He was not going to die, not here, not now.
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The Reviewer: A Story Review of Robert Aickman’s Strange Stories
The Reviewer – for that was how he signed his name at the bottom of his column – sat down at his desk. He always took an almost physical satisfaction at it: the grain of the polished wood, the smoothness of the carving, the finish, all quietly spoke, in unison, of the taste of the man who sat before it. That was, the reviewer, thought, as it should be.
He picked up his pen, feeling it thick between his fingers, and paused, holding it above the fresh expanse of virgin paper that waited, spread upon his writing desk. Always, the pause; the delicious hesitation, the wait.
Ah, the wait.
The Reviewer allowed the wait to turn into the weight: the heavy load of words, building in his mind, swirling there in inchoate, pregnant silence.
Then, release.
When it was over, and he was spent, the Reviewer put the pen down, laying it neatly beside the sheet of paper: always, exactly parallel to the edge, and an inch away. Precision in such matters was a signifier of his own singularity.
With the pen retracted, the Reviewer turned his eyes to the paper. First, he cast his eyes over its entirety, taking the expanse in, in one single, appraising glance. The shape of the review was the first element of its felicity: how often had he, in his youthful, fumbling experiments, cast aside a work simply because the words made an unbecoming shape upon the page.
But here, the paragraphs were well proportioned, their very form propelling the reading eye onwards, down the page towards the final, juddering climax. For, of course, the Reviewer saved his best work for those authors he cared for most deeply: the ones he truly despised. For them: evisceration. The exposure of their incompetence was his satisfaction, the reason for his existence as a reviewer.
And this was one of the worst. A writer whose cod historical dialogue was meant to add veracity to his recreation of the 7th century, but who revealed, by the inversion of word order and his failed attempts to catch the alliterative punch of Anglo-Saxon poetry, only the tin ear of the 21st.
The Reviewer, satisfied with the form, steepled his fingers.
Now, to read.
The writing always came in a Bacchic flood, the word frenzy flooding his body and mind, so that he did not know what he wrote; only, that he was, finally, deliciously, spent.
The reading, however, was Apollonian: the careful, weighted appreciation of every word and phrase, every syllable and sentence. The Reviewer knew no purer aesthetic experience than the first reading.
He breathed out, calming mind and body, then brought his eyes to the page.
The Reviwer read through to the end.
He stared long at the page.
The words upon it did not change.
For a moment, he thought if, perhaps, some other hand had written them. But he was too fastidious in memory to allow himself that escape.
The words. Those trite, banal, graceless words were his.
They were worse, even, than the talentless hack he had sought to expose.
The Reviewer stood up. He left the paper white upon his desk, and went out into the street. The street lamp, its dirty yellow staining the pavement, lit him. The Reviewer looked up and down the street where he lived. No one left and no one came.
The Muse had left him.
No matter. The Reviewer knew where to find her again.
The last time, she had called herself Jade. The Reviewer’s lips ticked upwards in something like a smile. She had said, he had the biggest talent she’d ever seen.
He would just have to find the Muse again.
As he set off, walking down the street towards the cluster of drab yellow neon that told of the Muse’s presence, he wondered what she would call herself this time.
The End
(There. Robert Aickman’s strange stories are, indeed, strange, and I wasn’t at all sure how to review them. But if you like this little tale, then you’ll enjoy Aickman’s stories too.)
Who Killed Horror?
I’m old enough to remember how, back in the 1980s, it seemed like the horror genre was going to take over the world. Stephen King, of course, had started it: Carrie came out in 1974, Salem’s Lot in ’75, The Shining in ’77 and The Stand in ’78. Jumping on the bandwagon, a whole host of writers and publishers began churning out horror books through the following decade – and I was a big fan of them, picking lurid covers off the shelves at bookshops.
And then, it died. Not for Stephen King, of course, but for the rest. The blood-stained tracks became too trampled, the public lost interest, the publishers stopped publishing. The 1990s saw lots of articles written, asking variations on the question, who killed off the horror genre.
Now, having read The Turn of the Screw, I can answer the question. We did. We writers, we killed it off. Drove a stake through its heart, chopped its head off, pulled out its entrails and painted its drained blood upon the walls.
And that’s how we did it too: by piling up bodies, horror on horror, and forgetting that, for horror to work, there has to be something worse than death and the pain of dying; something much worse.
This is what makes The Turn of the Screw, and the other Victorian ghost stories, so effective: because these writers believed – or at least belonged to a culture that believed – that there are things worse than death. That a soul can be lost and, in its loss, something infinitely more precious than the mere pumping of blood and inflating of lungs is lost too.
After all, the problem with death, when that’s all there is, is that death ends everything. It’s the black curtain, the exit, the end, the close to suffering and the final release. Writing in a culture where death is the great, the sole, evil, robs horror of, well, its horror. Take away dread, the unspoken, wordless, formless dread of things and fates beyond and above and below death, and horror is reduced to variations on torture porn: how much can we make the protagonist suffer before his end? There is no horror in this, only the workings out of a monkey curiosity, drained of empathy.
So, for horror to work, then there must, indeed, be fates worse than death. It is the knowledge that this is true that makes The Turn of the Screw – despite Henry James’s rather curious prose style, so much more laboured and laborious than his brother, William James’s – into such a haunting book. And, reading it, tells us how flattened we have allowed our imaginative world to become.
Adventures in Bookland: The Colour Thief by Andrew Fusek Peters
Depression exists underneath words, and outside them. It drains meaning from them and renders them pointless squiggles on a page or passing breath, taken by the wind. So, this picture book largely dispenses with words and uses pictures to tell of how a young boy learns of, understands and copes with his father’s depression. It does so beautifully and the central metaphor – of depression as the thief of colour – works perfectly. Highly recommended for anyone having to deal with depression in the family, and particularly when it affects children.
Adventures in Bookland: Here Comes the Poo Bus! by Andy Stanton
In Here Comes the Poo Bus! narrative poetry – an undeservedly neglected form in the 20th century – reaches a new pitch of artistic tension and, final, blessed, relief. Have you ever reached that point, in the creative process, where the artistic load has grown to such a mass that it simply has to be dumped, immediately, no matter where you are and what you are doing? Even in the midst of the most important meeting or walking the high hills of Yosemite, unseen connections have been made in the dark, unplumbed places and then, suddenly, they all come together and have to be released.
Ever had that happen to you?
Or, if not, have you ever been overcome by the desperate, this-will-not-wait, desire to do a poo?
Then this is the book for you!
It contains what is, I think, the single finest verse ever committed to paper:
Here it comes! The poo bus!
Along the avenue.
It’s big! It’s brown! It drives through town!
It’s made out of poo!
I should mention that, before I read this extraordinary work, my favourite poetic couplet came from T.Rex’s seminal statement of artistic, cultural and political change, Children of the Revolution, and simply states:
I drive a Rolls Royce
‘Cos it’s good for my voice.
Mind, it’s worth bearing in mind, when choosing suitable reading matter for yourself and your children, that my own finest poetic achievement came in distilling the emotion (“Oh my goodness me, I cannot believe I am seeing this”) in the tranquility of recollection. So, to finish, here it is. If you like this, you’ll love Here Comes the Poo Bus!
Gorillas eat their poo?
I can’t believe they do.
Oh no! Oh yuck!
It’s true!
Adventures in Bookland: Dream London by Tony Ballantyne
Like a dream, Dream London evaporates almost completely from memory as soon as it’s finished. This makes it either the best evocation of dreaming yet put down on paper or useless. I’m afraid you’ll have to read it yourself to find out which – I’m afraid I can’t remember.
Tell Us What You Really Think, Mr Teacher
This may be the finest example I have yet read of a teacher saying what he really thinks of his pupil. Sadly, nowadays school reports are anodyne documents, cloaked in cliches. But this example, from a Geography teacher’s report, I can personally vouch for: I have seen and read the dog-eared report (a report treasured down the years by the boy, now man and a teacher himself, who received it).
David has failed completely to impress me favourably this term. Apart from his manner, which is frequently offensive, his term time marks and exam scores are abysmal.
A Proper Peer
On a recent visit to Wrest Park in Bedfordshire, we saw this quote, in the Bowling Green House, from Jemima, Marchioness Grey: ‘Have been strolling most of the morning with my book, and my dog and my fawn.’ 1744.
Now that is the quote of a proper aristocrat! And here she is – Jemima, Marchioness Grey (9 October 1723 – 10 January 1797):
Adventures in Bookland: The Lion Comic Book Hero Bible
While the beginning was a Word, spoken by God to and of himself, what are we to do in an age when words – the packets of meaning that carry the dim, refracted reflection of the original Word of creation – are being systematically devalued and drained of meaning? Think on it: from the inversion of meanings in slang and street talk to the complete draining of sense and colour and, sometimes, even logic that occurs in business speak, our language is having the sense drained from it, so that the awareness of power that once existed in speaking and reading, the belief, sometimes inchoate sometimes explicit, that words carry power and that that power might be made concrete in arenas as different as the working of a spell or the raising of a crowd, that sense of the power of words has diminished and in places disappeared. After all, look around you. Everywhere, people looking at screens but, for the most part, they’re watching cat videos or, thumbs blurring, they’re playing some graphics heavy game.
Our words have grown old and tired. Maybe it’s the penalty of centuries of civilisation. Maybe it’s a consequence of hearing ourselves speak so much that we have grown sick of the sound of our own voices. Or, more likely, it’s the response to the flashy new toys of the video kid. After all, movies are only a century old, TV just over half a century, and the new era of instant visuals is barely a decade old. No wonder people are dazzled by them – they still carry the flash and dazzle of movement, the deeply laid instinct to look towards something that catches our eye. Words, in comparison, are static: you have to seek them out. So no wonder then the Bible, the source of so many of the words, and most of the ideas, that underpin our creaking civilisation is passed over: it’s all just words on a page.
One way of facing this visual deficit is exactly what Lion have done with this brilliantly produced and richly conceived book: turn words into pictures – to be precise, the sorts of pictures that were the precursors of much of the film and gaming entertainment of today: comic-book art.
Siku (Old Testament) and Jeff Anderson (New Testament) draw the Word, and do so with a richness, immediacy and strangeness that kindles the Secret Fire of life back into words and stories grown old with repetition. I particularly liked Siku’s take on the Old Testament – the stylisation of his work marrying perfectly with the mythological strands of the Pentateuch.
I can think of few better ways to gain a new and fresh take on the Bible – or to have a crash course in the major aspects of biblical history. The Bible has a lot of words – the Lion Comic Book Hero Bible has a lot less!
In a culture that is rapidly losing its cultural roots, I’d also hugely recommend this book to any RE teachers looking for a quick and accessible and engaging way to introduce the Bible to a class of de-facto heathens.