Robert Aickman – a new article

Laird Barron’s recent eye-opening article on Robert Aickman’s ‘The Hospice’ HERE. .  Something I wrote in 2013 on my blog: “I don’t want to harp on about this, but I genuinely think that – at least in part – that The Hospice (and Into The Wood?) forms a tribute to ‘The Magic Mountain’ by Thomas Mann and covers many of its themes which you can tick off one by one. And I think we know that Thomas Mann was one of Aickman’s major influences according to his letters. But I have been the first to decry this biographical type of literary criticism based on my life-long interest in the Intentional Fallacy! So I am torn.” My original real-time review of ‘The Magic Mountain’ (including comparison with Aickman) started HERE

A book I have compared to both ‘The Magic Mountain’ by Thomas Mann and ‘The Hospice’ by Robert Aickman is ‘The Inmates’ by John Cowper Powys: HERE

“and a dog’s eyes answered his stare with a look of such unutterable loneliness…” – from ‘The Inmates’

My proposal is that Aickman would not only have been a big fan of Mann but also of Powys.

Discussion forum thread about all this HERE.