# Robert Aickman
**Robert Aickman** (Robert Fordyce Aickman, 27 June 1914 – 26 February 1981) was an English writer of what he called "strange stories", quasi-supernatural tales that avoid the conventions of the ghost story, and a conservationist who co-founded the Inland Waterways Association to preserve and restore Britain's canals.[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/aickman_robert) • [2](https://www.nyrb.com/collections/robert-aickman) He wrote 48 strange stories, published between 1951 and 1981 in eight books, and was the grandson of the Victorian novelist Richard Marsh, whose occult thriller *The Beetle* (1897) appeared the same year as *Dracula* and matched it in popularity.[3](https://www.tartaruspress.com/rosalie/robert-aickman-author-of-strange-tales.html) • [4](https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2018/06/why-robert-aickman-master-weird-fiction)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Born / died | 27 June 1914, London; 26 February 1981, London, of cancer[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/aickman_robert) • [2](https://www.nyrb.com/collections/robert-aickman) |
| Signature term | Called his fiction "strange stories" and resisted the horror label[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/aickman_robert) |
| Output | 48 strange stories in eight collections, 1951–1981; also two novels, two autobiographies, and two books on the waterways[3](https://www.tartaruspress.com/rosalie/robert-aickman-author-of-strange-tales.html) • [5](https://www.faber.co.uk/author/robert-aickman/) |
| First book | *We Are for the Dark: Six Ghost Stories* (1951), a collaboration with Elizabeth Jane Howard[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/aickman_robert) |
| Awards | World Fantasy Award 1975 for "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal"; British Fantasy Award 1981 for "The Stains"[6](https://hellnotes.com/ron-breznays-masters-of-horror-robert-aikman/) |
| Canal work | Co-founder, 1946, of the Inland Waterways Association; stood down as director of its national campaign in 1963[5](https://www.faber.co.uk/author/robert-aickman/) • [7](https://historicengland.org.uk/research/results/reports/7242/CanalandRiverNavigationsNationalOverview) |
| Family | Grandson of Richard Marsh, author of *The Beetle* (1897); married to the literary agent Edith Ray Gregorson from 1941 to 1957[2](https://www.nyrb.com/collections/robert-aickman) • [5](https://www.faber.co.uk/author/robert-aickman/) |
## Life
Aickman was born in London, the son of the architect William Arthur Aickman and a much younger woman; his parents fought bitterly and separated when he was seventeen.[8](https://www.wordtrade.com/spotlight/022jun2018.pdf) His father's architectural practice failed, and there was no money to send him to Oxbridge; he grew into, in one critic's description, a classic autodidact who could seem polymathic but became insecure and defensive when challenged.[9](https://irishgothicjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/ijghsissue3.pdf) He did not attend university and lived on a small family income in London, working variously as a literary agent, editor, and theater and art critic.[2](https://www.nyrb.com/collections/robert-aickman)
In 1941 he married Edith Ray Gregorson, a literary agent and writer of children's books; with her he set up the Richard Marsh Agency, named for his grandfather.[5](https://www.faber.co.uk/author/robert-aickman/) • [4](https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2018/06/why-robert-aickman-master-weird-fiction) The marriage ended in 1957 when, after a spiritual experience and worn out by his infidelity, she left for an Anglican convent in [Oxfordshire](https://www.edgepedia.org/oxfordshire) and became a nun.[10](https://www.thresholdsarchive.org.uk/a-cold-hand-the-stories-of-robert-aickman/)
## The canals
After reading Tom Rolt's book *Narrow Boat*, Aickman, then a London literary agent, wrote to Rolt, and the two met aboard Rolt's boat *Cressy* in August 1945; the idea of campaigning for the waterways took hold, and an inaugural meeting was arranged for early 1946.[11](https://waterways.org.uk/about-us/the-charity/iwa-75-years-of-campaigns) With Rolt and his wife Angela, Aickman set up the Inland Waterways Association to preserve Britain's canal system from neglect and destruction.[5](https://www.faber.co.uk/author/robert-aickman/) • [12](https://app.the-tls.co.uk/tls_article/hauntings-from-the-mist/pugpig_index.html) He planned a fact-finding tour of the northern waterways in the summer of 1948, and such tours became a fixture of the association's calendar.[11](https://waterways.org.uk/about-us/the-charity/iwa-75-years-of-campaigns)
His leadership was combative. A 1961 internal Ministry letter described the association as showing "tremendous energy and an unhesitating readiness to falsify facts provably known to it".[7](https://historicengland.org.uk/research/results/reports/7242/CanalandRiverNavigationsNationalOverview) The reopening of the Stratford Canal by Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in July 1963 was a triumph for the restorationists, and Aickman, whose intransigence the same account calls double-edged, stood down from his role as director of the national campaign.[7](https://historicengland.org.uk/research/results/reports/7242/CanalandRiverNavigationsNationalOverview) He also wrote two popular nonfiction books about the inland waterways.[2](https://www.nyrb.com/collections/robert-aickman)
## The strange stories
Aickman turned to fiction late and published his first book, *We Are for the Dark: Six Ghost Stories* (1951), in collaboration with the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard; it contained three stories by Aickman and three by Howard.[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/aickman_robert) • [6](https://hellnotes.com/ron-breznays-masters-of-horror-robert-aikman/) • [21](https://tartaruspress.com/aickman-we-are-for-the-dark.html) The *Science Fiction Encyclopedia* notes that these first tales were the work of a writer already mature, in full control of his material, with no public apprenticeship behind them.[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/aickman_robert)
His eight collections ran from *Dark Entries* (1964) and *Powers of Darkness* (1966) through *Sub Rosa* (1968), *Cold Hand in Mine* (1975), *Tales of Love and Death* (1977), *Painted Devils* (1979), *Intrusions* (1980), and the posthumous *Night Voices* (1985); *The Wine-Dark Sea* followed in 1988.[13](https://www.jrank.org/literature/pages/3133/Robert-Aickman.html) • [14](https://sfadb.com/Robert_Aickman_Chronology) He also wrote the short novel *The Late Breakfasters* (1964), an uneasily fantasticated farce, and the posthumously published novella *The Model* (1987), in which a protagonist who longs to be a ballerina is carried into a doll's-house world.[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/aickman_robert) • [2](https://www.nyrb.com/collections/robert-aickman) Two autobiographies, *The Attempted Rescue* (1966) and *The River Runs Uphill: A Story of Success and Failure* (1986), present a life told by implication rather than exposition.[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/aickman_robert)
**Method.** Aickman dispensed almost entirely with the scaffold of exposition, withholding rationales so that even when it is fairly clear what has happened in a story, unanswered questions and loose ends remain.[15](https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/jan/12/brief-survey-short-story-robert-aickman) • [10](https://www.thresholdsarchive.org.uk/a-cold-hand-the-stories-of-robert-aickman/) "Never explain: never apologise" was one of his favorite phrases, according to his personal secretary Barbara Balch, and the epigraph to *Cold Hand in Mine* reads, "In the end it is the mystery that lasts and not the explanation".[10](https://www.thresholdsarchive.org.uk/a-cold-hand-the-stories-of-robert-aickman/) • [15](https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/jan/12/brief-survey-short-story-robert-aickman) He judged the form severely, writing that there are "only about 30 or 40 first-class ghost stories in the whole of western literature".[15](https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/jan/12/brief-survey-short-story-robert-aickman)
**Standing.** Aickman rejected the horror label, and the horror writer Ramsey Campbell, a friend, wrote in an afterword to the Faber reprint of *Dark Entries* that Aickman had no use for Lovecraft or any fiction he regarded as horror.[16](https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-strange-writing-of-robert-aickman) In their commitment to ambiguity and the inscrutable psychologies of their characters, his stories have been placed closer to modernist writers than to an Edwardian like [M. R. James](https://www.edgepedia.org/m-r-james), in the lineage of [Henry James](https://www.edgepedia.org/henry-james)'s *The Turn of the Screw* and the later ghost stories of Kipling.[15](https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/jan/12/brief-survey-short-story-robert-aickman) A closer comparison drawn by one reviewer is with [Franz Kafka](https://www.edgepedia.org/franz-kafka), whose dreamlike logic Aickman's writing shares.[17](https://foxedquarterly.com/brandon-robshaw-robert-aickman-literary-review/) In an essay for *Supernatural Fiction Writers* (1985), John Clute, a critic and co-editor of reference works on fantasy and horror, offered a tentative reading of the stories as Jungian-inflected dramas of mid-life crisis, enacted by protagonists who are almost always male and whose failure lay in rebuilding the heroic selfhood of their youth into a form of chivalry.[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/aickman_robert) Stories of note include "Ringing the Changes" (1955), in which the risen dead paralyze a moribund marriage; "The Hospice" (1975); "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal" (1973), a vampire story that won the 1975 World Fantasy Award; and "The Stains" (1980), which won the 1981 British Fantasy Award.[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/aickman_robert) • [6](https://hellnotes.com/ron-breznays-masters-of-horror-robert-aikman/)
## Reception
Aickman's books were never bestsellers, and after his death, which he elected to treat homoeopathically, they were largely neglected for years.[18](https://tartaruspress.com/aickman/biography.html) • [15](https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/jan/12/brief-survey-short-story-robert-aickman) Recognition came toward the end of his life and grew after it: the centenary of his birth in 2014 brought a Faber reissue of the collections, and the NYRB Classics line published him as well.[12](https://app.the-tls.co.uk/tls_article/hauntings-from-the-mist/pugpig_index.html) • [19](https://www.horrifiedmagazine.co.uk/other/drabness-and-dread-on-robert-aickman/) Recurring criticism holds that the strange stories are too vague and too devoid of easy answers to reach a large audience; admirers answer that the ambiguity is the point.[12](https://app.the-tls.co.uk/tls_article/hauntings-from-the-mist/pugpig_index.html) A recurring judgment among critics is that he was perhaps the finest writer of the ghost story in the second half of the twentieth century.[20](https://fanac.org/fanzines/Fantasy_Comment/fantasy_commentator_50_v9n2_searles_1997-fa.pdf)
## References
1. [Aickman, Robert, Science Fiction Encyclopedia](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/aickman_robert)
2. [Robert Aickman, New York Review Books](https://www.nyrb.com/collections/robert-aickman)
3. [Robert Aickman: Author of Strange Tales, Tartarus Press](https://www.tartaruspress.com/rosalie/robert-aickman-author-of-strange-tales.html)
4. [Why Robert Aickman is the master of "weird fiction", New Statesman](https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2018/06/why-robert-aickman-master-weird-fiction)
5. [Robert Aickman, Author, Faber](https://www.faber.co.uk/author/robert-aickman/)
6. [Ron Breznay's Masters of Horror: Robert Aickman, Hellnotes](https://hellnotes.com/ron-breznays-masters-of-horror-robert-aikman/)
7. [Canal and River Navigations: National Overview, Historic England](https://historicengland.org.uk/research/results/reports/7242/CanalandRiverNavigationsNationalOverview)
8. [Wordtrade spotlight review, June 2018](https://www.wordtrade.com/spotlight/022jun2018.pdf)
9. [Gary William Crawford, Robert Aickman: An Introduction, Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies](https://irishgothicjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/ijghsissue3.pdf)
10. [A Cold Hand: The Stories of Robert Aickman, THRESHOLDS](https://www.thresholdsarchive.org.uk/a-cold-hand-the-stories-of-robert-aickman/)
11. [IWA – 75 Years of Campaigns, Inland Waterways Association](https://waterways.org.uk/about-us/the-charity/iwa-75-years-of-campaigns)
12. [From the mist, TLS](https://app.the-tls.co.uk/tls_article/hauntings-from-the-mist/pugpig_index.html)
13. [Robert Aickman Biography, JRank](https://www.jrank.org/literature/pages/3133/Robert-Aickman.html)
14. [Robert Aickman Chronology, SF Awards Database](https://sfadb.com/Robert_Aickman_Chronology)
15. [A brief survey of the short story: Robert Aickman | Short stories | The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/jan/12/brief-survey-short-story-robert-aickman)
16. [The 'Strange' Writing of Robert Aickman, The Bulwark](https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-strange-writing-of-robert-aickman)
17. [Brandon Robshaw, Robert Aickman Stories, Slightly Foxed](https://foxedquarterly.com/brandon-robshaw-robert-aickman-literary-review/)
18. [Biography, Tartarus Press](https://tartaruspress.com/aickman/biography.html)
19. [Drabness and Dread: On Robert Aickman, Horrified](https://www.horrifiedmagazine.co.uk/other/drabness-and-dread-on-robert-aickman/)
20. [Fantasy Commentator 50 (Searles, 1997)](https://fanac.org/fanzines/Fantasy_Comment/fantasy_commentator_50_v9n2_searles_1997-fa.pdf)
21. [Aickman We Are for the Dark, tartaruspress.com](https://tartaruspress.com/aickman-we-are-for-the-dark.html)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Literature and written works › Writers and literary biographies › Fiction writers: novelists and genre › Science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers › Horror writers*
*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 30, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Sep 30, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
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