The Fetch by Robert Aickman

Robert Aickman (1914-1981) is the acknowledged master of the "strange tale"...his work sits a few steps up from the "weird tales" of Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) and perhaps a few steps closer to Robert W Chambers (1865 - 1933) author of the seminal "The King in Yellow".

Charming, rude, irascible, paranoid.... he lived the life of a slightly forgotten bohemian, often relying upon friends and devoted women to maintain his modest lifestyle and oversized ego.

The writer, born in London a month before the commencement of World War 1,was the son of an architect, a man whom Aickman would later describe as 'the oddest man I have ever known'. Aickman went on to study architecture himself, but it held no serious interest for him. Nevertheless the discipline is a key component in his descriptive palette. Locations and settings are very precisely detailed, in terms of their form and perspective.

He was educated at Highgate School and his classical education is very apparent - stylistically, in his use of allegory - and thematically in relation to the metaphysical. The more knotted symbolism of some of his weirdest work can be traced back to Ovid or Homer. Gods, transformations and matings between the divine and the mortal etc..

While still a child, his mother left, and that sense of absent female attention frequently haunts his stories. Basically he had a shit load of Freudian trauma to process...

The Wine Dark Sea. Anthology

The Fetch

It is extraordinarily hard to choose a single story from his output.

This may not be his most scary story, and in some ways its one of his more conventional ones. It could for example be very satisfactorily turned into a screenplay - unlike "The Hospice" But in terms of construction, pacing, tone of voice and finally dread it sits pretty close to the top of his oeuvre - so close to the top of the horror genre itself.

I read this about 10 years ago late at night on the top floor of a large house in the hills of Kandy, a lake town in Sri Lanka. I would not leave my room till morning.

Synopsis

I want to give you as little information as possible. A boy witnesses a disturbing event while his mother lies dying in her bedroom. The event appears to re-haunt him at various significant times during his life. Ok thats it.. now go ahead and read it...it should be in the Wine Dark Sea anthology which is readily available on Amazon. It is a brilliant introduction to his work ... with the Inner Room and the Trains included as well. Both stories are easily the peer of The Fetch.

Personal response (Spoilers)

Okay so Terminator right?

And the face against the wall, and the slow climb of the stairs. Fear of the unseen entrance and then the predicted return.  Goes all the way back to Gawain and the Green Knight. And all the way forward to Ringu, and It Follows.

It's just brilliantly done, so efficiently, so unexpectedly and with that Aickman neutral tone of voice. Then we have the 2 increasingly dread-rousing repeats culminating in a bizarre Zombie style siege on a house. We have the typically Aickman like weird female companions, with their disabled limbs, and semi-vacant presence. The biggest internal squeal from me came when the lesbian lover turns and senses the creature, before it walks up to the house.

And finally the way the creature sits in a tree and taps its head mournfully against a first floor window. What the fuck is it?

I love this story. It still creeps me out. This is a first response, I will return and edit and provide a deeper analysis. But just on a surface level, what a weirdy creepy little number it is.