Re: Ex Occidente Press
 

I've just received a few airmail copies of The Terrible Changes and it looks great. The cover image is grimmer than the one originally planned (changed due to repro problems) and the whole thing has a stark and sombre beauty. Even the paper used to line the covers is the exact same shade of blue as a night in which winged and faceless things come to take you away.

Re: Ex Occidente Press
 

Thank the Lord!!

Re: Ex Occidente Press
 

Simon, it would have been too much horror in one book.

Mark S.

Re: Ex Occidente Press
 

[Chokes on his tea and spills snuff all over the sofa.]

You've never read anything by Robert Aickman....?

Forget about buying books from Ex Occidente (heresy I know).

Take an extended holiday from TLO.

Go to Amazon or Bookfinder and acquire some Aickman collections and then spend the next fortnight acquainting yourselves with the texts (the US edition of 'Cold Hand In Mine' is as cheap as chips).

Seriously, you should do it. Aickman is to contemporary horror what The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones are to post Presley rock music.

Re: Ex Occidente Press
 

Aickman is one of the greatest weird fiction authors in terms of expanding your sense of what supernatural fiction can be about: the psychological, the erotic, the social and the metaphysical come together in his work. He's also a master of ambiguity who can crack the reader's assumptions apart with a single innocent comment – the last five words of 'No Time Is Passing' are a case in point. He owes a lot to de la Mare in terms of technique, but has different things to say about the human condition. A few Aickman stories strike me as arrogant and narrow in their attitude, but far more are breathtakingly original and challenging. 'The Swords' is among the greatest weird stories of the last half-century.

Aickman considered M.R. James a superficial populist – which only seems arrogant if you don't see how much more ambitious and serious Aickman's approach is. He belongs to a tradition of psychological and metaphysical ghost stories that includes Oliver Onions, Henry James, Walter de la Mare and John Metcalfe before him, Fritz Leiber as a contemporary and Charles L. Grant, Ramsey Campbell and M. John Harrison after him. Aickman quite openly despised the Jamesian principle of the 'pleasing terror' or cosy chill that entertains without challenging the reader's assumptions. His stories pose serious questions about human nature and the world we have created.

Re: Ex Occidente Press
 

Chris is quite right.

Unless you have the misfortune to happen across, at the start of your Aickman exploration, his oh-so-tedious short novel The Model. In which case, it may put you off Aickman for life.

Mark S.

Re: Ex Occidente Press
 

Or, indeed, 'Never Visit Venice', where Aickman delivers a choleric anti-Italian rant of incredible length and tedium before eventually deciding he might as well get on and tell a story.

But the Aickman masterpieces come thick and fast in most of his collections. My favourites include 'Into the Wood', 'Bind Your Hair', 'The Inner Room', 'Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen', 'Pages from a Young Girl's Journal', 'Wood', 'No Time Is Passing', 'The Stains'...

Re: Ex Occidente Press
 

Oh, to one day pen a tale even half as good as "The Inner Room"...

Re: Ex Occidente Press
 

Interestingly, Ligotti is (or has been) an Aickman sceptic: he describes Aickman's work as "a closetful of cliches" hidden behind a contrived difficulty of reading. If it weren't for that, one could draw parallels between the two writers as creators of allegorical weird tales – 'The Bungalow House', for example, strikes me as quite Aickmanesque. Perhaps it's worth doing regardless.

But we are waaaay off topic and this thread is getting too long to open up. I can't see how to start a new thread, but that's probably my usual technology-blindness.

Re: Ex Occidente Press
 

It's is a bit your blindness, but it's also a bit the site itself, with its labyrinthine nest of topic areas, all hidden from view by a deceptively inviting front page (I say this with love, of course). You'll need to go into the "Content" tab up top and muddle your way into a forum. In there, you'll find a button to start a new tab.

Brian Lavalle, the fellow who runs the Aickman website (or should I say former site, as a trip to it just now revealed a "space for rent" sign), posts here occasionally, and has himself drawn parallels between Ligotti and Aickman. I can certainly see similarities between their work as well, "The Bungalow House" being a prime example. Still, I don't think the idea was ever fully investigated as I suspect many here on the Ligotti boards are Aickman-ignorant — through no fault of their own, of course, but that one hasn't been able to buy Aickman off the shelf, especially in the Faber-free USA, for many years.