (Audible Audio Edition) Robert Aickman Reece Shearsmith Audible Studios Books Reviews
Great collection! Aickman's short stories are unique! I've never read something like them in any language. I gave 3 stars only because the kindle edition has some typographical errors and that's a pity considering the excellence of his writing. As a matter of fact, it's not the first time I find this kind of error in a Faber & Faber digital edition. Truly shameful!
There is just nothing to compare with Aickman in modern horror/weird fiction until you reach Thomas Ligotti, which is as high praise as it gets. Borges or Meyrink would be far more at home in his world than Clive Barker or Stephen King, but that's no bad thing in a world flooded with cheesy vampire chick-lit. (Twilight as the new Titanic, anyone?) The only problem is that so few of his 48 tales are readily available in print. Faber Finds have gone partway towards redressing the balance, but there is so much more out there still - including two entire full-length novels. Can someone in the publishing community please get to work and finish the job?
An unusual ghost story teller who writes with precision and creates an atmosphere of creeping dread. I dug it, and I'm curious to check out his other stuff as well.
If there is a fine level of dust over everything in the house you are staying in, it may not be sloppy housekeeping; it may be a message from the dead.
This is the fourth volume of Aickman stories I've read and with this , I believe I exhaust what's readily available.The best story here is the title story,UNSETTLED DUST.There is a ghost here and a miserably unhappy pair of sisters and a sarcastic narrator full of pithy cutting observations about government work and what would now be called NGO's.This volume also contains BIND YOUR HAIR ,which is in another collection.Good story but a repeat.Most of the stories here are overly opaque.One RAVISSANTE is utterly incomprehensible.(Although it did remind me of Susan Hill's MAN IN THE PICTURE). Another THE STAINS makes no sense but what it implies is completely bonkers.Is this , criticism , not really , Aickman is brilliant and unique.I enjoy everything he writes.Yet, I long for a bit more clarity.If Philip Larkin wrote strange stories , I suspect they would have been a bit like this .I find it interesting he was enamored of Elizabeth Jane Howard,Kingsley Amis' first wife- famously Larkin's friend .They probably all hated each other.In closing , these are wonderful , intriguing stories.
I wish I had discovered Aickman in the 70s when he was still alive. I have read some of his admirers and critics and would liked to have corresponded with him. I think I first read him in the early 90s. The eeriness of the banal, I would say. You can;t read these stories without thinking that we don't know what is real.
These stories are chiefly reprinted from Sub Rosa, a hard to find book (though Tartarus Press has recently reprinted that one). The stories are subtle, literary, indirect, symbolic metaphors, often surreal. I don't think he is all that scary. I've read The Inner Room (which is not in The Unsettled Dust), that doll house story another reviewer mentioned. It's not scary, just strange. All of Aickman's stories can be found in his two volume The Collected Strange Stories (Tartarus Press). Other easy to find books are The Wine-Dark Sea and Cold Hand in Mine. His others are more difficult to find. Of the stories in The Unsettled Dust, I like the title story the best. It is more conventional that his usual bizarre, surreal, strange stories. The title story has a ghost in a ruined mansion which has dust everywhere. The ghost itself is made of dust. It is an excellent story. The Houses of the Russians is set on a Finnish island. It has ghosts, also visions of Heaven and Hell, a timeslip element with a vision of a festival. A talisman or medal saves the protagonist from an awful but undefined fate. Like most of Aickman's stories, this fate is left to the reader to figure out. No Stronger Than a Flower is about vanity. One wears the mask of another. It is about the liberation of a woman through her vanity, also on the failure of a marriage. The Cicerones is a gruesome horror story on the theme of Christianity as horror. It has tombs of the bishops of St. Baron, with a cathedral in Belgium, with gruesome paintings of martyrs. The story has a tour of this place by odd people who seem to take delight in the pain of others. There is a symbolic hint of the fate of the characters from the sculpture on the keystone over a door, but I regard the story as unfinished. The reader must figure out what happens next. The Next Glade is from the collection Intrusions, and is also found in The Wine-Dark Sea. Of this story, I can only say that it is odd, and seems to be a wainscot, pocket universe story where the protagonist finds himself in another dimension or a fairy land. I can't explain it. Ravissante is about an obsessed painter, with a bedroom like a mortuary, like The Cicerones, it is set in Belgium. It deals with sexual humiliation, but on the whole does not make much sense. The narrator explains why he gave up painting. He encounters the ugly widow of an artist he had admired, she subjects him to a sexually degrading ritual before a canvas he recognized as his own work, but which he had never painted. It was to keep out of this region of terror and humiliation that the man gave up his art and married a woman who would efface herself for him. Like much of Aickman (and a vast shelf of horror tales) it is misogynistic. Bind Your Hair is from his Dark Entries collection, but is also in The Wine-Dark Sea. I could not get much out of that story, but it involves witchcraft out in a hilly country. The story seems to refer to rituals necessary for protection, but to me it is one his strange symbolic stories. It seems to deal with transformations, werewolves, a vampire woman, and pagan ritual. The Stains has been frequently reprinted. It was originally in an anthology titled New Terrors. It is from his Night Voices, but also is in The Wine-Dark Sea. Here the protagonist falls in love with Nell, a nymph of the Earth, whose father is literally the Earth. She has a stain that grows, spreads to Stephen and to the outside world. The theme seems to be love and death reconciled, and is a tragedy. The protagonist surrenders to obsessed, a common motif in Aickman. He exiles himself on a northern moor, succumbs to terror and decay. He comes to terms with the fact he is dying, that the nymph he meets is escorting him to his grave. In the end the nymph takes him down to her father's dwelling--the natural world. The protagonist realizes he is happy and counts the good things only. This story is quite long (a short novel) and is actually quite dull. A love story, with the isolated man finding love which leads to his death-- a theme Aickman used over and over again and again. Aickman writes on decay, abandonment, earthiness, sex leading to death. Common themes in horror. Still Aickman is not exactly my favorite author, yet he is praised by numerous critics.
After finishing a Robert Aickman story, his readers are often left feeling unsure of what has just happened, but certain that there should be an explanation (if only they knew what it could be) and that the writer has manipulated them as masterfully as possible. Faber Finds has reissued three collections of these stories, and though THE UNSETTLED DUST has more proofreading errors than in even the other two collections, it has some of his finest stories. One of his very best, "Ravissante," is here, but it requires considerable patience on the part of the reader its elaborate and seemingly wandering beginning pays off in the unreal description of its later events (which are like those of Henry James' "The Aspern Papers" but as experienced in a nightmare) and one of his very greatest creepy endings. "The Same Dog" and "The Stains," two of his other finest stories, are also here, as is the brief but disturbing "The Cicerones."
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