Ep. 11 - Into the Wood by Robert Aickman

Pleasant Evenings Book Club

My favorite description for the curious effect of Robert Aickman stories was given by Neil Gaiman: "Reading Robert Aickman is like watching a magician work, and very often I'm not even sure what the trick was. All I know is that he did it beautifully."

His story Into the Wood is one of the more curious entries in his catalogue in that he has somehow inverted the ghost story to such a degree that the real terror becomes a world where nothing goes bump in the night. We discuss the feeling of surrendering to mystery and the way modernity casts itself in opposition to it.

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