The Coffin House

3.Oct.21

I reviewed this story over six years ago…

THE COFFIN HOUSE by Robert Aickman

“Even the sugar basin contained only a discoloured slime.”

Now this is embryo Aickman as the quintessential ‘Strange Story’ writer, with, for me, foreshadowing ingredients of ‘The Trains’. Two land girls lost and finding themselves in a forbidding abode, sudden change of costume…
Actually, it is rather effective and if I’d read it in ‘Aickman’s Heirs’ (an anthology I happen to be simultaneously real-time reviewing HERE alongside this review), I would have called it an excellent Aickman pastiche!

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Today, it becomes even more insidious, as the two land girls seeking shelter in this woman’s house discover she is an evil policewoman (are there such?) with a whistle, and later she is dressed as a nurse with an empty syringe, with in between these events a man with a ‘coffin knife’ prepared to prepare them, but for what? — perhaps to flay and flense them, not just for the coffins straightaway, but for whatever hunger was borne for them…?