ABSTRACT
Robert Aickman’s editorship of the Fontana Books allowed him to present what amounts to a personal canon of the ghost story, and to locate his own writing within it. Aickman’s introductions illuminate his view of the ghost story: at the same time as seeing the form as antique, he also believed it met contemporary needs. If Aickman is remembered today, it is usually for his strange stories, which appeared in a number of collections and anthologies from 1951 onwards. Aickman’s stories return to the theme of imaginative escape, sometimes so directly they scarcely feel like ghost stories at all. Both “The View” and “The Wine-Dark Sea” feature magical islands and mysterious spirits that recall The Tempest more than the haunted nooks and crannies of the Victorian ghost story. If the standard introduction to the ghost story turns on phrases that tend to the tongue-in-cheek, promising a ‘good scare’ or the like, then Aickman makes a very different proposition.
