The Wine-Dark Sea is the third collection of Robert Aikman stories I’ve reviewed here recently, and the weakest by far. The best of Aikman’s “strange stories,” as he called them, begin with a completely ordinary situation, and fairly quickly ramp up to a high degree of weirdness with a sense of impending doom hovering just out of sight. In most of these stories, however, things ramp up fairly slowly, and only to a moderate degree of weirdness, with a sense of something less than dread just out of sight. Long tunnels, no cheese.
The stories:
- The Wine-Dark Sea – A man finds paradise on an otherworldly Greek island, only to discover the inevitable downside. B+
- The Trains – Two female backpackers wander off the main trail and become the guests, or captives, of a strange family too deeply immersed in the train industry. B
- Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen – A very sad exploration of loneliness and urban isolation. B
- Growing Boys – These brutish twin sons will keep you from wanting to have children. B-
- The Fetch – Itching to visit Scotland? You won’t after reading this. A fetch is a supernatural creature that plucks people out of their earthly existence. B+
- The Inner Room – My favorite story of the bunch, about a child with a creepy doll house: she grows up and forgets about it, but it doesn’t forget about her. Despite the great buildup and ingenious plot the ending was a bit underwhelming, however. B.
- Never Visit Venice. A man for whom true love seems impossible gets pretty darn close on a trip to guess where. B-
- Into the Wood. In Sweden, a woman who seems to have it together finds out nothing is together when she stays at what she thinks is a hotel but is in fact something altogether different. B-
As with all Aickman tales, the characters and atmosphere are carefully and gracefully drawn, so that even when the plots are sluggish, as they are here, the reading is unsettlingly pleasurable.
