The Inner Room

I took the opportunity of this little volume in the Faber Stories series to introduce myself to a new writer, Robert Aickman, the British horror specialist in whose stories, to quote my favorite podcast, Backlisted, "Very ordinary, unimaginative people suddenly find themselves caught in a horrible nightmare." And so it is in The Inner Room, in which a child's acquisition, and then abandonment, of a strangely run-down dollhouse leads to uncomfortable dreams and then, much later in life, an even more uncomfortable visit to an actual house. The horror (and the pleasure) comes in part from the story, but more so from Aickman's sentences, nearly every one of which seems to overflow with a Lovecraftian surplus of dread. Quite delicious, this first, rotten bite...