Robert Aickman – Master of the Uncanny 

Robert Aickman stands as a unique figure in the landscape of horror literature, renowned for his mastery of the uncanny. This article from Phil Lecomber explores Aickman’s distinct storytelling style and his ability to evoke a creeping sense of unease without resorting to traditional horror tropes like violence or gore. By delving into the psychological underpinnings of what makes us feel uncanny, the piece highlights how Robert Aickman’s mundane settings and perplexing characters create an atmosphere of dread that captivates and unsettles readers. Through his work, Robert Aickman invites us to confront our deepest fears and the unseen forces that linger in everyday life.

Robert Aickman – Master of the Uncanny 

In the late 1980s I bought a copy of Robert Aickman’s novella The Model, purely based on its intriguing cover: a Bruegelesque peasant on a fogbound heath, lamenting the death of a fabulous bird, overlooked by a large rocking horse; the overall effect being that of some kind of medieval fever-dream.

Unpublished in his lifetime (the finished manuscript was found amongst his papers after Robert Aickman’s death in 1981), this mesmerising tale of a young girl’s dreamlike journey across Czarist Russia seduced me immediately and soon had me seeking out other works by the author. Which led me to his horror stories; or strange stories, as Aickman preferred. And what a revelation they were. For Robert Aickman was a master of the uncanny. Nearly all of his tales – there are a mere forty-eight in total – leave the reader with a creeping sense of unease. No body horror, very little violence or gore, no jump scares, just the exquisite conjuring of a sense of the uncanny. 

Why is it that some works of fiction – or real-life experiences – produce this strange emotion? Both the psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud pondered this very question back at the start of the 20th century. The German word for uncanny is unheimlich, although, etymologically speaking, it more closely corresponds to ‘unhomely’ – in the sense that it is the opposite of heimlich: at home, cosy, at ease.

Jentsch posited that one of the causes of this emotion is an intellectual uncertainty, specifically a doubt as to whether a seemingly lifeless object might actually be alive, or, conversely, something which we take to be a living being might actually be inanimate. This would explain why waxwork figures, Victorian dolls, automata, ventriloquists’ dummies and reanimated corpses are often principal players in the theatre of the uncanny. Jentsch also adds to this list the effect of witnessing someone in the grip of a seizure, or caught in the repetitive spasmodic actions of mental disease – the human body overtaken by a seemingly mechanical process. 

But this feeling of unheimlich is not just restricted to experiences which might produce a creeping sense of dread. We often feel it when presented with surprising coincidences – talking about an old schoolfriend, say, only to have them contact us the next day out of the blue; or learning the definition of a new word and then seeing it appear multiple times in articles we read that week. Resorting to the tenets of psychoanalysis, Freud suggests these manifestations of unheimlich are caused by a repressed remnant in our psyches of a period of early human development – the old animistic view of the universe.

This was a time when our ancestors believed the world to be peopled with spirits and attributed magical powers to strangers and inanimate objects. Freud postulates that we still have residual traces of these views, and that when something is uncanny, rather than, say, just frightening, it is because this repressed primitive remnant of the animistic attitude is stimulated and returns to our conscious mind.

He says the same can be said of our attitude to death, dead bodies and ghosts, all of which held great superstitious relevance to our ancestors: ‘… secret harmful forces and the return of the dead … our primitive forebears once regarded such things as real possibilities … Today we no longer believe in them, having surmounted such modes of thought. Yet we do not feel entirely secure in these new convictions 

… Now, as soon as something happens in our lives that seems to confirm these old, discarded beliefs, we experience a sense of the uncanny – because something familiar that has been repressed has reappeared.’ 

But there is a difference between the things we find uncanny in real life and that which we find uncanny in imaginative fiction. After all, in fiction, the author has many more opportunities to produce the effect. There are certain required conditions, though. If the writer has invented a universe where spells, ghosts, demons and wish-fulfilment are everyday occurrences then the manifestation of these things will not be uncanny – frightening and compelling, perhaps, but never uncanny.

However, if they create a world which, for all intents and purposes, appears like our everyday version of reality, and then they introduce something supernatural into it, they have far better scope for manifesting the required effect. Such is the realm of Mr Robert Aickman.

The settings for Robert Aickman’s stories are the most mundane of surroundings: dreary bed and breakfast establishments, failing coastal inns with alcoholic proprietors, modest suburban households. His protagonists are often lonely individuals, awkward in the company of others, fastidious in their habits, unclubbable, not always likeable. And against this backdrop of grey, British banality, Aickman spins his webs of unease, slowly undermining the agency of his protagonist, gradually building the unheimlich sense of dread. One can never second-guess where his strange tales might lead to and quite often they have no real satisfactory conclusion; the reader is left with the feeling they might have actually just recalled a partially remembered nightmare. 

There are other authors, of course, who excel in the genre of the uncanny. One of my favourites of the species is a short story by Daphne du Maurier called The Doll. Written by the author when she was only twenty, but not published until 2011, it is a disturbing story about a man who becomes infatuated with a mysterious, alluring violinist named Rebecca. However, he is driven to a neurotic breakdown when he discovers that Rebecca harbours a disturbing secret – hidden in her flat she has a life-sized mechanical doll, whom she has taken as her lover.

The tale is one of obsession, but also of repressed sexual feelings – an underlying theme of many of Robert Aickman’s stories as well (for all of his uptight British propriety, the author’s work often has a strong erotic charge). It also conforms to Jentsch’s theory of the uncanny. Here’s the point where the protagonist discovers the doll for the first time: 

Something was sitting in the chair. I felt an eerie cold feeling in my heart, as if the room were haunted. ‘What is it?’ I whispered. 

Rebecca took the lamp and held it over the chair. ‘This is Julio,’ she said softly, I stepped closer, and saw what I took to be a boy of about sixteen, dressed in a dinner jacket, shirt and waistcoat, and long Spanish trousers. 

A boy of about sixteen; for some reason, I find that detail particularly unnerving. The inanimate object, then, mistaken as a living being. But is Rebecca’s mechanical lover truly inanimate? There’s our intellectual uncertainty. I use a similar uncanny reveal in my novel MIDNIGHT STREETS – about a series of grisly murders in 1920s London – when a young mother, thinking she may have been burgled, discovers the tips of a pair of child’s patent leather shoes protruding from under the living room curtains. Momentarily relieved at thinking it’s just her young son playing hide-and-seek, she whips back the curtain to reveal … well, something that certainly isn’t alive any more. 

According to du Maurier’s protagonist, Julio’s face was ‘… the most evil thing I have ever seen. It was ashen pale in colour, and the mouth was a crimson gash, sensual and depraved … and the eyes were cruel, gleaming and narrow … They seemed to stare right through one.’ Compare this to the description of another uncanny doll – the ventriloquist’s prop from Gerald Kersh’s The Extraordinarily Horrible Dummy: 

There was something disgustingly avid in the stare of its bulging blue eyes, the lids of which clicked as it winked; and an extraordinarily horrible ghoulishness in the smacking of its great, grinning, red wooden lips. 

Published in 1944, Kersh’s tale is a perfectly-crafted vignette of that popular uncanny trope: the haunted ventriloquist’s dummy, probably most successfully represented by the Michael Redgrave section of the classic British supernatural anthology movie, Dead of Night. That version was attributed to the writer John Baines, but as the film was released in 1945, it begs the question as to which story came first. Perhaps it’s just another of those uncanny coincidences? 

But let’s get back to du Maurier’s doll, Julio, the one with the sensual and depraved mouth. The overwhelming sense we get from this tale is one of carnal danger. At one point Julio’s face is described as that of a ‘grinning hateful satyr’ – surely the most lustful of mythological creatues. A similar, decadent erotic charge runs through one of my favourite Aickman tales: The Swords. Wanting to escape his digs for a while, a young, inexperienced travelling salesman stumbles across a shabby circus tent set up on a dreary piece of wasteland in Wolverhampton.

Inside he finds a show going on, the seats half-filled with a collection of seedy men. It has all the appearances of some tawdry striptease, but the female performer on stage sits sprawled, catatonic on a chair, her face made up with strange green powder. The circus barker – whom our protagonist suspects of being her pimp – then proceeds to cajole members of the audience into piercing the young woman with swords, a collection of which are piled up before him.

We are as unnerved as the young salesman to discover that, rather than injuring the beguiling performer, these woundings seem to enliven and arouse her. The young man escapes through the tent flaps, terrified he will be next to be called up to perform the transgressional act. The whole thing has the eerie detachment of some horrid dream. With our inexperienced protagonist now besotted with the strange young woman, things become even more surreal when the barker pimps her out to him. Typical of Robert Aickman, the ending is both disturbing and puzzling in equal measures. 

And so to one of the most accomplished of Robert Aickman’s stories, Ringing the Changes, a kind of folk horror tale which takes us back to Freud’s theory of repressed primitive superstition. The story centres around two newlyweds, Gerald and Phrynne, who have chosen to spend their honeymoon in a remote seaside town. Immediately upon their arrival, the bell in a nearby church begins to peal ominously. Soon it’s joined by the bells from other churches, and what at first was a curious oddity, now becomes a monotonous nuisance which threatens to ruin their honeymoon.

Things are made worse when they discover they’ve booked themselves into a ramshackle hotel, run by a pair of shoddy dipsomaniacs. One of the fellow guests admonishes Gerald for bringing his young wife to the town on such a night, and urges him to leave immediately. It soon becomes clear the clanging bells herald some terrifying ancient ritual and before long the couple find themselves cowering in their room, as the dead are resurrected to the riotous thrill of the marauding locals. But this is an Robert Aickman story – not The Walking Dead; we never actually see the reanimated corpses, we only smell them, in the claustrophobic dark, as they invade the hotel room.

And they’re not there to kill, only to dance; dance with the locals … and with Phrynne, who gets carried away into the nightmarish throng. In the morning things appear to have returned to normal; but Gerald notices his new wife will no longer meet his eye; he knows then, of course, things will never be the same. As they leave town they pass the cemetery, where the locals are toiling hard with their spades, returning the dead to their graves, repressing those primitive urges once again. And at the sight of this, Phrynne’s mouth ‘… became fleetingly more voluptuous still.’ Robert Aickman’s tale is over, and we are left, once again, with an overwhelming sense of the uncanny. 

Midnight Streets by Phil Lecomber (£9.99, Titan Books) will be published on 18th March. 

‘I loved this fast-paced, atmospheric adventure through the smoke and neon of 1920s Soho, vividly written and rich with historical detail. The twists and turns will leave you reeling.’ – Alex Pavesi, bestselling author of Eight Detectives

A pacy, evocative dark historical thriller about a working-class private detective in 1920s London’s Soho, who has grown up alongside the morally dubious characters who are key to cracking the cases he investigates, for fans of Dominic Nolan and Laura Shepherd Robinson.

When Cockney private detective George Harley saves a young girl’s life on a dark London night in 1929, he doesn’t realise it marks the beginning of an investigation which will change his life forever. The incendiary book which inspired the girl’s abduction also seems to be linked to a series of grisly murders that are taking place on Harley’s patch, and though he’s delighted to be asked by Scotland Yard to help find the killer before they strike again, he could do without the local razor- and cosh-wielding mobsters thinking he’s in the police’s pocket.

Set during the Golden Age of Crime Fiction, Harley’s world is a far cry from the country house of an Agatha Christie whodunnit. This working-class sleuth does his ‘sherlocking’ in the frowzy alleyways and sleazy nightclubs of Soho – the city’s underbelly – peopled with lowlife ponces, jaded streetwalkers, and Jewish and Maltese gangsters: a world of grubby bedsits, all-night cafés, egg and chips, and Gold Flake cigarettes. Here, the midnight streets are black as pitch and, as Harley finds himself embroiled in the macabre mysteries of a city in which truth is as murky as the pea-souper smog and the sins are as dark as stout porter beer, he begins to realise he may never find a way out.

9781835411995 | 11th March 2025 | Paperback & eBook | £9.99 |

$18.99 | 448pp

titanbooks.com | @TitanBook

PHIL LECOMBER was born in 1965 in Slade Green, on the outskirts of South East London—just a few hundred yards from the muddy swirl of the Thames.

Although he now lives in the beautiful West Country city of Bath, most of his working life has been spent in and around the capital in a variety of occupations. He has worked as a musician in the city’s clubs, pubs and dives; as a steel-fixer helping to build the towering edifices of the square mile (and also working on some of the city’s iconic landmarks, such as Tower Bridge); as a designer of stained-glass windows; and—since the early 90s—as the director of a small company in Mayfair specializing in the electronic security of some of the world’s finest works of art.

All of which, of course, has provided wonderful material for a novelist’s inspiration.

Always an avid reader, a chance encounter as a teenager with a Gerald Kersh short story led to a fascination with the ‘Morbid Age’­—the years between the wars. The world that Phil has created for the Piccadilly Noir series is the result of the consumption and distillation of myriad contemporary novels, films, historical accounts, biographies and slang dictionaries of the 1920/30s—with a nod here and there to some of the real-life colourful characters that he’s had the pleasure of rubbing shoulders with over the years.

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