“The Houses of the Russians” (1968)

I’m not sure yet what the consensus is on Robert Aickman, I’m just going with the ones that seem to really reach me. They all seem to reach me. This is another good one from probably his best period, the late ‘60s. I was slowed down a little by all the description of unusual landscapes, where land and water meet with many islands in remote Finland. This story might be ripe for graphic adaptation because I can see you could really lay it out in comic book panels with the right artist. It’s also a story with indeterminate borders in other ways: between the political entities of postwar Finland and the USSR, for example. Because of these geographical and political factors there is necessarily some sense of this story as travel writing. The island with the mysterious vacation homes, once we finally get there, is the kind of stuff that I think only Aickman can do. As usual, it is accompanied with an unsettling sense of the experience of dreaming. These houses are at once peculiar and bear a bland malevolence that comes through well, though it is hard to explain. Another border is one of time and history, with the Russian experiment with communism approximately at midcentury, and memories still alive of time before the Revolution. This theme may even have been Aickman’s most intentional in 1968. Or not—certainly the landscape also reflects the preoccupation of his day job and other life, as the protector of waterways. It’s a frame story, told by a mysterious old man. I like the way the houses veer from totally abandoned to alive with parties in progress. I love that our main guy, the storyteller, ends up at one. I like the imposing, massive figure in black he takes for a priest. The old man’s idea, at least at the time of his visit to this strange region, was that he was presumably Eastern Orthodox or something, which perhaps evokes Soviet persecution of organized religion. I looked at a cheesy paranormal reenactments show called True Horror the other day. It was a story about a woman in England in the 2000s who bought a house that used to be a “witches prison” and was now haunted. By coincidence, one of the ghosts as depicted looks like the black figure in this story. Funny coincidence, but also emphasizes how Aickman is able to slip his ghosts in so effectively. This one is working on a lot of levels and takes some time to sink in.

Robert Aickman, The Unsettled Dust
Story not available online.