![]() ![]() ![]() His tone, no matter the events he might be relaying, is relentlessly matter-of-fact. Here is the reason such advice might be necessary: Aickman’s prose is dry, often oppressively so. There are passing thoughts on which to dwell, at least a little bit. You have to revel in the freedom that opening a story with the sentence “The situation at home had left Robin Breeze entirely free to choose what he did with his life” (from “Letters to the Postman”) offers in terms of past, present, and future. You have to wonder, when he describes the complexion of an unknown party as “rubicund or umber” (as he does in the claustrophobic “No Time Is Passing”), why he has chosen such specific and unusual terms. You have to let it sit with you, you have to absorb it, you have to let its words twist their way through your brain and around your tongue. “Sometimes I would look up at the end of a story, feeling that the whole thing had just twisted itself inside out and turned into smoke – I had blinked, and missed it all.” ![]()
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